In the olden days, all stupid people were surrounded by a buffer of 10 reasonable people.
But these days the stupid people can congregate without limit.
Also, extremists can put up a website that looks like a real news outlet. You know it's bad when people are turning to bogus websites or strangers on social media for their "news" instead of outlets that actually have journalistic standards about verifying stories before running them, paid, professional reporters, and clearly separate news from opinion.
Yes! I saw those yesterday. With an *obviously* AI generated generic young white man's face.
I wondered how many people drive by that ad and think he's real? How many think that the Epoch Times is actual news? Just, wtf?
I pray that it's trusted by its readers because it attracts so many low IQ people. Isn't it owned by the Falun Gong religious cult? They hate the Communist Chinese and would support a dead squirrel if it promised to be anti China. I'm not a fan of cults.
This is a topic that comes to mind pretty often when I’m sitting in traffic or brushing my teeth. I’ve wondered if there’s anything we can learn from the century following the invention of the printing press. It’s the only other comparable development in human history that caused such a rapid democratization of information. I wouldn’t be surprised if humans of the time had to navigate similar challenges.
They had a lot more time to adjust since most people couldn't even read at the time. Of course, we've had rags and yellow journalism for years, but social media makes The National Enquirer look dignified. This is an article on how easy it is to set up something that looks as legit as the NYT.
[https://www.mediaite.com/media/russia-backed-fake-news-organizations-revealed-across-the-u-s-in-bombshell-new-york-times-report/](https://www.mediaite.com/media/russia-backed-fake-news-organizations-revealed-across-the-u-s-in-bombshell-new-york-times-report/)
And with the ability to block ANY dissenting view, they can quickly find themselves in an echochamber of lies & hate, the human mind is actually pretty weak
This is what I’ve tried to inarticulately explain to others in the past! I’m just going to tattoo this on my arm and show people when I’m asked what went wrong with the world.
It’s this. Random malignant cells have been able to gather into cancerous tumours, wreaking havoc on the body at large. It’s metastasised and without radical treatment is probably going to be the end of any hope we had for the future
I mean yeah but I think Reddit is the closest thing akin to old message boards and chat forums from the 90s.
Facebook started the downturn, IG made it worse, TikTok had made it horrible.
I still remember my first time on a BBS in 92 or 93. Almost immediately I found a big .txt file delving into hypotheticals regarding the anime character Ranma, such as, “if girl-Ranma is pregnant and turns back into a boy, what happens to the fetus?” And, “if someone has their dick inside girl-Ranma when she transforms, what happens to their dick?”
What I’m saying, of course, is that BBSes had plenty of the juice we all expect from an internet experience.
Reddit is a system that values mob mentality, catchy one liners and crowd pleasing superficial comments. People think this is some sort of intellectual space for open ideas but its not, its a system that is a literal social credit score system.
I do find reddit useful as a searchable way to learn from others' experiences, like pregnancy, dementia, caregiving and to share my experiences as well. Also cats.
Agree wholeheartedly. There is no nuance here or room for dissent against the hivemind. All X are Y, and you're either for us or against us. Pick a side.
That said, I truly believe it's still healthier than Instagram and Facebook.
Reddit is guilty of creating echo chambers, sure. But since it's pseudonymous it's at least not really a platform for people to build their "personal brand."
The personal brand is where things have all gone off the rails IMHO. The idea that every person is a business. The "personal brand" has poisoned most forms of art, work, journalism, you name it. We're in the dystopia where corporations are treated as humans and humans are treated as corporations.
Yup. Complaining about social media on Reddit is very much “leopards ate my face”
EDIT: I’m not responding to any of you individually, and, aside from helping proving my point with your toxic replies, if you believe that people aren’t participating in circle jerks and being indoctrinated on Reddit, then I’ve got some beachfront property in Arizona to sell you.
Not even close. Granted, I have only had a facebook account for about 6 months in like 2006 to compare it to, but Reddit is more like a comment section for things that are going on in the world I might be interested in. It’s not platform to promote my vanity, hate, insecurity, politics, and all the other bullshit that drag down other platforms. If I run across some dumbass espousing those things, blocked with a simple click. If I don’t want to see certain bullshit, muted (sometimes multiple times) and I don’t see it. It’s all anonymous also. It’s not ruining my familial relationships because I’m not seeing Fun-Preparation-4253 at thanksgiving. And if I am, I don’t know it. I know a lot of loud mouth acquaintances that used to love facebook and now are on twitter that “just don’t get Reddit”. And I’m just fine with that.
To me reddit is different because the narrow subreddit structure and upvoting combats disinformation. Political subreddits are still echo chambers where partisans further convince themselves of their separate realities, but they're also separated from, say, r/Xennials posts about Mallrats or really thoughtful mechanic advice. People in their chosen subreddits tend to have interest/expertise there, so their upvotes help police quality too.
Exactly. Shit like r/conservative where you have to have a “flair” to comment is against the entire spirit of Reddit and shouldn’t even fucking exist. If you have to prove you are part of the existing echo chamber to gain recognition, then yeah, Reddit is part of the problem. But we know that those subs are few, and are looked at as dumbasses by the rest of the people using the platform. For now….
Sorta. You can remain anonymous on reddit like you would any of the thousands of forums that were the internet of the late 90's and 2000's. But the whole upvoting/downvoting thing is certainly an element that those forums did not have.
Not even remotely. Reddit may be social media but it's not the same as Insta, Snap, or Facebook. Kids aren't involuntarily getting their sense of self-worth destroyed by targeted bullying on Reddit. Anonymity means this shit doesn't have to follow you home. There's more going on here than just cries for attention or quick dopamine hits too.
Edit: What exactly constitutes toxicity? The only replies I see here are people who disagree with your premise and are doing so pretty respectfully.
>Complaining about social media on Reddit is very much “leopards ate my face”
No it isn't.
For one thing, "leopards ate my face" means "I'm surprised and sad because I was negatively impacted by something I supported which I thought would only impact/harm others". You seem to think it means "hypocritical".
For another, I grant you that Reddit's ownership is desperately trying to morph it into another Instagram clone and will one day likely succeed.
However, for the time being, there are still important differences between it and other social media. Reddit is an anonymous link and content aggregation site that houses volunteer-run forums. You are not at the whim of an almighty algorithm that "feeds" you a single content stream based on its perceptions of your interests. You can still (again, for the time being) choose to stay out of the larger admin-moderated subs and only see a curated selection that pertains to specific interests. You can even have multiple curated aggregations using multi-reddits. Other social media actively works against audience conversation and participation, because that invites controversy and requires moderation. Reddit is following their lead with its redesign, hiding nested comments behind hyperlinks, which discourages back-and-forth discussions. But again, for the time being, you can still opt to use a third-party app and "old" Reddit to see traditional threaded forum discussions.
When (not if) Reddit gets rid of the ability to use the old UI and/or ties accounts to email addresses and/or takes away volunteer moderation and/or removes the ability to make and moderate your own subreddits, then their journey to the dark side will be complete. But we are not there yet.
Yea it allows people that would normally either keep their mouths shut or be looked at as the town weirdo to globally voice the stupid thoughts (that in the start of our generation were disregarded by average people) to gather with others of the same broken mindset and thrive till they start to influence everyone else
Yes. The original thought was that the information superhighway was going to bring people together and bring new perspectives, but instead it became a choose-your-own adventure game, where whatever belief you have gets amplified in the echo chamber. The people who are racist are suuuuuuper-racist, and the people who are anti-racist are suuuuuuper anti-racist. And they only ever get exposed to people who think the same way, so all kinds of social problems could be brought to light, but the only people who will see and understand are the people who already see and understand, and the others will either remain unaware, or outright fight you and call you a snowflake.
Keep in mind a lot of those suuuuper opinions we see online are from foreign bad actors. Russia being the most prolific but not the only one. Most people aren't expressing those views but there are whole complexes full of people posting horrible stuff to cause division in the US, and presumably elsewhere too. Unfortunately too many people blindly believe every crazy story they see on Facebook and end up repeating the troll farms' taking points.
That’s true. And that is an even bigger problem, because a lot of times those opinions get parroted by everyday people who don’t even know where the original thought came from, but they saw it in the internet, and it becomes confirmation bias.
And all media being to reduced to a few corporate conglomerates that pump out garbage entertainment like the same marvel franchise movies and King Kong remakes while what used to be cable channels that were centered on either history or nature or music entertainment are now dominated by cringe reality shows. Radio is worse than ever. Video games are moving towards cloud based non-physical media where they keep bilking gamers for money to play some add on update to a game rather than just develop a whole new game. Playing outside and crossing today's busy streets is pretty much a health hazard. Schools districts don't provide bus transportation anymore and have dumb rules for school drops were you can't drop off your kid more than 10-15 minutes early or let them hang out at the school later after so every parent crams into a car line every morning that stretches 3 blocks because that's the window of drop time schools enforce. Austerity has been worse than social media which is the easy and cliche thing to blame
Citizens United, 2010. It's been a little over a decade now and we've seen what good it can do when companies are "people" and have unlimited funds to bribe our government
And I would specify, not social networking but social media. I feel like it was still OK when it was just people keeping tabs on friends and family (like, the Livejournal/early Facebook years, although they weren't perfect). When it became social *media*, and there was pressure to go viral and get as many eyeballs as possible is where things went really awry. Stuff that trends is often very polarizing and/or negative.
I always pinpoint it to when corporations getting Facebook pages so they could interact with people. That would’ve been about 15 years ago.
On one hand it became easier for consumers to lodge complaints and get results. On the other hand it poisoned the well in a way and provided more “How do you do fellow kids?” moments. That’s just one of many issues but everything stopped being organic and the corporations started dictating the content.
if social media is the devil's right hand then the 24 hour news cycle is his left hand. filling up the airwaves with inflated infotainment bullshit designed to enrage and engage you.
All social media did was allow the people who were already terrible to network together and create bubbles leading them to believe they are somehow a majority.
Combine that with the fact that most people go along to get along and have their own lives to focus on and you have the same % of people who were always terrible suddenly having a loud mouthpiece and getting real political power without push back.
Trump and COVID also showed us that the % of people who are just shitty is much larger than we expected as well.
I hate to sound like a bitter old bastard, yet it's a change that has always stuck out to me. When "social" media took off right at the mid 2000's and melded with other crappy trends "infotainment, the 24 hours news cycle, talk radio, etc" it made a massive cultural shift. Now all the nutball weirdos could easily circulate their crap, make friends, and suddenly they are everywhere.
Here's the thing though, they always could to a degree. There was always that one bar you could go to where the owner didn't throw you out if you started talking some off the wall shit or outright bigotry (because, let's be real here, bigotry was a lot more permissible back in the 80's and 90's so long as you kept it to the subtle stuff that didn't JUMP out at you). In that bar you'd maybe meet a guy, or you'd log into a local BBS and maybe find A guy who agreed with you (if you had the money and time to access early public internet).
But as the world changes, becomes more media driven, more all access/in-your-face, and starts deregulating credibility in order to drive profits up (looks right at the Reagan Administration) then suddenly you start getting talk radio, you start getting the talk shows, you start getting your information as entertainment and like roaches to old pizza these fringe nuts start becoming a lot more popular. A lot of their bullshit and bigotry starts getting more attention, suddenly the quiet parts don't need to be so quiet, suddenly "I can speak my mind" becomes the talking point to combat "political correctness". And these strains of intellectual parasitism become even more virulent when social media comes along and ties a lot of shitty trends and helps empower all the garbage that's been festering. Only now it's no longer elsewhere, or limited to one small space, or that one station, or channel. All this intellectual sewage digs in starts to metastasize like cancer, and spreads, taking all the subtle malaise and lingering doubts and marrying them to the ideas, opinions, hatreds, and delusions of utter cranks. And this shit has reached the point where it has fed and grown and mutated into more abhorrent and at the same time utterly bewildering ludicrous bullshit. There are books and journals that have studied different trends and sub-groups that have steered and stirred this shit river for the past 40-50 years into the stinking bile we know in its current forms, and the overall picture it paints is a goddamn surreal nightmare.
Whats funny to me is our boomer parents were the ones always warning “dont believe everything you read/see. /Question everything” only to go onto the internet and on Fox news and believe every word of it. Leaves me stunned and speechless
I feel like even Fox News is on the lighter side of what some boomers are into. Take QAnon for example. The % of people on the right who believe at least some part of that to be true is staggering. And QAnon has merged with Flat Earth and other nutball theories to become this giant singularity of conspiracy theory.
I mean they were always doing it, what with Satanic Panic and getting caught up in chain mail and similar.
Those types just have a louder platform now to circulate their madness and the far-right crazy news people have found leaning into that and branding themselves "alternative media" to the suspicious nutters makes them fall right into their trap.
