This is a terrible trend. Even my anti-social ass used to love to go to the arcade when I got the rare opportunity to do so as a kid. That we’ve just collectively decided to sit at home and scroll on phones is so, so evil.
Culture
Clined
Not a good thing.
Censor Sensor
And a decade prior to that — in 2006 — it was even freer. That was the heyday of blogs. By 2015 the internet was already quite censored compared to 2003-2006. It is indeed far worse now, though.
The gatekeepers are returning, in a way. Admittedly they are stupider, less conscientious and far more venal than before. But as I’ve said in the past, the huge project being undertaken now is the elite striving very, very hard to get the information genie back in the bottle again. And they will not stop until that is accomplished.
No Way To
Agreed that slave morality ain’t no way to live. And those groups definitely would do worse things.
Switchboard
A few days ago, I was discussing with my partner that the left has largely become what used to be called “conservative,” especially economically, with the right having taken up in many areas what used to be called “progressive.”
Weird to see, and to experience in a single lifetime. And almost no one else notices it or will admit it if they do happen to catch sight of this heretical idea out of the corner of their eye.
Slip Slap
I don’t even agree with a lot of the article, but this writing slaps.
This assumption is remarkably out of step with the people who actually inhabit the city’s public space. At a bus stop, I saw a poster that read: today, soc 2 is done before your ai girlfriend breaks up with you. it’s done in delve. Beneath it, a man squatted on the pavement, staring at nothing in particular, a glass pipe drooping from his fingers. I don’t know if he needed SOC 2 done any more than I did. A few blocks away, I saw a billboard that read: no one cares about your product. make them. unify: transform growth into a science. A man paced in front of the advertisement, chanting to himself. “This . . . is . . . necessary! This . . . is . . . necessary!” On each “necessary” he swung his arms up in exaltation. He was, I noticed, holding an alarmingly large baby-pink pocketknife. Passersby in sight of the billboard that read wearable tech shareable insights did not seem piqued by the prospect of having their metrics constantly analyzed. I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to prompt it. then push it. After spending slightly too long in the city, I found that the various forms of nonsense all started to bleed into one another. The motionless people drooling on the sidewalk, the Waymos whooshing around with no one inside. A kind of pervasive mindlessness. Had I seen a billboard or a madman preaching about “a CRM so smart, it updates itself”? Was it a person in rags muttering about how all his movements were being controlled by shadowy powers working out of a data center somewhere, or was it a car?
The article is actually completely wrong about AI progress, though. It’s improving just as rapidly as it was, if not more so.
Minaj
I miss the days when everything was not taken as some political position. When it was ok to not like an artist because their music just didn’t do anything for you.
It really did not improve anything — not politics, not art — to drag everything into the political realm. Sometimes not liking Rush is just not liking Rush.
Against History
Related to the below post, much of the left believes that all humans are basically interchangeable widgets with no important differences between them. It’s a very neoliberalized view of human diversity and individuality.
And, like what most of the left believes, of course it is wrong.
Humans are not in fact interchangeable widgets. Culture is extremely strong and not something that just alters with the direction of the wind. People are not all the same. Neither are sociocultural practices or their results. Why the left believes that — or at least pretends to — makes no sense as all the evidence of human history is against this conclusion.
But, somehow, they do.
Dire Food
Correct.
I was alive during the 1980s and the food situation in the US was dire. It’s vastly superior now.
Delu
Why does relationship in the U.S. feel so harsh compared to back home?
The US has the worst relationship culture and by far the most abysmal gender relations of any Western country. Also, the worst, most entitled women and nearly the worst men1 overall.
Dating will be hell for anyone who is not accustomed to gender relations being outright unrestricted warfare.
Open
NYC and other places used to have tons more open 24/7 or very late before the pandemic, even more in the 1980s and 1990s, and absolutely boatlods of stuff open (particularly in NYC) 24/7 from the 1930s to the 1970s.
Not sure what caused the continual decline of this, but was also true for other large cities to a lesser extent. And I wish it’d all come back; I’d strongly prefer most things to be open most of the time.
1995
This line from Molly Nilsson’s “1995” is probably the single best encapsulation of what it felt like to live then: “Back in ’95, we thought we were standing on the threshold to the end of time.”
Nailed it in one line. I wish I had Molly’s succinctness, but that is as close as one can get in words to the feeling of living in the era after the Berlin Wall fell and before the Oklahoma City Bombing, before 9/11, before the world turned.
Yes, we were wrong and in retrospect delusional that it was the end of history. That there was a brighter future in store. That we’d solve racism and hatred and blood feuds and war. But it sure as fuck felt like that. That optimism perfused everything. Those who claim it did not were too young to remember or are just lying. Most of them have some agenda, as well.
But I was there. I know what happened and what it was like.
S-VHS
What’s your white whale – something you’ve been looking for for years but never found?
Not quite what the OP is asking, but I had a lot of music videos recorded on Super-VHS from MTV and other sources, some of which are not available on YouTube or any other service. I had a couple dozen of these tapes back in the 1990s, all two hours long.
Those tapes were thrown away or sold for drugs, not sure which.
Some of those videos will probably never be seen by anyone again. I doubt there are any master copies extant at the studios, and if no one can unearth a copy on VHS, they are gone forever.
Strict Forward
Overall, the world would have been better off if only a few dozen million people ever used the internet outside of corporate work/connectivity, smartphones required expensive licensing and mental health testing to acquire, and social media just did not exist at all.
There’s no going back. But that would have been a far superior timeline.
Intellectualized
I’d say 0.0001% or so, and most of them are not academics or in academia.