Social media companies have managed to figure out what can keep a person glued to a screen for hours on end. The result is a clearly fucked up generation that took in endless staged content as reality and their brains have been shaped accordingly. Young men do not have a working model of the world that is based in reality.
Congratulations to the social media companies and their infinite ad revenue, and so sorry to the rest of us who have to live in a Tiktok society.
>I don’t know how to stop political violence in America.
"sad young terminally online men" is not an American thing it's a global phenomenon yet America has something that most other countries don't. Simple as that.
Particularly the victim had decided this. I don't know if he thought he'd be a victim of gun violence, or if it was an instance of "gun violence for thee, but not for me", but democracy is all about the tyranny of the majority.
This is the problem with making any tradeoff. If you think only the benefits will apply to you, and the downsides to other people, you're being delusional.
I can agree with the original intent of the second amendment. But deliberately ignoring the most critical point of it is just insane: "well-regulated militia". People who are trained, share common values and understand the gravity of firing a weapon is kind of important.
I don't think the founding fathers would see "You were born in America and are old enough? here ya go!" as what they intended.
As a non-american, I've never really understood appeals to the beliefs of the founding fathers tbh.
It should really be irrelevant what a bunch of long dead people think. It's your country, the corpses of the founding fathers don't have to live in it, so their interpretation of your legal doctrines (even if written by them) hardly seem relevant.
This is because the founding fathers are a major component of the US "civic religion". The founders are seen to be unequivocally good and prophetic, to the extent where questioning anything they thought or did is considered unacceptable. It is strongly preferred for people to tie their ideas and initiatives back to the founding fathers in some way, instead of going against the grain and suggesting that people could be fallible or that some centuries-old laws may need to be updated once in a while.
The US is a very backwards-looking country, which leads to some good things but also other effects that aren't seen in most other countries. A major legal theory in the US now is that laws should be interpreted based on what we think the people at the time meant by them, rather than what the writings actually say. Any large-scale political reform is disfavored - the US has effectively stopped editing its constitution half a century ago, and under the sea of laws that were derived from its "founding documents", you still have 18th century law. This, in combination with the founding fathers stuff, means that every political argument is given an escape hatch - why prove that your idea is actually good for anyone, when you can just try to hammer down that this is "what the founding fathers would have wanted"?
I think this is an easy position to state but difficult to hold and defend. Norms and traditions are important just look at America right now when the president decided the norms established by a bunch of dumb dead people don't matter. I think the position is easy to state because a lot of people of the past did horrible things in the context of the present. But they also at many different generations opposed horrible things when no one else did. What Thomas Jefferson said for example in the declaration of independence all Man are created equal mattered for the emancipation in 1865 and also mattered to woman 1920.
The words of dead people shape a tremendous amount of law and norms that make the world better. The importantance incrementalism cannot be overstated nor can the infuration at that said incrementalism can be overstated, in the past and now. To say we don't care because we can't see the relevance is observational error.
I'd be curious of your country of origin because I guarentee you have legacy members of culture that matter politically speaking. But there are also examples of mathematicians long dead that have had lasting effect on things we still teach today. They are founders of a different field of sorts.
I actually agree that Norms and Traditions are important, but I don't think they have a functional link to the beliefs of historical figures. Norms are better understood, I think, in the same vein as oral tradition; passed down directly from one generation to the next, slowly changing over time.
On the other hand, I'm not particularly invested in the personal moral evil or good of people in the past. When I see similar opinions to mine expressed by Americans, they often give an argument of that ilk, but it seems to me to be rooted in the same belief that these long dead people should somehow have a say in the present. The fundamental reason their opinion is irrelevant isn't because they're evil (a subject which I haven't studied, and won't present an opinion on either way), but because they've been dead for a couple hundred years.
I'm Australian, and while like all countries we have important historical figures, the culture surrounding them isn't at all like what I observe from the United States. While, for example, you'd be hard pressed to find someone arguing that Edmund Barton wasn't an important figure, I don't think anyone in the modern day really gives a shit what they thought.