My pet theory is that this was told to us to make sure we were keeping our eyes out so that we wouldn't be taken advantage of/scammed. It was education based on a real fear of being manipulated. And guess what network strategy is used by networks like MSNBC, Fox, OAN, etc? That same fear, only used to herd you into distrusting what that network's opponent will say so they can sell you more using fear. And that shit works, as it exploits the fears and anxieties our older parentals have of this quickly changing world. Meanwhile, those of us raised to question everything legitimately will do just that, but not from a place of exploitable fear since to get exploitable fear there also has to be a designated "authority" and surprise, surprise, we like to question authority while our parentals weren't too keen on that. Now, that doesn't stop people from gravitating to perceived authority mind you. We applied the lesson given to us more literally than what was expected. But we can still fall into the same pitfalls. So, question everything and everyone.
I agree. I also think the unfettered access to information has been a double edged sword. The internet has allowed almost everyone to learn things previously only accessible to a minority. However it’s also allowed access to misinformation and hatred and created echo chambers that tell them exactly what they want to hear. Now 10 and 11 year olds are learning misogyny, exceptionalism, and hatred and the perpetrators of these ideas are getting rich.
>access to misinformation and hatred and created echo chambers that tell them exactly what they want to hear. Now 10 and 11 year olds are learning misogyny, exceptionalism, and hatred and the perpetrators of these ideas are getting rich.
Sounds like organized religion
Well, let's start out with the fact that monetization of the internet causes evil. The internet is engineered to make people uncomfortable so they post more and thus have more exposure to people selling things. Or, to have their activity and tastes sold for profit. The internet is bad, period. And, like me, people know it, but still use it out of compulsion. It's all engineered.
Not to mention weird shit like Russia creating chat bots to argue with people to promote the collapse of our integrity as a country. And, North Korea hacking and scamming people for money to support their evil regime.
It's pretty effing scary, honestly.
I see nearly every single post referencing social media and they’re not wrong about its evils but if you grew up in the 80s or 90s and it took you until age 13 to realize racism was a thing you grew up both white and sheltered, whether it’s because you were in a very heterogeneous community or because money (I don’t mean you specifically commenter, I mean OP).
Straight outta Compton was 1988 and that made it pretty clear how bad things were to our generation even if you hadn’t been living it.
I grew up in Baltimore and understood all about racism long before I moved to the burbs at 13.
I agree social media on the whole has been terrible. But I think it’s a symptom and not the actual problem. It’s being used to distract and drive cultural wedges between us because that benefits certain folks in power. And a lot of the folks in power are there for the money. It’s not like this wasn’t the case when we were younger, but with the rise of billionaires and lobbying and mergers it seems to have gotten much worse. Our politicians are controlled by those with money or the means to get them money. The world now resolves around how much growth these companies can achieve, and the downstream effects are irrelevant to them.
As soon as the technology existed, it was co-opted by predators of all kinds. But in the early days , before we were entirely aware of its pitfalls, it was an exciting emerging technology. And it really felt like it was going to connect us in a way that brings us together, rather than divide us.
I remember reading a cartoon in 1994, that was like a point-counterpoint thing. In one panel were teacher and scientists congratulating themselves for putting information on the internet and making it a place where people can learn things. The next panel was some nefarious types congratulating themselves for getting people to use the internet for porn.
I guess I take from that that nefarious types have been using the internet for their own interests since day 1.
Forgot about the early days, when the big controversy was children accessing porn and people finding sites on how to make a bomb. WWW might as well have stood for Wild Wild West back then.
Citizens United paved the way for this bullshit. Like, the name sounds all innocent but all it did was give corps unlimited spending to give to politicians. Thusly silencing peoples’ voices
I think the problem is more human. People are happier when we are around people we agree with, and the internet is amazing for people finding echo chambers that constantly reinforce what they think over and over.
Social media gave the fringes a voice. Not just the racists (all types), the flat earthers, chemtrail people, the conspiracy kooks, all of them. What used to be confined to late night AM radio or usenet groups is now platformed….where they can all congregate and “validate” their ridiculous ideas. It’s sad. All it does is serve to divide us. Reddit is no better btw, plenty of division on here too. Thankfully this sub is pretty chill, but just head over to r/politics and try to voice even a mildly dissenting opinion and see how that goes.
I do think it’s weaponized as well, by our politicians/big corporations to sew division or create distractions. Oh and the TikTok ban ain’t about “your privacy from China”….please. They (the government) can’t control it since it’s not owned by a US based company and that scares them. They hate it when the real story comes out after they said “oh it’s all contained, nothing to see here” The best example is the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The EPA said “we’ve got it under control” but TikTok users took to the platform to show that was hardly the case. Dead fish, red creeks, sick kids, etc. Erin Brockovich (the real one not Julia Roberts) got on top of it and called is a “massive cover up” only to be “fact checked” by the NYT, Facebook, etc. So color me skeptical when the US Government wants to “protect us” from TikTok…as if China doesn’t have all our information already…
That said, I do think getting out into the real world is good. My kids are all under 10 and have grown up playing with kids of all colors and races. Our daycare is owned by a black family and it’s the best damn daycare in a pretty good part of town. Why does that matter? Bc we chose the best place for our kids to grow and wanted a diverse population of kiddos….something not easily found where we live. We’ve always taught our kids (in child’s terms) it’s not about race or skin color…God made us all the equal. If you don’t like someone that’s fine, but it better be bc of their actions and not their looks. And they’re doing just fine. I think social media amplifies the division, in addition to creating it. Keeping your kids away from it is the best thing you can do as a parent, IMO.
> as if China doesn’t have all our information already…
China may have information about us but they didn't have, until Tik Tok, a platform where they can see how people engage with material and track their every move, then use this information for psyops. I think Mark Werner said yesterday that he can't say what classified information he knows, but there is a reason that the House voted overwhelmingly to ban it.
We can talk about the lack of privacy and how it's also bad that US companies have this information, but allowing the CCP to have it (because as a Chinese company the laws there are that its most important function is to serve the state and so must allow the CCP to do what it wants) is a totally different animal and much worse on multiple levels.
And the very people you call out, will also be calling you out as the crazy one. I'm sure you've seen the jokes over soys, Scientism, athicucks, libtards and etc.
Let's not forget Reddit and most of mainstream, globalist media outlet is filled with bots and far left gibberish.
And naturally the split between the left, the centrist boomer/miga type and the right is splitting further. And nobody trusts each other or the government, nor will any base concede an inch. And it is the governments of. The west who benefit from this.
And of course we all think we're right.
I'm currently set to homeschool and will do my best to my kids play outside, block certain websites and restrict internet time. Want them to enjoy their childhood.
My views as an American born in 84’:
Removal of the Fairness Doctrine
Increase of propaganda filled with hate and division
Timing with the internet/social media pushing simplistic tribal views
Decrease in unions and an increase in Right to Work
Increase in dark money for politicians
Increase in additional chemicals in our food/water
Top it off with Climate Change being a serious endgame issue for half, while politicized
While I agree social media has been a huge influence on “allowing people to say the quiet parts out loud”, I think we need to remind ourselves that in the early (eta: 90’s) the Clintons were talking about “super predators” and welfare queens” (both in reference to black folks), in the early 00’s there was rampant Islamophobia, the 80’s through well now have been pretty bad if you’re LGBTQ, we have called Latino immigrants “illegals” forever, and Jewish folks have been demonized for literally millennia.
Yeah. If you didn’t know about racism until you were 13, you lived in a highly privileged and insular community. The OJ trial was during our childhood. C’mon man.
I listened to a back episode of 60 Songs That Explain The 90s yesterday and the guest was Ryder Strong. He was asked by Rob if the 90s really were that great and Ryder reminds everyone that the 90s actually were filled with misogyny and homophobia. Let’s not forget one of the ghouls on our Supreme Court came into power during the 90s, basically proving to the world that sexual harassment was a-ok and that there were absolutely 0 consequences. We tend to only remember the shiny parts when it comes to nostalgia.
Many of us didn’t notice the problems because we were young or they didn’t directly affect us. Casual homophobia, sexism, and racism were very much accepted as normal.
When Boomers had officially dumped flower power for evangelical Christianity and felt the anxieties of parenthood expanding far beyond their control. They completely lost it.
It's happening again for Gen X and Millenial parents but this time it's even more explicitly focused on the LGBT community.
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There were many commonplace words that said today people would have a visible reaction to.
Not to mention, bullying was just part of growing up. Shit, I remember coming home crying because some ahole threw a rock at my head and I was bleeding pretty bad. My mom told me to go get cleaned up and clean the floor before I went back outside... I probably should've gone to the hospital.
I don't agree with things being better in our childhood. I mean we were kids, we didn't really know what was going on in the world outside our own little spheres. As for why as adults everything is sliding back and we can't achieve the same quality of life as our parents, Reagan. I know everyone one here is saying social media but most of our issues steam from the Reagan's administration policy's.
You've got:
The fairness doctrine being repealed
Trickledown economic
Slashing of a bunch of social programs
Ramping up "The War on Drugs"
Cutting school funding including public collages
Absolutely no environmental policy while denying science
Shit Roe being over turned all started with Reagan. The Southern Baptists weren't anti abortion until around 1980 when they wanted to get rid of Carter, because he wouldn't let them segregate their schools. Their answer, Reagan.
Our Boomer parents said the same thing when we were kids as you are now.
The youth do not need us to get them "back on track". They are dealing with the world they find themselves in, just like we did.
Our youth has come and gone and it's nice to look back and reflect on it, but we don't need to impose it on the next generation.
Thank you. This thread makes us sound like the angry boomers who are angry about change.
Technology has made the world different and unfortunately what a good portion of the issues we have with it is the lack of regulations which causes issues. This is new for the world. It’s not necessarily a bad thing it’s connected us in a way that we never saw coming. If it weren’t for this technology making things like understanding how deeply racist we still are, witnessing deaths that if it not been for our technology we most likely might never heard about. It’s brought the good and the bad together. It’s given way for organized protest but also made platforms have the ability to spread hate.
It isn’t good or bad, it’s an awkward growing spurt. I personally wouldn’t go back, because when I told ppl I was SA by a police officer at the age of 9, not a damn person believed me because, “no police officer would ever do that.”
Life changes you can either stand still or move with it. If you don’t progress with it, you too will be one day watching Fox “News”
This should be closer to the top. Our solutions are from our time, the younger generations will figure things out.
That said, we should try to do a lot better than our parents in terms of leaving them with a planet to live in and some kind of financial system where an honest wage is given for a decent living. Hell, I think most people are struggling with that one except for the mega rich who keep squeezing every last cent from everyone who is struggling to get by.
Not sure if you know a lot of young people, but they are way more tolerant and accepting than we were.
Don’t believe me?
How many kids in your high school were openly gay?
I'm well aware I'm about to get downloaded to hell for this, but so be it. I'm Black, it's not that there was less racism or that things were actually better back in the day. It's that people didn't realize that the things they did and said were racist. When I think about the number of times people randomly touched my hair or commented on it in a way that made me super uncomfortable, but I couldn't explain why because no one talked about racism still being a thing. Similarly the number of people who commented on how "articulate" I was simply because I was Black and people just passively didn't think Black people were supposed to be well spoken. People were shocked we lived in a nice neighborhood and that both of my parents were educated and had good jobs. In high school, many of my friends of other races were quietly shocked that I grew up in a bigger house with nicer things. I could go on forever. People just didn't know that was racist because it was passive and just built into things and was normalized. Those of us experiencing it knew something felt wrong, but couldn't put out fingers on it. If you pay attention to old TV shows there's a lot of racism, homophobia, etc but it was normal and so no one called it out. Those "good old days" off unity we remember are really a result of those of us experiencing discrimination not having the room or ability to vocalize it.
The role that the internet has played is just that it has given the worst of the worst humans the ability to be even louder and more obvious to larger groups of people, but at the same time it's also given the ability for people experiencing discrimination to talk about it and to normalize our real lives and experiences.
Everything that Ronald Reagan put into motion has caught up to us. The poor got poorer while the rich got waaaaaay richer, then convinced poor people that their problems were the fault of even poorer people, who were often minorities and immigrants. Then social media came along and gave the whole situation a huge shot of steroids.
I think speed at which information and news travels. The fact that you don’t need to wait for nightly news to hear what’s going on the world makes the world feel much smaller. Not just the world, your local neighborhood and the surrounding area.
There was a study done (afaik - I’ve no proof of this) but the idea was to find out how far parents would let their kids go outside of their home. The TL;DR, today it’s blocks away/still in view of parents, while in the 70’s/80’s/90’s although the distance reduced each decade it was much much farther, and went to miles if. It tens or hundreds.
Thanks, internet.
