A lot of 1990s tech optimists thought that people with awful opinions were the unfortunate victims of a lack of access to books and education; and the strict gatekeeping of broadcast media by the powerful.
This new multi-media technology was going to give everyone on the planet access to a complete free university education, thousands of books, and would prevent the likes of Chinese state-run media suppressing knowledge about Tienanmen Square.
And after they receive this marvellous free education, all the communists and nazis and religious nutjobs will realise they were wrong and we were right. We won't need any censorship though, in our enlightenment-style marketplace of ideas, rational argument is all that's needed to send bad ideas packing, and the educated audience will have no trouble seeing through fallacies and trickery.
Also the greater education will mean everyone can get better jobs and make more money, and with this trade with China we're just ramping up they'll see our brilliant democratic system, and peacefully adopt it. The recently fallen Soviet Union is of course going to do the same, and it's going to go really well. We'll all live happily ever after.
This Bill Clinton chap has a federal budget surplus, now we're not spending all that money on the cold war, so we'll get that national debt paid off in no time too.
You may be able to figure out why this particular brand of optimism isn't so fashionable these days.
I wouldn’t say that optimism and idealism are no longer fashionable, but instead that original optimism (however true) was blinded by it’s own lack of knowledge. We should still be perusing optimist/idealist outcomes but not the ones from another era.
To be fair, we have lots of things that people in the '90 were just hoping for (in medicine, tech, average world wealth, etc), but sure we didn't get all the maximalist/idealist results.
Also, I think tech optimists might have a tendency to ignore how slow changes actually happen (thinking of how many times we got promised self driving cars or fusion).
My impression is that the covid pandemic had a huge psychological impact on everybody which resulted in anger and fear surfacing at all levels, with bad implications (emotion based decision making, aggressiveness, conflict). No clue if this is real or if it is how it will play out on the long term...
>but sure we didn't get all the maximalist/idealist results.
Yes. The techis mostly there, and a few decades later it's readily available and cheap enough to be almost universally available. But you can't make a horse drink. The old guard may have underestimated the power of a cult and this attraction to authoritarianism. I didn't believe it either some decade ago. But seeing it before my eyes shows the folly of man.
COVID was definitely an accelerator for all these bad traits to come out of the woodwork. It could have been any economic downfall, but a global pandemic requiring a simple behavior to not die really showed this odd. If "wear a mask or you'll die" can't convince some people, I'm not sure what can.
Economic infantilisation and the new productised and externalised way of being brought upon by social media. We were an autopilot society that thought it had no need to restate values or keep innovating. The things that used to matter like community bonds and values dont matter literally because we cant see them in an instagram post and they may as well not exist-
plus the media and public sphere dysfunction we see through the fact that we haven't seen any new celebrities or public intellectuals elected in the past 10 years, telling people ideas don't get you anywhere.
This will only get worse as we are at the end of progression of this culture and cultural consensus has split between educated legacy media and uneducated young new media which develops its own often incorrect assumptions about the world- like about mental illness assumptions. It's cultural ouroboros- we're destroying parts of ourselves because they've grown too different. We need a new way forward and a new culture of contentment that champions the human.
If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news stories for the past couple of years you may have some idea why this is happening.
>If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news stories for the past couple of years you may have some idea why this is happening.
Maybe I'm a bit dramatic here, but the subtext I seem to get is that "legacy media is dying out and we're not going to cede power easily. Even if we burn the country down with us."
There's no graceful transfer to the next generation like usual (or perhaps, there never was a graceful transfer to begin with). It has this apocalyptic feeling where the old guard wants to do any and everything they want and don't care what happens after they are gone. Not every boomer, but it's the generation with those people in power.
It's a fire sale on american imperialism, capital and cultural dominance, and everyone wants in. American leadership is geriatric and asleep at the wheel and the dementia vote is dangerous. Everyone sees this as the free for all it is.
There will always be those who seek to create order from chaos for their own benefit. We're seeing multiple groups trying to emotionally stunt this next generation and sow social discord. These are the same groups that have blackmail on the current sitting. China is more of a military threat but russia is far more of a cultural threat because they understand the west, which is nothing to joke about. Hungary is obviously also influential, due to their constant meetings in the us and hungary with the heritage foundation, and their help in formulating the presidential transition project.
Our blue "friend" in the middle east is just as malicious, easily scorned and has a passion for retaliation.
Apathy and fatalism is ascendant in western leadership, just look at the culture behind davos and modern american tech start ups. Mass hardcore group sex parties of the wealthy and influential(davos and openai), designer drugs, an underlying humour on selling out the world and killing it with climate change. They don't care about the atomization of the individual or the sancitity of him either.
We need to identify the new poles of power to understand the currents that shape our world if we are to have any hope in fighting them.