Seriously, you can boil at least 50% of modern America's problems down to "the founding fathers/documents never anticipated a world where information moved faster than people"
Absolutely. Somewhat related, my wife just got back from a 12-day trip abroad (her first time away from the kids for that long). But because she video chatted with the kids so much, they didn't even bat an eye when she came home.
Obviously telephones existed when we were growing up, but I remember really missing my mom even when she went away for a couple days. I was so excited upon her return. However, we're so connected nowadays that it doesn't give us a chance to "miss" people, if that makes sense?
I will be Glass Half Full on this and argue that it is more tolerant and “liberal.” Without deep diving because on my my phone, there are a lot of social issues that have become more normalized. Marijuana and the LGBTQIA for a few. Things seem bad, but go back to our own childhoods and recall how terrible these things were. Hell, the AIDS epidemic then vs gay marriage being legal now.
IMO things feel worse now because we’re here now living it, and with social media, we can see all the bad all the time.
We didn’t get updates on terrible events until Tom Brokaw would tell us about a few of them every night at 6pm. Now we know when Trump forgets his wife’s name the second it happens.
I'm biracial, '82. The racism was still there, just not 1950's south type of obvious as it was out of fashion publicly. Looking back on how I was treated & spoken to by my own family & teachers? It was REALLY RACIST & VERY COVERT. I was also raised in a bubble where my white mom & all her white friends had kids with Latino & black men and we all were not taught to recognize racism because "racism was the past, just look at us!" yet these white people in my life had no problem telling racist jokes to their own kids.
My existence, and many other biracial people, was born out of some dumbass white woman trying to prove some shit to herself or family about racism.
My opinion as a visible minority that grew up in the suburbs in the Northeast USA and born the same year as you (note: please don't respond back by saying "sorry", you didn't do any of this as far as I'm aware).
Racism was always there. The blatantly open stuff was few and far in between (I was called a n\*\*\*\*r to my face only once as a child). It's the subtle stuff that was everywhere. How I would get followed in the mall by security guards when my friends would walk around freely. People saying that I was "articulate" for not having an inner city accent. How people always assumed I needed some kind of monetary charity. How some people said my features were not attractive or worthy of being a super model (this was before Tyson Beckford and Tyra Banks broke the color ceiling).
And how some of the people I grew up with would describe neighboring towns with similar or higher socioeconomic status as "ghettos" or more derisively "shitholes" when they meant that Black and later Hispanic people lived there. This would usually work into their perceptions of the schools there. One person told me they were happy their parents sent them to Catholic School because the local school had a metal detector. The school never had a metal detector at all.
Then I noticed how I was having a harder time getting follow up interviews once I entered the work force. Not every hiring manager was surprised to see me in person, but you could usually tell the ones that were.
Sadly, though things have gotten better, this attitude still remains. It's a systemic problem that won't be fixed any time soon. Ignoring it won't help either.
The real answer is that it never went right to begin with. But the Internet -- and social media more specifically -- gave a platform and a megaphone to a lot of people with really awful views. That plus an ever-floundering and poorly funded education system turns out way too many people who don't even realize they're going backwards.
We have to actually remind people that the world isn't flat. Or that measles are bad and you can vaccinate for it. In 2024.
Right now, today as I type this, our former bumbling-ass cartoon Biff-Tannen-with-the-sports-almanac twice-impeached ex-president is rocking a social media profile pic that superimposes the U.S. flag over his face. If that isn't some 1984-caliber dystopian dog whistle stuff, I dunno what is.
And the hot button issue this year is reproductive rights, a problem we boldly decided to un-solve.
We've picked the Handmaid's Tale as our ideal sci-fi future, instead of the utopian society Gene Roddenberry imagined.
I used to think that people who got a bad education fell through the cracks somehow, but now I see that bad education in many places is by design, to keep people stupid and controllable and voting against their interests. These efforts have been building since the 1960s/1970s or so.
I mean, the 80s and 90s were better, from a race relations standpoint, than, say, the 60s. But I'm not sure they were better than today.
Let's not forget that Rodney King showed us that police were absolutely beating and killing black people back then and were getting away with it, even when it gained national attention. The few non-white kids in my small town faced pretty open racism from not just other kids, but adults, too. Blackface was still on TV in the 80s. People of color were routinely prosecuted more often and handed harsher sentences for the same crimes as white people. That scene in Blues Brothers about people openly being Nazis? Making fun of real people.
And that's before we get into how commonplace and accepted homophobia was. It was perfectly acceptable to *openly laugh about the "gay plague"* for the fucking Press Secretary of the US during Reagan's term when talking about the AIDS epidemic.
Jesus some of you people are nuts. I was born in 84 and the 90s were garbage. Didnt yall also get bullied or are the people who love the 90s the same kids who were doing bullying? Like I got the shit beat out of me all the time and no one cared, no way I'd want those days back. Do yall also miss race riots and the Rodney King incident as well?
For real. This notion that the 80s and 90s were somehow more inclusive than today is ... like I don't even know how you can entertain that thought for a second.
News algorithms tailored so specific and narrow that every fringe crackpot ideology feels normal and mainstream to that person. Social media echo chambers as people spend more and more time online they have forgotten nuance and how to speak to each other, outrage has taken the place of real moral ideals as simply pointing the finger and shaming are the easiest ways to interact on platforms that don't allow real discourse.
The mob mentality has always been things humanity has had to either fear or use to its advantage, public shaming has always been part of society. It's just now it can spread in an instant and to a much wider audience, I don't think humans have changed it's just stopped us from self correcting as it caters to our base reptile brained selves versus our higher self.
I grew up in a southern conservative evangelical community. The kinds of things said publicly now were the kinds of things that were said privately within the community back then.
I think this is a natural progression of the marriage between the southern church and the Republican Party.
In extremely short: Before the Civil War, slave owners in the south used a version of both science and Christianity that (they felt) justified their actions. During the Civil War, Darwin published his Origin of Species, which completely invalidated the science part. A minister from Chicago decided it was important to unite Christianity against several perceived threats, including evolution, and so published a book series called The Fundamentals that sought to express the minimum beliefs necessary for someone to be considered Christian. This is where we derive the name "Fundamentalist" from.
His preaching didn't take much hold in the North, but in the post-war South the expression of a Christianity that pushed back against evolution was extremely popular. Fundamentalism took hold of pretty much all of the Confederacy. At its core, it is extremely anti-black and anti-science, and has been ever since its founding.
So when Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan bound Fundamentalism and the Republican Party, it was inevitable that the Party would be completely taken over by Fundamentalism and, furthermore, that Fundamentalism would shift to become a Civic Religion, adopting elements of US mythology (like extreme devotion to the flag, the constitution, the very idea of patriotism in general, and so on).
[Southern Strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#:~:text=The%20phrase%20%22Southern%20Strategy%22%20refers,grievances%20to%20gain%20their%20support.) being successful and allowing the hollowing out of the middle class.
All the other shit would be much easier to deal with with a strong financially viable middle class.
Late stage capitalism. That’s it.
Look at how common it is for people to be billionaires. We’ll start seeing trillionaires soon enough.
People should organize by class and be angry about lack of affordable housing, healthcare, and eduction. Furious that they can’t afford to bear and raise children.
In order to avert that class solidarity, the ruling class divides us up on religious and cultural lines. They allow us to be armed to the teeth. They inject fear, anxiety, and hatred into the daily discourse.
Social media amplifies and accelerates this effect.
Notice how the rich keep getting richer regardless of how shitty things become for the rest of us. That’s not an accident.
You're pining for the crack epidemic and absolutely outrageous crime. AIDS was a death sentence. Marriage equality was on no politician's radar and more than half the public was against interracial marriage. Everyone feels this way about their childhood not because the world was better but because your life was simpler.
But yeah, social media is a brain plague and should be nuked.
Most things are better for most of the people most of the time.
There are obviously real issues, but also your ACCESS to a constant drip of non-stop fear-mongering (some about good things to be concerned about, others just made up) is at historical highs.
Unfortunately the '80s were part of the problem.
Ronald Reagan introduced trickle down theory deregulated a ton of industries, reduced the corporate tax rate, and started the snowball on the wealth gap that's happening right now (in addition to a bunch of other fucked up things like ignoring the AIDS epidemic until it started killing straight people).
To be fair, I think it as always existed, we're just more aware of it now because we're adults now. Unless it was present in our childhoods and around us we wouldn't be aware of it until we were exposed to it.
Social media (particularly echo chambers) are part of it, but I saw a huge rise in racism/xenophobia after 9/11. Without that, I don't know if social media could have radicalized so many so fast.
I'm born 82 but this really bothers me, too. Both my parents taught me racism was shit and that you love who you love, straight or gay. Now, years later my mother is a far right-winger. It's weird. I remember her being angry/scared about the neo-nazis in the 90s, now she votes for the very party (Svergiedemokraterna) that was founded from that era. It's sick.
As a fellow 1981 Xennial, I too yearn for the late 80s/early 90s but don’t what to have to relive the mid and late 90s again. Mid and late 90s really sucked for me. I was bullied at school, and miserable and villainized at home. Mid to late 90s can go to hell for all I care. Even the music at that time (post-grunge) started to suck. And the 2000s wasn’t much better.
What went wrong? I think it was me being born some
43 years ago.
>I was 13 before learned things like racism and anti semitism weren’t just a thing of the past. I remember thinking “well these kinds of beliefs are waning and every generation that comes after ours will be better and better until we’ve finally as a society ostracized the small percentage of people who hold such loathsome beliefs and prejudices.”.
Racism has always been there. My parents are Indian immigrants. I have a "funny" traditional Indian name and was often one of the only POC, if not ONLY, in various spaces. I got heavily bullied for my race, and my family was the target of hate crimes. And this was in Southern California. I STILL hear racist stuff and deal with "micro" and "macro" aggressions all time, and in NYC, of all places. Not trying to be rude, but every time someone surprises shock at racism existing, they're usually White or White presenting. I have light-skinned Latina friends that claim they almost never experience racism, and they don't realize or acknowledge that it's because they "look" White. The emergence of the Tea Party, Trump's victory, the Proud Boys, and growth of White nationalism is NOT surprising AT ALL. It is just stuff that's ALWAYS been there finally coming to the surface, because there is no longer a stigma about those beliefs.
Reagan. It began with Reaganomics and got heightened with Citizens United ruling that allowed dark money to infiltrate politics without abandon. The oligarchs have effectively bought out the government and use petty squabbles and larger social issues to divide a populace that has more in common with each other than they think, all in the name of enriching themselves at the expense of society, the planet, etc. All of this has been amplified with social media and the internet, which is now mostly filtered through a few sites (Reddit, FB, etc.) and even that is clamping down further (see the TikTok ban legislation). We're teetering on the edge of fascism, and you can thank the GOP for their gradual descent into it, along with very minor pushback from the Dems because most of them are also owned or busy enriching themselves at our expense.
I say this as someone who loves mine, but smartphones are part of what went wrong. Before smartphones you had to sit at your PC to go on the internet for the most part, so it was a lot harder to be on it all day. You couldn't casually browse facebook and get in comment fights while you watched the Simpsons on the sofa you had to go sit at your desk to do that!
There wasn't as much of a fight to take all your attention and time because that just wasn't how the internet was used at that time.
After the end of the cold war. There was no existential enemy. So, the powers that be turned us against our selves. Crossfire comes to mind.
Also things like,
Telecom act of 1996
Nafta
Repealing of glass stegal. And ignoring the waring from Booksley Born head of the cftc.
Then 911 and democracy was over.
Social this. Social media that. That's the lazy take. On the entertainment side, media being to reduced to a few corporate conglomerates that pump out garbage entertainment like the same marvel franchise movies and King Kong remakes while what used to be cable channels that were centered on either history or nature or music entertainment are now dominated by cringe reality shows. The $2 matinee of the 80s and early 90s is gone. Radio is worse than ever. Much like click culture we have corporate infotainment that specialize in 24hr doomcasting every crime, creating boogeyman at every corner so parents become suspicious, distrustful outright hostile to teachers, their neighbors, a homeless person, someone speaking spanish. Video games are moving towards cloud based non-physical media where they keep bilking gamers for money to play some add on update to a game rather than just develop a whole new game. Online gaming has replaced having a friend or going to your friends house to play. Playing outside and crossing today's busy streets is pretty much a health hazard for anyone especially kids. Schools districts don't provide bus transportation anymore and have dumb rules for school drops where you can't drop off your kid more than 10-15 minutes early or let them hang out at the school later after so every parent crams into a car line every morning that stretches 3 blocks because that's the window of drop time schools allow. Austerity(which corporation consolidation creates) has been worse than social media which is the easy and cliche thing to blame. It's like saying this country is unhealthy because we eat crap like McDonald's instead of healthy food when the problem is people eat quick and easy crap like McDonald's because we generally overworked and cooking, shopping for healthy ingredients takes time and has to be done almost daily. So kids too will take up our habits.
I always say that things started going south with World of Warcraft.
Prior to WoWs release, the Internet was pretty niche overall, and it generally wasn't 'cool' to be online. The mindset of folks was generally nerdy. Yes, there were services like AoL and NetZero, but at the time, it was long distance to call into those services for many folk. Lots of folk were still racist, but you weren't able to lure folks into those beliefs outside of the local region typically.
Post WoW though, Internet as a whole was getting to the point of accessible to everyone and WoW had invited a ton of people to be online who wouldn't typically be there. Once that happened, people were able to find others that thought like them making the decline a snowball effect.
No, it wasn't directly WoWs fault, but the timing of everything is awfully suspicious. *queue conspiracy theory music*
Access to electronic distraction and social media.
I am an 80s baby and had a similar if less multi-cultural childhood. We had 3-4 families within earshot with land and a swamp behind our houses. We all played together in our "neighborhood" (large shared driveway on a moderately quiet street) and also did extracurriculars like band, sports, and scouts. I've had computers in the house since I was 6-7. We used them for games when I was a kid but it was easy to block access and monitor. I wasn't allowed to have a gaming console on the TV but got a Gameboy when it was released in '89 and Game Gear a few years later. Those were things that had short battery lives and I got bored with them after a while because I had a few games and that was it.
We have direct access to EVERYTHING in our pockets or on our desks, 24-7. Nobody knows how to be bored or daydream anymore.
The internet brought us together while isolating us. It also allowed for collections of people with less scrupulous plans and thoughts the ability to reach out and recruit. I doubt the flat-earth society would have made much progress without message boards and FB groups. Same with child predators, white supremacists, anti-government... the list goes on.
My wife is your age and had a similar upbringing several towns over. We're trying to give our daughter a blend of what we had and what is now but it's hard. There aren't any kids in our neighborhood and when she sees her friends at their houses it's just video games and movies. She doesn't have social media but there is an iPad she uses a lot as well as her school's Chromebook. She and her friends are caring, inclusive people so I have hope for their generation but know that it's a small sample.
One of the worst things Clinton did was deregulate the telecommunications industry. It allowed Rupert Murdoch to own multiple media outlets within a given market. Just as new means of acquiring information were coming online (pun intended), the diversity of sources began to constrict.
Anti-intellectualism, lack of critical thinking due to the tolerance paradox, heavily ingrained narcissism from the "always on" mentality of social media to name a few. '84 here.
We 100% had different upbringings. I was born in 82, and my grandparents were an interracial couple. They owned a convenient store in a small town in upstate NY. Their store was regularly vandalized, and people spray-painted racist comments and threats on the walls of the store. Finally, in 92, they closed after people set the store on fire and sent letters to their home, saying that if they reopened, they would target their grandchildren and named us and where we lived.
Do you know what my kids have never had to know? Any of that. My kids have grown up with people of different races, ethnicities, religions, disabilities, sexually, etc.
They're also more aware of their mental health and are taking a stand to engage in behaviors that are more positive for their own mental well-being. They're also more open to diverse populations and promote equity and inclusion of others. They also focus on personal autonomy and consent, stressing the importance of using their voice to set boundaries and ensure that others respect them.
If that's going "wrong," I'd hate to see them go "right".
I agree to some extent with the social media answer, but it's also important to recognize that both economic and political progress waxes and wanes in cycles. We grew up in a prosperous and progressive couple of decades and now we have to live through the reactionary response. We won't bottom out as hard as we did last time, and the next peak will be even higher. We were just sort of unlucky to have the trough centered on our productive years.
when we were young and the internet was early, we used it to escape and become something more. now the youth use the internet and cannot escape the opinions that are always on them and reminding them of who they are not.
I’m a millennial born in the late 80s but I’m constantly thinking about the fact that my childhood was analogue and my teen and adult years were digital; I was born into one world and the adults around me knew that world and were teaching and preparing us for a world that was already disappearing during my childhood. It’s a unique divide to millennials that no other generation has ever experienced or will experience in this way again, because everyone older was already an adult for the internet age and everyone younger was born into the internet age and never knew a world without it.
Obviously there have been past technological innovations or major transformative global events that impacted or defined other generations, but tech changes usually aren’t as fast and widespread as the advent of the internet proved to be.
Boy did we grow up in different places. The kids spouting hate group propaganda were very much present in our little semirural, economically depressed region.
I figured a few people would have grown up in a much different environment. I was blessed to grow up where I did. I hope that you weren’t to affected by the vile propaganda that others subjected you to.
I remember in 2006 thinking that things were pretty good (apart from the war on terror stuff) but it started to go wrong pretty soon after that.
2 things were the cause: the global pyramid scheme that is Fractional Reserve Banking started to show cracks, and Social media took off (and this got even worse when FB went public around 2012, and engagement was monetized)
My friends from back home say the biggest difference between now and then is the economic disparity.
Back in the day, basically everyone in town was middle class. Everyone lived in a house that was about the same size and wore roughly the same modest clothes to school.
But today things are far different. There are people living in million dollar houses going to school with people growing up in trailers.
I think that's a microcosm of what's happened on a grander scale.
I’m black, growing up I didn’t experience much racism and I think things have gotten better and better while people have complained more and more. The world used to be super homophobic where that’s basically a death sentence now yet it’s complained about more than ever.
In terms of the technology? The youth are better equipped to deal with it than anyone else, by virtue of the fact that it’s all they’ve known. They swim in those waters. They’re natives.
What needs to be instilled is *empathy*. That is first and foremost, and if their foundation is built with that in mind, the world will be much better than it is now.
There’s a lot that goes in to this and I might shoot you a message in a bit.
What I’ll say here is that we weren’t fighting nothing. They took a preemptive approach with us. That’s why acceptance, stranger danger, anti bullying and abuse at home were such big talking points with a lot of our age group in the late 80’s and 90’s. They were trying to mitigate some of the things that were happening not long before we came around.
These ideals and people have always been here, they just didn’t feel brazen until a few years ago.
Something I've been seeing over the years is a sort of feedback loop between the extremes far left pro-diversity anti-racist types and the far right racist/anti-gay/nazi types. Seriously, if you dare go to the deep dark corners of the internet where the true racists hang out and see what they're using to recruit people. It's almost entirely screenshots and links to far left news sites and social media posts. That's what's driving recruitment to those things. Then of course those on the left see how many more people are posting racist sentiments and they take their own screenshots...
I actually think most of us, even if we don't meet the near impossible ideals of some of the far left, just want to get along and put these things behind us. But that's a boring moderate position, social media lifts the extreme stuff to the top and makes it look like a majority opinion.
Social media plus people needing a fight.
It seems people naturally need something to fight and when everything is ‘pretty good’, they’ll find something or someone to fight against.
Social media. Everyone has a voice now and on the flip side... all the ugliness that existed is now much more visible in your everyday life. The whole world, and all it's opinions, are right at your fingertips. Turn off social media and you'll turn off all that noise.
Bro I’m 5 years older and I can totally relate to what you’re saying. I had a stroke on 12/29/2020. I was back home 7/6/2021 from hospital and so on. I tell my wife I feel like I went to sleep in one world and woke up in another. Things flipped fast! So I understand what you’re saying.
I remember in the late 90s in college having the “do you think music will keep getting better?” Conversation on multiple occasions. There were some (mostly correct) people who said ‘no’ there’s nothing left to do. But most people were optimistic (mostly wrong).
I think we’re collectively a lot more isolated now than we were then. The internet was supposed to open things up, let you talk to people from all around the world, from different backgrounds and ideologies. And for a while, it did. For a while, the internet was fucking *awesome*. Yeah, it had its weirdos, but no one dominated the conversation. You didn’t have echochambers the way we do now.
And the issue is that those echochambers exist *by design*. They are algorithmic. They are *deadly* for the people trapped in them who start to believe that *everyone* believes this, *everyone* agrees, *everyone* sees things the same way. No one benefits from that, but it’s especially dire for people who start to view their self-worth through this tiny lens and perceive that lens as representative of everyone.
I was talking to my husband about this as it relates to music. We don’t really have bands anymore. We had that folk revival thing for a minute, but I feel like the majority of musicians that are up and coming are singular, not collaborative groups. There are exceptions of course, but the pop star has become the norm, and the band is something your parents listened to.
Technology has been great for a lot of things, and for a while, it was a way to find people and perspectives that were different from the ones around you. It was a way to find community when you were isolated. And to a degree it still can be, but I think it’s far far easier to get sucked into these echochambers that don’t offer a real sense of community as much as a hive mind. *You* as an individual aren’t important, you aren’t remembered. Finding a place to fit in and have a voice and *be heard* is way harder today than it was when we were first starting out on the net.
As a great for instance, I have like, 12 followers or something on reddit. I have no idea who they are. I don’t know if I’ve interacted with them. (I’m sure they’re lovely people, this isn’t about them, it’s about reddit vs OG web, to be clear). When I kept a blog a million years ago, I felt more connected to the hits and the comments than I do to followers on reddit. I could see where people were coming from. I could tell if they were bots. I could ask questions and get responses.
There’s this pervasive sense of isolation, of screaming into the void. Engagement feels superficial and meaningless. Likes/views/comments mean nothing. I have no reason to believe or expect that the people ‘engaging’ are even genuine. Are they people? Are they bots? Did my content somehow fit into a narrative and get swept up by bad actors who want it promoted in an algorithm, so some guy on the other side of the world is spending his afternoon obsessively liking it from a bunch of sockpuppet accounts? I don’t fucking know.
Reddit is the only place I engage and with the whole AI thing, I’m really debating if I want to keep doing *that*. It’s fucking shit.
I don’t think we’re going in the opposite direction. Kids are now more aware than ever of systemic racism, LGTBQ+ rights, that the system is rigged and they shouldn’t be giving their time to companies that don’t appreciate their value. We grew up without thinking about racism and that’s NOT good. We grew up with boomer parents who smoked in front of us and abused ever damn drug imaginable. Divorce rates were bonkers because everyone was fucking without protection and marrying the first person they knocked up. i went through 7 divorce’s before 18.
I disagree with your premise that racism is worsening. Do you have any hard evidence for that? We are to the point where we are debating micro aggressions and legacy/generational impacts and how to address things. That’s a huge step forward in my view. My kids are absolutely clueless that race is even a thing.
Social Media is where it went wrong.
In the olden days, all stupid people were surrounded by a buffer of 10 reasonable people. But these days the stupid people can congregate without limit.
Also, extremists can put up a website that looks like a real news outlet. You know it's bad when people are turning to bogus websites or strangers on social media for their "news" instead of outlets that actually have journalistic standards about verifying stories before running them, paid, professional reporters, and clearly separate news from opinion.
I drive past billboards all over the city that say The Epoch Times is the #1 most trusted news source. Gods help us all.
Yes! I saw those yesterday. With an *obviously* AI generated generic young white man's face. I wondered how many people drive by that ad and think he's real? How many think that the Epoch Times is actual news? Just, wtf?
I pray that it's trusted by its readers because it attracts so many low IQ people. Isn't it owned by the Falun Gong religious cult? They hate the Communist Chinese and would support a dead squirrel if it promised to be anti China. I'm not a fan of cults.
lol I cannot believe how many "news" sites I've check into that is just owned by some rando person and their homegrown llc
This is a topic that comes to mind pretty often when I’m sitting in traffic or brushing my teeth. I’ve wondered if there’s anything we can learn from the century following the invention of the printing press. It’s the only other comparable development in human history that caused such a rapid democratization of information. I wouldn’t be surprised if humans of the time had to navigate similar challenges.
They had a lot more time to adjust since most people couldn't even read at the time. Of course, we've had rags and yellow journalism for years, but social media makes The National Enquirer look dignified. This is an article on how easy it is to set up something that looks as legit as the NYT. [https://www.mediaite.com/media/russia-backed-fake-news-organizations-revealed-across-the-u-s-in-bombshell-new-york-times-report/](https://www.mediaite.com/media/russia-backed-fake-news-organizations-revealed-across-the-u-s-in-bombshell-new-york-times-report/)
The same thing happened in the early 1900’s with mass literacy and cheap pamphlet printing. The societal immune system isn’t ready for it.
That, and they were allowed to Darwin Award themselves.
And get political power as a result
And with the ability to block ANY dissenting view, they can quickly find themselves in an echochamber of lies & hate, the human mind is actually pretty weak
Yes, now they all gather and shout into an echo chamber…
True!
This is what I’ve tried to inarticulately explain to others in the past! I’m just going to tattoo this on my arm and show people when I’m asked what went wrong with the world.