A lot of 1990s tech optimists thought that people with awful opinions were the unfortunate victims of a lack of access to books and education; and the strict gatekeeping of broadcast media by the powerful.
This new multi-media technology was going to give everyone on the planet access to a complete free university education, thousands of books, and would prevent the likes of Chinese state-run media suppressing knowledge about Tienanmen Square.
And after they receive this marvellous free education, all the communists and nazis and religious nutjobs will realise they were wrong and we were right. We won't need any censorship though, in our enlightenment-style marketplace of ideas, rational argument is all that's needed to send bad ideas packing, and the educated audience will have no trouble seeing through fallacies and trickery.
Also the greater education will mean everyone can get better jobs and make more money, and with this trade with China we're just ramping up they'll see our brilliant democratic system, and peacefully adopt it. The recently fallen Soviet Union is of course going to do the same, and it's going to go really well. We'll all live happily ever after.
This Bill Clinton chap has a federal budget surplus, now we're not spending all that money on the cold war, so we'll get that national debt paid off in no time too.
You may be able to figure out why this particular brand of optimism isn't so fashionable these days.
I wouldn’t say that optimism and idealism are no longer fashionable, but instead that original optimism (however true) was blinded by it’s own lack of knowledge. We should still be perusing optimist/idealist outcomes but not the ones from another era.
To be fair, we have lots of things that people in the '90 were just hoping for (in medicine, tech, average world wealth, etc), but sure we didn't get all the maximalist/idealist results.
Also, I think tech optimists might have a tendency to ignore how slow changes actually happen (thinking of how many times we got promised self driving cars or fusion).
My impression is that the covid pandemic had a huge psychological impact on everybody which resulted in anger and fear surfacing at all levels, with bad implications (emotion based decision making, aggressiveness, conflict). No clue if this is real or if it is how it will play out on the long term...
>but sure we didn't get all the maximalist/idealist results.
Yes. The techis mostly there, and a few decades later it's readily available and cheap enough to be almost universally available. But you can't make a horse drink. The old guard may have underestimated the power of a cult and this attraction to authoritarianism. I didn't believe it either some decade ago. But seeing it before my eyes shows the folly of man.
COVID was definitely an accelerator for all these bad traits to come out of the woodwork. It could have been any economic downfall, but a global pandemic requiring a simple behavior to not die really showed this odd. If "wear a mask or you'll die" can't convince some people, I'm not sure what can.
were you one of those believers at the start?
Economic infantilisation and the new productised and externalised way of being brought upon by social media. We were an autopilot society that thought it had no need to restate values or keep innovating. The things that used to matter like community bonds and values dont matter literally because we cant see them in an instagram post and they may as well not exist-
plus the media and public sphere dysfunction we see through the fact that we haven't seen any new celebrities or public intellectuals elected in the past 10 years, telling people ideas don't get you anywhere.
This will only get worse as we are at the end of progression of this culture and cultural consensus has split between educated legacy media and uneducated young new media which develops its own often incorrect assumptions about the world- like about mental illness assumptions. It's cultural ouroboros- we're destroying parts of ourselves because they've grown too different. We need a new way forward and a new culture of contentment that champions the human.
If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news stories for the past couple of years you may have some idea why this is happening.
>If you've been paying attention to the subtext in news stories for the past couple of years you may have some idea why this is happening.
Maybe I'm a bit dramatic here, but the subtext I seem to get is that "legacy media is dying out and we're not going to cede power easily. Even if we burn the country down with us."
There's no graceful transfer to the next generation like usual (or perhaps, there never was a graceful transfer to begin with). It has this apocalyptic feeling where the old guard wants to do any and everything they want and don't care what happens after they are gone. Not every boomer, but it's the generation with those people in power.
It's a fire sale on american imperialism, capital and cultural dominance, and everyone wants in. American leadership is geriatric and asleep at the wheel and the dementia vote is dangerous. Everyone sees this as the free for all it is.
There will always be those who seek to create order from chaos for their own benefit. We're seeing multiple groups trying to emotionally stunt this next generation and sow social discord. These are the same groups that have blackmail on the current sitting. China is more of a military threat but russia is far more of a cultural threat because they understand the west, which is nothing to joke about. Hungary is obviously also influential, due to their constant meetings in the us and hungary with the heritage foundation, and their help in formulating the presidential transition project. Our blue "friend" in the middle east is just as malicious, easily scorned and has a passion for retaliation.
Apathy and fatalism is ascendant in western leadership, just look at the culture behind davos and modern american tech start ups. Mass hardcore group sex parties of the wealthy and influential(davos and openai), designer drugs, an underlying humour on selling out the world and killing it with climate change. They don't care about the atomization of the individual or the sancitity of him either.
We need to identify the new poles of power to understand the currents that shape our world if we are to have any hope in fighting them.
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