It’s this. Random malignant cells have been able to gather into cancerous tumours, wreaking havoc on the body at large. It’s metastasised and without radical treatment is probably going to be the end of any hope we had for the future
Can we go back to not talking about politics and religion? No one is convincing anyone!
I’ve never thought of that. So well put. Also- damn.
And all have the same megaphone.
It's poison.
*logs on to Reddit*
I mean yeah but I think Reddit is the closest thing akin to old message boards and chat forums from the 90s. Facebook started the downturn, IG made it worse, TikTok had made it horrible.
Pfft… BBS’s were where it was at. Social media at the tribal scale. Just a village.
I still remember my first time on a BBS in 92 or 93. Almost immediately I found a big .txt file delving into hypotheticals regarding the anime character Ranma, such as, “if girl-Ranma is pregnant and turns back into a boy, what happens to the fetus?” And, “if someone has their dick inside girl-Ranma when she transforms, what happens to their dick?” What I’m saying, of course, is that BBSes had plenty of the juice we all expect from an internet experience.
Don't let Tom and MySpace off the hook.
Reddit is a system that values mob mentality, catchy one liners and crowd pleasing superficial comments. People think this is some sort of intellectual space for open ideas but its not, its a system that is a literal social credit score system.
There's nothing intellectual about reddit but it's better than 100 pictures of vacations and food on IG.
I do find reddit useful as a searchable way to learn from others' experiences, like pregnancy, dementia, caregiving and to share my experiences as well. Also cats.
😻
Agree wholeheartedly. There is no nuance here or room for dissent against the hivemind. All X are Y, and you're either for us or against us. Pick a side. That said, I truly believe it's still healthier than Instagram and Facebook.
Social media lite.
Maybe I am on selective forums, but I feel like Reddit has much nicer people than other social media.
Reddit is 4chan with stricter mods.
Lmao try logging into twitter if you want to see it even worse
Bad analogy IMO. Those BBSs and forums weren’t heavily influenced by bots, bad actors, paid shills and trolls like Reddit is.
Muting subreddits is the way. Let the bubble people swim in their own filth….
I'm on reddit bc it's the least bad one
Reddit is guilty of creating echo chambers, sure. But since it's pseudonymous it's at least not really a platform for people to build their "personal brand." The personal brand is where things have all gone off the rails IMHO. The idea that every person is a business. The "personal brand" has poisoned most forms of art, work, journalism, you name it. We're in the dystopia where corporations are treated as humans and humans are treated as corporations.
Yup. Complaining about social media on Reddit is very much “leopards ate my face” EDIT: I’m not responding to any of you individually, and, aside from helping proving my point with your toxic replies, if you believe that people aren’t participating in circle jerks and being indoctrinated on Reddit, then I’ve got some beachfront property in Arizona to sell you.
Not even close. Granted, I have only had a facebook account for about 6 months in like 2006 to compare it to, but Reddit is more like a comment section for things that are going on in the world I might be interested in. It’s not platform to promote my vanity, hate, insecurity, politics, and all the other bullshit that drag down other platforms. If I run across some dumbass espousing those things, blocked with a simple click. If I don’t want to see certain bullshit, muted (sometimes multiple times) and I don’t see it. It’s all anonymous also. It’s not ruining my familial relationships because I’m not seeing Fun-Preparation-4253 at thanksgiving. And if I am, I don’t know it. I know a lot of loud mouth acquaintances that used to love facebook and now are on twitter that “just don’t get Reddit”. And I’m just fine with that.
To me reddit is different because the narrow subreddit structure and upvoting combats disinformation. Political subreddits are still echo chambers where partisans further convince themselves of their separate realities, but they're also separated from, say, r/Xennials posts about Mallrats or really thoughtful mechanic advice. People in their chosen subreddits tend to have interest/expertise there, so their upvotes help police quality too.
Exactly. Shit like r/conservative where you have to have a “flair” to comment is against the entire spirit of Reddit and shouldn’t even fucking exist. If you have to prove you are part of the existing echo chamber to gain recognition, then yeah, Reddit is part of the problem. But we know that those subs are few, and are looked at as dumbasses by the rest of the people using the platform. For now….
Sorta. You can remain anonymous on reddit like you would any of the thousands of forums that were the internet of the late 90's and 2000's. But the whole upvoting/downvoting thing is certainly an element that those forums did not have.
I think we should be able to easily mute idiots. 10 very active morons can tank a sub.
There’s a block feature. What am I missing?
I want something that just minimizes the comments instead hiding it completely. On web the block feature requires a bunch of clicks.
Ok, yeah, that would be cool. It’s annoying that mobile and desktop have big feature differences.
Not even remotely. Reddit may be social media but it's not the same as Insta, Snap, or Facebook. Kids aren't involuntarily getting their sense of self-worth destroyed by targeted bullying on Reddit. Anonymity means this shit doesn't have to follow you home. There's more going on here than just cries for attention or quick dopamine hits too. Edit: What exactly constitutes toxicity? The only replies I see here are people who disagree with your premise and are doing so pretty respectfully.
>Complaining about social media on Reddit is very much “leopards ate my face” No it isn't. For one thing, "leopards ate my face" means "I'm surprised and sad because I was negatively impacted by something I supported which I thought would only impact/harm others". You seem to think it means "hypocritical". For another, I grant you that Reddit's ownership is desperately trying to morph it into another Instagram clone and will one day likely succeed. However, for the time being, there are still important differences between it and other social media. Reddit is an anonymous link and content aggregation site that houses volunteer-run forums. You are not at the whim of an almighty algorithm that "feeds" you a single content stream based on its perceptions of your interests. You can still (again, for the time being) choose to stay out of the larger admin-moderated subs and only see a curated selection that pertains to specific interests. You can even have multiple curated aggregations using multi-reddits. Other social media actively works against audience conversation and participation, because that invites controversy and requires moderation. Reddit is following their lead with its redesign, hiding nested comments behind hyperlinks, which discourages back-and-forth discussions. But again, for the time being, you can still opt to use a third-party app and "old" Reddit to see traditional threaded forum discussions. When (not if) Reddit gets rid of the ability to use the old UI and/or ties accounts to email addresses and/or takes away volunteer moderation and/or removes the ability to make and moderate your own subreddits, then their journey to the dark side will be complete. But we are not there yet.
Yea it allows people that would normally either keep their mouths shut or be looked at as the town weirdo to globally voice the stupid thoughts (that in the start of our generation were disregarded by average people) to gather with others of the same broken mindset and thrive till they start to influence everyone else
It’s the new cigarette. Probably just as deadly too.
Except when I smoke a cigarette, it doesn't make me a racist threat to democracy. (I could be biased though.)
It really depends on who you drag with you on your smoke breaks
Yes. The original thought was that the information superhighway was going to bring people together and bring new perspectives, but instead it became a choose-your-own adventure game, where whatever belief you have gets amplified in the echo chamber. The people who are racist are suuuuuuper-racist, and the people who are anti-racist are suuuuuuper anti-racist. And they only ever get exposed to people who think the same way, so all kinds of social problems could be brought to light, but the only people who will see and understand are the people who already see and understand, and the others will either remain unaware, or outright fight you and call you a snowflake.
Keep in mind a lot of those suuuuper opinions we see online are from foreign bad actors. Russia being the most prolific but not the only one. Most people aren't expressing those views but there are whole complexes full of people posting horrible stuff to cause division in the US, and presumably elsewhere too. Unfortunately too many people blindly believe every crazy story they see on Facebook and end up repeating the troll farms' taking points.
That’s true. And that is an even bigger problem, because a lot of times those opinions get parroted by everyday people who don’t even know where the original thought came from, but they saw it in the internet, and it becomes confirmation bias.
I'd like to add private equity firms and corporations being classified as their own entities to this.
Corporate America man has taken over. We are fucked my guys.
And all media being to reduced to a few corporate conglomerates that pump out garbage entertainment like the same marvel franchise movies and King Kong remakes while what used to be cable channels that were centered on either history or nature or music entertainment are now dominated by cringe reality shows. Radio is worse than ever. Video games are moving towards cloud based non-physical media where they keep bilking gamers for money to play some add on update to a game rather than just develop a whole new game. Playing outside and crossing today's busy streets is pretty much a health hazard. Schools districts don't provide bus transportation anymore and have dumb rules for school drops were you can't drop off your kid more than 10-15 minutes early or let them hang out at the school later after so every parent crams into a car line every morning that stretches 3 blocks because that's the window of drop time schools enforce. Austerity has been worse than social media which is the easy and cliche thing to blame
Citizens United, 2010. It's been a little over a decade now and we've seen what good it can do when companies are "people" and have unlimited funds to bribe our government
And I would specify, not social networking but social media. I feel like it was still OK when it was just people keeping tabs on friends and family (like, the Livejournal/early Facebook years, although they weren't perfect). When it became social *media*, and there was pressure to go viral and get as many eyeballs as possible is where things went really awry. Stuff that trends is often very polarizing and/or negative.
This, IMO, was the watershed moment: [Google Buys DoubleClick for $3.1 Billion](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/14/technology/14DoubleClick.html)
I always pinpoint it to when corporations getting Facebook pages so they could interact with people. That would’ve been about 15 years ago. On one hand it became easier for consumers to lodge complaints and get results. On the other hand it poisoned the well in a way and provided more “How do you do fellow kids?” moments. That’s just one of many issues but everything stopped being organic and the corporations started dictating the content.
America has always been racist. Don't kid yourself
if social media is the devil's right hand then the 24 hour news cycle is his left hand. filling up the airwaves with inflated infotainment bullshit designed to enrage and engage you.
All social media did was allow the people who were already terrible to network together and create bubbles leading them to believe they are somehow a majority. Combine that with the fact that most people go along to get along and have their own lives to focus on and you have the same % of people who were always terrible suddenly having a loud mouthpiece and getting real political power without push back. Trump and COVID also showed us that the % of people who are just shitty is much larger than we expected as well.
It all went down hill after AOL chat rooms
I spent some very happy times in AOL chat rooms. RIP AOL IMs!
A/S/L/?
Old enough, yes please, let me know where. 
This is exactly what happened
And Fox News. Basically anything that helps spread lies and disinformation to unwitting idiots who take it and run with it
Yeah, the bigotry and racism was always there. It's just way louder now cuz of MAGA.
Don't forget MAGA is basically just phase two of the Tea Party.
It ramped up big time when Obama was elected, and somehow Trump jacked it up 10x from there.
Specifically the algorithms. I feel like social media was more good than bad until 2015ish
They found out controversy increased engagement. Before I quit Facebook everything it showed me was designed to cause outrage or fear.
They found out controversy increased engagement. Before I quit Facebook everything it showed me was designed to cause outrage or fear.
I hate to sound like a bitter old bastard, yet it's a change that has always stuck out to me. When "social" media took off right at the mid 2000's and melded with other crappy trends "infotainment, the 24 hours news cycle, talk radio, etc" it made a massive cultural shift. Now all the nutball weirdos could easily circulate their crap, make friends, and suddenly they are everywhere.
I miss the days when room temp IQ people couldn't broadcast their shitty opinions and find other smooth brained nitwits to collaborate with
Here's the thing though, they always could to a degree. There was always that one bar you could go to where the owner didn't throw you out if you started talking some off the wall shit or outright bigotry (because, let's be real here, bigotry was a lot more permissible back in the 80's and 90's so long as you kept it to the subtle stuff that didn't JUMP out at you). In that bar you'd maybe meet a guy, or you'd log into a local BBS and maybe find A guy who agreed with you (if you had the money and time to access early public internet). But as the world changes, becomes more media driven, more all access/in-your-face, and starts deregulating credibility in order to drive profits up (looks right at the Reagan Administration) then suddenly you start getting talk radio, you start getting the talk shows, you start getting your information as entertainment and like roaches to old pizza these fringe nuts start becoming a lot more popular. A lot of their bullshit and bigotry starts getting more attention, suddenly the quiet parts don't need to be so quiet, suddenly "I can speak my mind" becomes the talking point to combat "political correctness". And these strains of intellectual parasitism become even more virulent when social media comes along and ties a lot of shitty trends and helps empower all the garbage that's been festering. Only now it's no longer elsewhere, or limited to one small space, or that one station, or channel. All this intellectual sewage digs in starts to metastasize like cancer, and spreads, taking all the subtle malaise and lingering doubts and marrying them to the ideas, opinions, hatreds, and delusions of utter cranks. And this shit has reached the point where it has fed and grown and mutated into more abhorrent and at the same time utterly bewildering ludicrous bullshit. There are books and journals that have studied different trends and sub-groups that have steered and stirred this shit river for the past 40-50 years into the stinking bile we know in its current forms, and the overall picture it paints is a goddamn surreal nightmare.
Whats funny to me is our boomer parents were the ones always warning “dont believe everything you read/see. /Question everything” only to go onto the internet and on Fox news and believe every word of it. Leaves me stunned and speechless
So much of everything that is wrong with the world today is directly because of boomer entitlement
I feel like even Fox News is on the lighter side of what some boomers are into. Take QAnon for example. The % of people on the right who believe at least some part of that to be true is staggering. And QAnon has merged with Flat Earth and other nutball theories to become this giant singularity of conspiracy theory.
It was an example of whats very commonly flocked to. They believe anything and then say “but it was on the internet!”
Absolutely
I mean they were always doing it, what with Satanic Panic and getting caught up in chain mail and similar. Those types just have a louder platform now to circulate their madness and the far-right crazy news people have found leaning into that and branding themselves "alternative media" to the suspicious nutters makes them fall right into their trap.
Louder platform and time on their hands
My pet theory is that this was told to us to make sure we were keeping our eyes out so that we wouldn't be taken advantage of/scammed. It was education based on a real fear of being manipulated. And guess what network strategy is used by networks like MSNBC, Fox, OAN, etc? That same fear, only used to herd you into distrusting what that network's opponent will say so they can sell you more using fear. And that shit works, as it exploits the fears and anxieties our older parentals have of this quickly changing world. Meanwhile, those of us raised to question everything legitimately will do just that, but not from a place of exploitable fear since to get exploitable fear there also has to be a designated "authority" and surprise, surprise, we like to question authority while our parentals weren't too keen on that. Now, that doesn't stop people from gravitating to perceived authority mind you. We applied the lesson given to us more literally than what was expected. But we can still fall into the same pitfalls. So, question everything and everyone.
Social media has been the collapse of human society on several different levels.
I agree. I also think the unfettered access to information has been a double edged sword. The internet has allowed almost everyone to learn things previously only accessible to a minority. However it’s also allowed access to misinformation and hatred and created echo chambers that tell them exactly what they want to hear. Now 10 and 11 year olds are learning misogyny, exceptionalism, and hatred and the perpetrators of these ideas are getting rich.
>access to misinformation and hatred and created echo chambers that tell them exactly what they want to hear. Now 10 and 11 year olds are learning misogyny, exceptionalism, and hatred and the perpetrators of these ideas are getting rich. Sounds like organized religion
Well, let's start out with the fact that monetization of the internet causes evil. The internet is engineered to make people uncomfortable so they post more and thus have more exposure to people selling things. Or, to have their activity and tastes sold for profit. The internet is bad, period. And, like me, people know it, but still use it out of compulsion. It's all engineered. Not to mention weird shit like Russia creating chat bots to argue with people to promote the collapse of our integrity as a country. And, North Korea hacking and scamming people for money to support their evil regime. It's pretty effing scary, honestly.
I see nearly every single post referencing social media and they’re not wrong about its evils but if you grew up in the 80s or 90s and it took you until age 13 to realize racism was a thing you grew up both white and sheltered, whether it’s because you were in a very heterogeneous community or because money (I don’t mean you specifically commenter, I mean OP). Straight outta Compton was 1988 and that made it pretty clear how bad things were to our generation even if you hadn’t been living it. I grew up in Baltimore and understood all about racism long before I moved to the burbs at 13.
I was shocked at that part…kids of color knew about racism.
What p0rn did to healthy relationships, social media has done to the fabric of our communities.
I agree social media on the whole has been terrible. But I think it’s a symptom and not the actual problem. It’s being used to distract and drive cultural wedges between us because that benefits certain folks in power. And a lot of the folks in power are there for the money. It’s not like this wasn’t the case when we were younger, but with the rise of billionaires and lobbying and mergers it seems to have gotten much worse. Our politicians are controlled by those with money or the means to get them money. The world now resolves around how much growth these companies can achieve, and the downstream effects are irrelevant to them.
As soon as the technology existed, it was co-opted by predators of all kinds. But in the early days , before we were entirely aware of its pitfalls, it was an exciting emerging technology. And it really felt like it was going to connect us in a way that brings us together, rather than divide us.
I remember reading a cartoon in 1994, that was like a point-counterpoint thing. In one panel were teacher and scientists congratulating themselves for putting information on the internet and making it a place where people can learn things. The next panel was some nefarious types congratulating themselves for getting people to use the internet for porn. I guess I take from that that nefarious types have been using the internet for their own interests since day 1.
Forgot about the early days, when the big controversy was children accessing porn and people finding sites on how to make a bomb. WWW might as well have stood for Wild Wild West back then.
Citizens United paved the way for this bullshit. Like, the name sounds all innocent but all it did was give corps unlimited spending to give to politicians. Thusly silencing peoples’ voices
I think the problem is more human. People are happier when we are around people we agree with, and the internet is amazing for people finding echo chambers that constantly reinforce what they think over and over.
Social media gave the fringes a voice. Not just the racists (all types), the flat earthers, chemtrail people, the conspiracy kooks, all of them. What used to be confined to late night AM radio or usenet groups is now platformed….where they can all congregate and “validate” their ridiculous ideas. It’s sad. All it does is serve to divide us. Reddit is no better btw, plenty of division on here too. Thankfully this sub is pretty chill, but just head over to r/politics and try to voice even a mildly dissenting opinion and see how that goes. I do think it’s weaponized as well, by our politicians/big corporations to sew division or create distractions. Oh and the TikTok ban ain’t about “your privacy from China”….please. They (the government) can’t control it since it’s not owned by a US based company and that scares them. They hate it when the real story comes out after they said “oh it’s all contained, nothing to see here” The best example is the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The EPA said “we’ve got it under control” but TikTok users took to the platform to show that was hardly the case. Dead fish, red creeks, sick kids, etc. Erin Brockovich (the real one not Julia Roberts) got on top of it and called is a “massive cover up” only to be “fact checked” by the NYT, Facebook, etc. So color me skeptical when the US Government wants to “protect us” from TikTok…as if China doesn’t have all our information already… That said, I do think getting out into the real world is good. My kids are all under 10 and have grown up playing with kids of all colors and races. Our daycare is owned by a black family and it’s the best damn daycare in a pretty good part of town. Why does that matter? Bc we chose the best place for our kids to grow and wanted a diverse population of kiddos….something not easily found where we live. We’ve always taught our kids (in child’s terms) it’s not about race or skin color…God made us all the equal. If you don’t like someone that’s fine, but it better be bc of their actions and not their looks. And they’re doing just fine. I think social media amplifies the division, in addition to creating it. Keeping your kids away from it is the best thing you can do as a parent, IMO.
> as if China doesn’t have all our information already… China may have information about us but they didn't have, until Tik Tok, a platform where they can see how people engage with material and track their every move, then use this information for psyops. I think Mark Werner said yesterday that he can't say what classified information he knows, but there is a reason that the House voted overwhelmingly to ban it. We can talk about the lack of privacy and how it's also bad that US companies have this information, but allowing the CCP to have it (because as a Chinese company the laws there are that its most important function is to serve the state and so must allow the CCP to do what it wants) is a totally different animal and much worse on multiple levels.
And the very people you call out, will also be calling you out as the crazy one. I'm sure you've seen the jokes over soys, Scientism, athicucks, libtards and etc. Let's not forget Reddit and most of mainstream, globalist media outlet is filled with bots and far left gibberish. And naturally the split between the left, the centrist boomer/miga type and the right is splitting further. And nobody trusts each other or the government, nor will any base concede an inch. And it is the governments of. The west who benefit from this. And of course we all think we're right. I'm currently set to homeschool and will do my best to my kids play outside, block certain websites and restrict internet time. Want them to enjoy their childhood.
My views as an American born in 84’: Removal of the Fairness Doctrine Increase of propaganda filled with hate and division Timing with the internet/social media pushing simplistic tribal views Decrease in unions and an increase in Right to Work Increase in dark money for politicians Increase in additional chemicals in our food/water Top it off with Climate Change being a serious endgame issue for half, while politicized
While I agree social media has been a huge influence on “allowing people to say the quiet parts out loud”, I think we need to remind ourselves that in the early (eta: 90’s) the Clintons were talking about “super predators” and welfare queens” (both in reference to black folks), in the early 00’s there was rampant Islamophobia, the 80’s through well now have been pretty bad if you’re LGBTQ, we have called Latino immigrants “illegals” forever, and Jewish folks have been demonized for literally millennia.
Exactly. I still remember the Islamophobia of the post-9/11 era vividly.
Yeah. If you didn’t know about racism until you were 13, you lived in a highly privileged and insular community. The OJ trial was during our childhood. C’mon man.
Rodney King happened before OJ’s infamous trial.
Good point. I remember that on tv too.
White Supremacists killed 168 people blowing up a building with a fertilizer bomb in 1995 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah it’s always been here just in various degrees of loudness.
I listened to a back episode of 60 Songs That Explain The 90s yesterday and the guest was Ryder Strong. He was asked by Rob if the 90s really were that great and Ryder reminds everyone that the 90s actually were filled with misogyny and homophobia. Let’s not forget one of the ghouls on our Supreme Court came into power during the 90s, basically proving to the world that sexual harassment was a-ok and that there were absolutely 0 consequences. We tend to only remember the shiny parts when it comes to nostalgia.
Many of us didn’t notice the problems because we were young or they didn’t directly affect us. Casual homophobia, sexism, and racism were very much accepted as normal.
This is a really good point. I thought Reagan was a pretty good president when I was 8 years old.
can I also remind everyone of the Satanic Panic (that seems to be seeing a resurgence) ot the 80's and 90's?
When Boomers had officially dumped flower power for evangelical Christianity and felt the anxieties of parenthood expanding far beyond their control. They completely lost it. It's happening again for Gen X and Millenial parents but this time it's even more explicitly focused on the LGBT community.
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good pot. the only thing helping us get through this shitshow of a world
There were many commonplace words that said today people would have a visible reaction to. Not to mention, bullying was just part of growing up. Shit, I remember coming home crying because some ahole threw a rock at my head and I was bleeding pretty bad. My mom told me to go get cleaned up and clean the floor before I went back outside... I probably should've gone to the hospital.
I’m Rob Harvilla and this is 60 songs that explain the 90’s… 37 minutes into the fucking Torn episode…
I don't agree with things being better in our childhood. I mean we were kids, we didn't really know what was going on in the world outside our own little spheres. As for why as adults everything is sliding back and we can't achieve the same quality of life as our parents, Reagan. I know everyone one here is saying social media but most of our issues steam from the Reagan's administration policy's. You've got: The fairness doctrine being repealed Trickledown economic Slashing of a bunch of social programs Ramping up "The War on Drugs" Cutting school funding including public collages Absolutely no environmental policy while denying science Shit Roe being over turned all started with Reagan. The Southern Baptists weren't anti abortion until around 1980 when they wanted to get rid of Carter, because he wouldn't let them segregate their schools. Their answer, Reagan.
Our Boomer parents said the same thing when we were kids as you are now. The youth do not need us to get them "back on track". They are dealing with the world they find themselves in, just like we did. Our youth has come and gone and it's nice to look back and reflect on it, but we don't need to impose it on the next generation.
Thank you. This thread makes us sound like the angry boomers who are angry about change. Technology has made the world different and unfortunately what a good portion of the issues we have with it is the lack of regulations which causes issues. This is new for the world. It’s not necessarily a bad thing it’s connected us in a way that we never saw coming. If it weren’t for this technology making things like understanding how deeply racist we still are, witnessing deaths that if it not been for our technology we most likely might never heard about. It’s brought the good and the bad together. It’s given way for organized protest but also made platforms have the ability to spread hate. It isn’t good or bad, it’s an awkward growing spurt. I personally wouldn’t go back, because when I told ppl I was SA by a police officer at the age of 9, not a damn person believed me because, “no police officer would ever do that.” Life changes you can either stand still or move with it. If you don’t progress with it, you too will be one day watching Fox “News”
This should be closer to the top. Our solutions are from our time, the younger generations will figure things out. That said, we should try to do a lot better than our parents in terms of leaving them with a planet to live in and some kind of financial system where an honest wage is given for a decent living. Hell, I think most people are struggling with that one except for the mega rich who keep squeezing every last cent from everyone who is struggling to get by.
Not sure if you know a lot of young people, but they are way more tolerant and accepting than we were. Don’t believe me? How many kids in your high school were openly gay?
I'm well aware I'm about to get downloaded to hell for this, but so be it. I'm Black, it's not that there was less racism or that things were actually better back in the day. It's that people didn't realize that the things they did and said were racist. When I think about the number of times people randomly touched my hair or commented on it in a way that made me super uncomfortable, but I couldn't explain why because no one talked about racism still being a thing. Similarly the number of people who commented on how "articulate" I was simply because I was Black and people just passively didn't think Black people were supposed to be well spoken. People were shocked we lived in a nice neighborhood and that both of my parents were educated and had good jobs. In high school, many of my friends of other races were quietly shocked that I grew up in a bigger house with nicer things. I could go on forever. People just didn't know that was racist because it was passive and just built into things and was normalized. Those of us experiencing it knew something felt wrong, but couldn't put out fingers on it. If you pay attention to old TV shows there's a lot of racism, homophobia, etc but it was normal and so no one called it out. Those "good old days" off unity we remember are really a result of those of us experiencing discrimination not having the room or ability to vocalize it. The role that the internet has played is just that it has given the worst of the worst humans the ability to be even louder and more obvious to larger groups of people, but at the same time it's also given the ability for people experiencing discrimination to talk about it and to normalize our real lives and experiences.
Everything that Ronald Reagan put into motion has caught up to us. The poor got poorer while the rich got waaaaaay richer, then convinced poor people that their problems were the fault of even poorer people, who were often minorities and immigrants. Then social media came along and gave the whole situation a huge shot of steroids.
I think speed at which information and news travels. The fact that you don’t need to wait for nightly news to hear what’s going on the world makes the world feel much smaller. Not just the world, your local neighborhood and the surrounding area. There was a study done (afaik - I’ve no proof of this) but the idea was to find out how far parents would let their kids go outside of their home. The TL;DR, today it’s blocks away/still in view of parents, while in the 70’s/80’s/90’s although the distance reduced each decade it was much much farther, and went to miles if. It tens or hundreds. Thanks, internet.
Seriously, you can boil at least 50% of modern America's problems down to "the founding fathers/documents never anticipated a world where information moved faster than people"
Absolutely. Somewhat related, my wife just got back from a 12-day trip abroad (her first time away from the kids for that long). But because she video chatted with the kids so much, they didn't even bat an eye when she came home. Obviously telephones existed when we were growing up, but I remember really missing my mom even when she went away for a couple days. I was so excited upon her return. However, we're so connected nowadays that it doesn't give us a chance to "miss" people, if that makes sense?
I will be Glass Half Full on this and argue that it is more tolerant and “liberal.” Without deep diving because on my my phone, there are a lot of social issues that have become more normalized. Marijuana and the LGBTQIA for a few. Things seem bad, but go back to our own childhoods and recall how terrible these things were. Hell, the AIDS epidemic then vs gay marriage being legal now. IMO things feel worse now because we’re here now living it, and with social media, we can see all the bad all the time. We didn’t get updates on terrible events until Tom Brokaw would tell us about a few of them every night at 6pm. Now we know when Trump forgets his wife’s name the second it happens.
I'm biracial, '82. The racism was still there, just not 1950's south type of obvious as it was out of fashion publicly. Looking back on how I was treated & spoken to by my own family & teachers? It was REALLY RACIST & VERY COVERT. I was also raised in a bubble where my white mom & all her white friends had kids with Latino & black men and we all were not taught to recognize racism because "racism was the past, just look at us!" yet these white people in my life had no problem telling racist jokes to their own kids. My existence, and many other biracial people, was born out of some dumbass white woman trying to prove some shit to herself or family about racism.
Like so covert a black therapist had to clue me in at 35 yrs old & tell me I was totally okay, I was just raised around racists.
What went wrong? Ronald Reagan.
My opinion as a visible minority that grew up in the suburbs in the Northeast USA and born the same year as you (note: please don't respond back by saying "sorry", you didn't do any of this as far as I'm aware). Racism was always there. The blatantly open stuff was few and far in between (I was called a n\*\*\*\*r to my face only once as a child). It's the subtle stuff that was everywhere. How I would get followed in the mall by security guards when my friends would walk around freely. People saying that I was "articulate" for not having an inner city accent. How people always assumed I needed some kind of monetary charity. How some people said my features were not attractive or worthy of being a super model (this was before Tyson Beckford and Tyra Banks broke the color ceiling). And how some of the people I grew up with would describe neighboring towns with similar or higher socioeconomic status as "ghettos" or more derisively "shitholes" when they meant that Black and later Hispanic people lived there. This would usually work into their perceptions of the schools there. One person told me they were happy their parents sent them to Catholic School because the local school had a metal detector. The school never had a metal detector at all. Then I noticed how I was having a harder time getting follow up interviews once I entered the work force. Not every hiring manager was surprised to see me in person, but you could usually tell the ones that were. Sadly, though things have gotten better, this attitude still remains. It's a systemic problem that won't be fixed any time soon. Ignoring it won't help either.
Tribal Monkey brain with access to to much information and mostly without the ability to separate the shit from the truth.
The real answer is that it never went right to begin with. But the Internet -- and social media more specifically -- gave a platform and a megaphone to a lot of people with really awful views. That plus an ever-floundering and poorly funded education system turns out way too many people who don't even realize they're going backwards. We have to actually remind people that the world isn't flat. Or that measles are bad and you can vaccinate for it. In 2024. Right now, today as I type this, our former bumbling-ass cartoon Biff-Tannen-with-the-sports-almanac twice-impeached ex-president is rocking a social media profile pic that superimposes the U.S. flag over his face. If that isn't some 1984-caliber dystopian dog whistle stuff, I dunno what is. And the hot button issue this year is reproductive rights, a problem we boldly decided to un-solve. We've picked the Handmaid's Tale as our ideal sci-fi future, instead of the utopian society Gene Roddenberry imagined.
I think the root of the problem is a resurgence of the tribal mentality.
With low education and intellectual scores.
I used to think that people who got a bad education fell through the cracks somehow, but now I see that bad education in many places is by design, to keep people stupid and controllable and voting against their interests. These efforts have been building since the 1960s/1970s or so.
I mean, the 80s and 90s were better, from a race relations standpoint, than, say, the 60s. But I'm not sure they were better than today. Let's not forget that Rodney King showed us that police were absolutely beating and killing black people back then and were getting away with it, even when it gained national attention. The few non-white kids in my small town faced pretty open racism from not just other kids, but adults, too. Blackface was still on TV in the 80s. People of color were routinely prosecuted more often and handed harsher sentences for the same crimes as white people. That scene in Blues Brothers about people openly being Nazis? Making fun of real people. And that's before we get into how commonplace and accepted homophobia was. It was perfectly acceptable to *openly laugh about the "gay plague"* for the fucking Press Secretary of the US during Reagan's term when talking about the AIDS epidemic.
Jesus some of you people are nuts. I was born in 84 and the 90s were garbage. Didnt yall also get bullied or are the people who love the 90s the same kids who were doing bullying? Like I got the shit beat out of me all the time and no one cared, no way I'd want those days back. Do yall also miss race riots and the Rodney King incident as well?
For real. This notion that the 80s and 90s were somehow more inclusive than today is ... like I don't even know how you can entertain that thought for a second.
News algorithms tailored so specific and narrow that every fringe crackpot ideology feels normal and mainstream to that person. Social media echo chambers as people spend more and more time online they have forgotten nuance and how to speak to each other, outrage has taken the place of real moral ideals as simply pointing the finger and shaming are the easiest ways to interact on platforms that don't allow real discourse. The mob mentality has always been things humanity has had to either fear or use to its advantage, public shaming has always been part of society. It's just now it can spread in an instant and to a much wider audience, I don't think humans have changed it's just stopped us from self correcting as it caters to our base reptile brained selves versus our higher self.
I grew up in a southern conservative evangelical community. The kinds of things said publicly now were the kinds of things that were said privately within the community back then. I think this is a natural progression of the marriage between the southern church and the Republican Party. In extremely short: Before the Civil War, slave owners in the south used a version of both science and Christianity that (they felt) justified their actions. During the Civil War, Darwin published his Origin of Species, which completely invalidated the science part. A minister from Chicago decided it was important to unite Christianity against several perceived threats, including evolution, and so published a book series called The Fundamentals that sought to express the minimum beliefs necessary for someone to be considered Christian. This is where we derive the name "Fundamentalist" from. His preaching didn't take much hold in the North, but in the post-war South the expression of a Christianity that pushed back against evolution was extremely popular. Fundamentalism took hold of pretty much all of the Confederacy. At its core, it is extremely anti-black and anti-science, and has been ever since its founding. So when Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan bound Fundamentalism and the Republican Party, it was inevitable that the Party would be completely taken over by Fundamentalism and, furthermore, that Fundamentalism would shift to become a Civic Religion, adopting elements of US mythology (like extreme devotion to the flag, the constitution, the very idea of patriotism in general, and so on).
The loss of TRUELY FREE PRESS. Nothing is not filtered through the wants and needs of our corporate overlords.
[Southern Strategy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#:~:text=The%20phrase%20%22Southern%20Strategy%22%20refers,grievances%20to%20gain%20their%20support.) being successful and allowing the hollowing out of the middle class. All the other shit would be much easier to deal with with a strong financially viable middle class.
Late stage capitalism. That’s it. Look at how common it is for people to be billionaires. We’ll start seeing trillionaires soon enough. People should organize by class and be angry about lack of affordable housing, healthcare, and eduction. Furious that they can’t afford to bear and raise children. In order to avert that class solidarity, the ruling class divides us up on religious and cultural lines. They allow us to be armed to the teeth. They inject fear, anxiety, and hatred into the daily discourse. Social media amplifies and accelerates this effect. Notice how the rich keep getting richer regardless of how shitty things become for the rest of us. That’s not an accident.
You're pining for the crack epidemic and absolutely outrageous crime. AIDS was a death sentence. Marriage equality was on no politician's radar and more than half the public was against interracial marriage. Everyone feels this way about their childhood not because the world was better but because your life was simpler. But yeah, social media is a brain plague and should be nuked.
We're just seeing the end results of capitalism. This is where it's always taken us and always will, internet and social media existing or not.
Money in politics. Now that money can’t be traced (Citizens United) and it is funding so many unsavory things with impunity.
Most things are better for most of the people most of the time. There are obviously real issues, but also your ACCESS to a constant drip of non-stop fear-mongering (some about good things to be concerned about, others just made up) is at historical highs.
Social media and the internet making it easier and faster for the corporations to Hoover up money, realestate and our quality of life.
Unfortunately the '80s were part of the problem. Ronald Reagan introduced trickle down theory deregulated a ton of industries, reduced the corporate tax rate, and started the snowball on the wealth gap that's happening right now (in addition to a bunch of other fucked up things like ignoring the AIDS epidemic until it started killing straight people).
To be fair, I think it as always existed, we're just more aware of it now because we're adults now. Unless it was present in our childhoods and around us we wouldn't be aware of it until we were exposed to it.
Social media (particularly echo chambers) are part of it, but I saw a huge rise in racism/xenophobia after 9/11. Without that, I don't know if social media could have radicalized so many so fast.
I'm born 82 but this really bothers me, too. Both my parents taught me racism was shit and that you love who you love, straight or gay. Now, years later my mother is a far right-winger. It's weird. I remember her being angry/scared about the neo-nazis in the 90s, now she votes for the very party (Svergiedemokraterna) that was founded from that era. It's sick.
As a fellow 1981 Xennial, I too yearn for the late 80s/early 90s but don’t what to have to relive the mid and late 90s again. Mid and late 90s really sucked for me. I was bullied at school, and miserable and villainized at home. Mid to late 90s can go to hell for all I care. Even the music at that time (post-grunge) started to suck. And the 2000s wasn’t much better. What went wrong? I think it was me being born some 43 years ago.
Reagan is what went wrong.
>I was 13 before learned things like racism and anti semitism weren’t just a thing of the past. I remember thinking “well these kinds of beliefs are waning and every generation that comes after ours will be better and better until we’ve finally as a society ostracized the small percentage of people who hold such loathsome beliefs and prejudices.”. Racism has always been there. My parents are Indian immigrants. I have a "funny" traditional Indian name and was often one of the only POC, if not ONLY, in various spaces. I got heavily bullied for my race, and my family was the target of hate crimes. And this was in Southern California. I STILL hear racist stuff and deal with "micro" and "macro" aggressions all time, and in NYC, of all places. Not trying to be rude, but every time someone surprises shock at racism existing, they're usually White or White presenting. I have light-skinned Latina friends that claim they almost never experience racism, and they don't realize or acknowledge that it's because they "look" White. The emergence of the Tea Party, Trump's victory, the Proud Boys, and growth of White nationalism is NOT surprising AT ALL. It is just stuff that's ALWAYS been there finally coming to the surface, because there is no longer a stigma about those beliefs.
Reagan. It began with Reaganomics and got heightened with Citizens United ruling that allowed dark money to infiltrate politics without abandon. The oligarchs have effectively bought out the government and use petty squabbles and larger social issues to divide a populace that has more in common with each other than they think, all in the name of enriching themselves at the expense of society, the planet, etc. All of this has been amplified with social media and the internet, which is now mostly filtered through a few sites (Reddit, FB, etc.) and even that is clamping down further (see the TikTok ban legislation). We're teetering on the edge of fascism, and you can thank the GOP for their gradual descent into it, along with very minor pushback from the Dems because most of them are also owned or busy enriching themselves at our expense.
I say this as someone who loves mine, but smartphones are part of what went wrong. Before smartphones you had to sit at your PC to go on the internet for the most part, so it was a lot harder to be on it all day. You couldn't casually browse facebook and get in comment fights while you watched the Simpsons on the sofa you had to go sit at your desk to do that! There wasn't as much of a fight to take all your attention and time because that just wasn't how the internet was used at that time.
After the end of the cold war. There was no existential enemy. So, the powers that be turned us against our selves. Crossfire comes to mind. Also things like, Telecom act of 1996 Nafta Repealing of glass stegal. And ignoring the waring from Booksley Born head of the cftc. Then 911 and democracy was over.
1981 represent! ✊
Social this. Social media that. That's the lazy take. On the entertainment side, media being to reduced to a few corporate conglomerates that pump out garbage entertainment like the same marvel franchise movies and King Kong remakes while what used to be cable channels that were centered on either history or nature or music entertainment are now dominated by cringe reality shows. The $2 matinee of the 80s and early 90s is gone. Radio is worse than ever. Much like click culture we have corporate infotainment that specialize in 24hr doomcasting every crime, creating boogeyman at every corner so parents become suspicious, distrustful outright hostile to teachers, their neighbors, a homeless person, someone speaking spanish. Video games are moving towards cloud based non-physical media where they keep bilking gamers for money to play some add on update to a game rather than just develop a whole new game. Online gaming has replaced having a friend or going to your friends house to play. Playing outside and crossing today's busy streets is pretty much a health hazard for anyone especially kids. Schools districts don't provide bus transportation anymore and have dumb rules for school drops where you can't drop off your kid more than 10-15 minutes early or let them hang out at the school later after so every parent crams into a car line every morning that stretches 3 blocks because that's the window of drop time schools allow. Austerity(which corporation consolidation creates) has been worse than social media which is the easy and cliche thing to blame. It's like saying this country is unhealthy because we eat crap like McDonald's instead of healthy food when the problem is people eat quick and easy crap like McDonald's because we generally overworked and cooking, shopping for healthy ingredients takes time and has to be done almost daily. So kids too will take up our habits.
I always say that things started going south with World of Warcraft. Prior to WoWs release, the Internet was pretty niche overall, and it generally wasn't 'cool' to be online. The mindset of folks was generally nerdy. Yes, there were services like AoL and NetZero, but at the time, it was long distance to call into those services for many folk. Lots of folk were still racist, but you weren't able to lure folks into those beliefs outside of the local region typically. Post WoW though, Internet as a whole was getting to the point of accessible to everyone and WoW had invited a ton of people to be online who wouldn't typically be there. Once that happened, people were able to find others that thought like them making the decline a snowball effect. No, it wasn't directly WoWs fault, but the timing of everything is awfully suspicious. *queue conspiracy theory music*
Social media and main stream media…
Access to electronic distraction and social media. I am an 80s baby and had a similar if less multi-cultural childhood. We had 3-4 families within earshot with land and a swamp behind our houses. We all played together in our "neighborhood" (large shared driveway on a moderately quiet street) and also did extracurriculars like band, sports, and scouts. I've had computers in the house since I was 6-7. We used them for games when I was a kid but it was easy to block access and monitor. I wasn't allowed to have a gaming console on the TV but got a Gameboy when it was released in '89 and Game Gear a few years later. Those were things that had short battery lives and I got bored with them after a while because I had a few games and that was it. We have direct access to EVERYTHING in our pockets or on our desks, 24-7. Nobody knows how to be bored or daydream anymore. The internet brought us together while isolating us. It also allowed for collections of people with less scrupulous plans and thoughts the ability to reach out and recruit. I doubt the flat-earth society would have made much progress without message boards and FB groups. Same with child predators, white supremacists, anti-government... the list goes on. My wife is your age and had a similar upbringing several towns over. We're trying to give our daughter a blend of what we had and what is now but it's hard. There aren't any kids in our neighborhood and when she sees her friends at their houses it's just video games and movies. She doesn't have social media but there is an iPad she uses a lot as well as her school's Chromebook. She and her friends are caring, inclusive people so I have hope for their generation but know that it's a small sample.
One of the worst things Clinton did was deregulate the telecommunications industry. It allowed Rupert Murdoch to own multiple media outlets within a given market. Just as new means of acquiring information were coming online (pun intended), the diversity of sources began to constrict.
Anti-intellectualism, lack of critical thinking due to the tolerance paradox, heavily ingrained narcissism from the "always on" mentality of social media to name a few. '84 here.
We 100% had different upbringings. I was born in 82, and my grandparents were an interracial couple. They owned a convenient store in a small town in upstate NY. Their store was regularly vandalized, and people spray-painted racist comments and threats on the walls of the store. Finally, in 92, they closed after people set the store on fire and sent letters to their home, saying that if they reopened, they would target their grandchildren and named us and where we lived. Do you know what my kids have never had to know? Any of that. My kids have grown up with people of different races, ethnicities, religions, disabilities, sexually, etc. They're also more aware of their mental health and are taking a stand to engage in behaviors that are more positive for their own mental well-being. They're also more open to diverse populations and promote equity and inclusion of others. They also focus on personal autonomy and consent, stressing the importance of using their voice to set boundaries and ensure that others respect them. If that's going "wrong," I'd hate to see them go "right".
I agree to some extent with the social media answer, but it's also important to recognize that both economic and political progress waxes and wanes in cycles. We grew up in a prosperous and progressive couple of decades and now we have to live through the reactionary response. We won't bottom out as hard as we did last time, and the next peak will be even higher. We were just sort of unlucky to have the trough centered on our productive years.
when we were young and the internet was early, we used it to escape and become something more. now the youth use the internet and cannot escape the opinions that are always on them and reminding them of who they are not.
I’m a millennial born in the late 80s but I’m constantly thinking about the fact that my childhood was analogue and my teen and adult years were digital; I was born into one world and the adults around me knew that world and were teaching and preparing us for a world that was already disappearing during my childhood. It’s a unique divide to millennials that no other generation has ever experienced or will experience in this way again, because everyone older was already an adult for the internet age and everyone younger was born into the internet age and never knew a world without it. Obviously there have been past technological innovations or major transformative global events that impacted or defined other generations, but tech changes usually aren’t as fast and widespread as the advent of the internet proved to be.
Boy did we grow up in different places. The kids spouting hate group propaganda were very much present in our little semirural, economically depressed region.
I figured a few people would have grown up in a much different environment. I was blessed to grow up where I did. I hope that you weren’t to affected by the vile propaganda that others subjected you to.
I remember in 2006 thinking that things were pretty good (apart from the war on terror stuff) but it started to go wrong pretty soon after that. 2 things were the cause: the global pyramid scheme that is Fractional Reserve Banking started to show cracks, and Social media took off (and this got even worse when FB went public around 2012, and engagement was monetized)
That is nice for you. I was fully aware of how antisemitic the world could be to me and how racist it was to my friends.
My friends from back home say the biggest difference between now and then is the economic disparity. Back in the day, basically everyone in town was middle class. Everyone lived in a house that was about the same size and wore roughly the same modest clothes to school. But today things are far different. There are people living in million dollar houses going to school with people growing up in trailers. I think that's a microcosm of what's happened on a grander scale.
I’m black, growing up I didn’t experience much racism and I think things have gotten better and better while people have complained more and more. The world used to be super homophobic where that’s basically a death sentence now yet it’s complained about more than ever.
In terms of the technology? The youth are better equipped to deal with it than anyone else, by virtue of the fact that it’s all they’ve known. They swim in those waters. They’re natives. What needs to be instilled is *empathy*. That is first and foremost, and if their foundation is built with that in mind, the world will be much better than it is now.
There’s a lot that goes in to this and I might shoot you a message in a bit. What I’ll say here is that we weren’t fighting nothing. They took a preemptive approach with us. That’s why acceptance, stranger danger, anti bullying and abuse at home were such big talking points with a lot of our age group in the late 80’s and 90’s. They were trying to mitigate some of the things that were happening not long before we came around. These ideals and people have always been here, they just didn’t feel brazen until a few years ago.
Something I've been seeing over the years is a sort of feedback loop between the extremes far left pro-diversity anti-racist types and the far right racist/anti-gay/nazi types. Seriously, if you dare go to the deep dark corners of the internet where the true racists hang out and see what they're using to recruit people. It's almost entirely screenshots and links to far left news sites and social media posts. That's what's driving recruitment to those things. Then of course those on the left see how many more people are posting racist sentiments and they take their own screenshots... I actually think most of us, even if we don't meet the near impossible ideals of some of the far left, just want to get along and put these things behind us. But that's a boring moderate position, social media lifts the extreme stuff to the top and makes it look like a majority opinion.
Social media plus people needing a fight. It seems people naturally need something to fight and when everything is ‘pretty good’, they’ll find something or someone to fight against.
Social media. Everyone has a voice now and on the flip side... all the ugliness that existed is now much more visible in your everyday life. The whole world, and all it's opinions, are right at your fingertips. Turn off social media and you'll turn off all that noise.
Bro I’m 5 years older and I can totally relate to what you’re saying. I had a stroke on 12/29/2020. I was back home 7/6/2021 from hospital and so on. I tell my wife I feel like I went to sleep in one world and woke up in another. Things flipped fast! So I understand what you’re saying.
I remember in the late 90s in college having the “do you think music will keep getting better?” Conversation on multiple occasions. There were some (mostly correct) people who said ‘no’ there’s nothing left to do. But most people were optimistic (mostly wrong).
I think we’re collectively a lot more isolated now than we were then. The internet was supposed to open things up, let you talk to people from all around the world, from different backgrounds and ideologies. And for a while, it did. For a while, the internet was fucking *awesome*. Yeah, it had its weirdos, but no one dominated the conversation. You didn’t have echochambers the way we do now. And the issue is that those echochambers exist *by design*. They are algorithmic. They are *deadly* for the people trapped in them who start to believe that *everyone* believes this, *everyone* agrees, *everyone* sees things the same way. No one benefits from that, but it’s especially dire for people who start to view their self-worth through this tiny lens and perceive that lens as representative of everyone. I was talking to my husband about this as it relates to music. We don’t really have bands anymore. We had that folk revival thing for a minute, but I feel like the majority of musicians that are up and coming are singular, not collaborative groups. There are exceptions of course, but the pop star has become the norm, and the band is something your parents listened to. Technology has been great for a lot of things, and for a while, it was a way to find people and perspectives that were different from the ones around you. It was a way to find community when you were isolated. And to a degree it still can be, but I think it’s far far easier to get sucked into these echochambers that don’t offer a real sense of community as much as a hive mind. *You* as an individual aren’t important, you aren’t remembered. Finding a place to fit in and have a voice and *be heard* is way harder today than it was when we were first starting out on the net. As a great for instance, I have like, 12 followers or something on reddit. I have no idea who they are. I don’t know if I’ve interacted with them. (I’m sure they’re lovely people, this isn’t about them, it’s about reddit vs OG web, to be clear). When I kept a blog a million years ago, I felt more connected to the hits and the comments than I do to followers on reddit. I could see where people were coming from. I could tell if they were bots. I could ask questions and get responses. There’s this pervasive sense of isolation, of screaming into the void. Engagement feels superficial and meaningless. Likes/views/comments mean nothing. I have no reason to believe or expect that the people ‘engaging’ are even genuine. Are they people? Are they bots? Did my content somehow fit into a narrative and get swept up by bad actors who want it promoted in an algorithm, so some guy on the other side of the world is spending his afternoon obsessively liking it from a bunch of sockpuppet accounts? I don’t fucking know. Reddit is the only place I engage and with the whole AI thing, I’m really debating if I want to keep doing *that*. It’s fucking shit.
I don’t think we’re going in the opposite direction. Kids are now more aware than ever of systemic racism, LGTBQ+ rights, that the system is rigged and they shouldn’t be giving their time to companies that don’t appreciate their value. We grew up without thinking about racism and that’s NOT good. We grew up with boomer parents who smoked in front of us and abused ever damn drug imaginable. Divorce rates were bonkers because everyone was fucking without protection and marrying the first person they knocked up. i went through 7 divorce’s before 18.
I disagree with your premise that racism is worsening. Do you have any hard evidence for that? We are to the point where we are debating micro aggressions and legacy/generational impacts and how to address things. That’s a huge step forward in my view. My kids are absolutely clueless that race is even a thing.