The most mythologized figures in Aussie history would probably be: Captain Cook, Curtin, and Whitlam; but I don't think anyone views them in a similar vein.
I suspect the reason we don't have similar figures might come down to our lack of a civil war. We separated peacefully from the UK, and didn't really come out with any heroes to mythologize.
> just look at America right now when the president decided the norms established by a bunch of dumb dead people don't matter.
The current administration isn't taking the US in some completely random direction, they very knowingly exploit the unquestioning reverence for old-time America to their advantage. Thanks to originalism, the US has its best shot at going back in time by being able to shake the foundations of modern laws. The conservatives' best chance at snapping away some of the civic rights that were granted in the 20th century isn't actual policy proposals, its reinterpretations of old laws and rulings.
The US has never been as concerned with what dead people wanted as it is now, because dead people can't speak for themselves, and the US admin will exploit it by putting words in their mouths through reinterpretations of old writings. It's the strongest argument, because it lets them get away with not arguing anything important, but rather rely on the near-religious love for all things "old America" and then justify that this is what the people would have wanted, this is true freedom as they envisioned it. They aren't moving away from their legacy, they're weaponizing it with full knowledge of just how unshakable the civil religion is.
While all countries have their beloved figures, I can't think of any place quite like the US where so much air is wasted arguing not on the merits of things, but what someone thinks these dead people would've thought about in the past. Being able to tie your proposal to the founders in some way is a very strong argument for you, regardless of anything else. There is a difference between revering the mathematicians that discovered fundamental truths that we're building on to this day or writers who have laid the groundwork for modern culture, and thinking that (undoubtedly influential and intelligent) politicians from over two centuries back have had godlike foresight to set the one true course for all of society forever, and that questioning or altering any of their decisions is completely unacceptable.
Theory: the US was a very early republic (it's probably almost the oldest contiguous one), and, at the time it was created, it was _normal_ for countries to have a degree of mysticism about their leadership (generally a monarchy).
So, it attached a certain amount of that magic to the 'founding fathers'. And this never entirely went away. Meanwhile, republics became more common, and, elsewhere, the need for mysticism faded (it's not even particularly common in actual monarchies these days, Thailand excepted). "Is this really what [whoever came up with the current constitution] would have wanted" would be a pretty weird question in most countries, those people being recognised not to be omniscient. But a fairly standard question in the US.
The country I come from (Australia) has a similar`ish racial makeup (about 70% white in Australia, vs about 63% in the USA), but I struggle to think of a similar set of values that ties us together. Notably, we also have significantly less political violence, so I don't think we're headed towards anarchy for a lack of one.
On the other hand, I see similar arguments coming from neighbouring countries. Notably both Malaysia and Indonesia have strong civic mythos.
I often wonder what the internet would look like if we just banned paid advertising. Facebook, instagram, X, TikTok, they’d all have to start charging users to stay alive and I don’t think anyone would choose to pay for the brainrot. I’d like to see us remove the incentives these companies have for just gluing us to our phones.
Social media is probably somewhat responsible, but I don't think it's the biggest problem here. It's the fact that Gen Z is checking out on life, for many people there is no hope of owning a house even if you give up all luxury spending and grind, it's impossible for many on a typical job.
It's also getting increasingly more expensive to hang out with friends in physical spaces. Every business needs to pay increasingly high rents, and charge increasing amounts. You could go out to the bar and spend $100, or you could stay at home and play video games for free.
We are living in an era where the old and rich have taken over and continue to extract every last drop of wealth from the people who have the least.
“It's also getting increasingly more expensive to hang out with friends in physical spaces.”
It was a very narrow window of history, if at all where this wasn’t true. Like I spent most of my teen years at people’s houses or backyard or parks and it was fuckin great. All my best memories were spent doing nothing with people I liked. Even my clubbing years while fun were relatively forgettable compared to the mischief of running around with my teen friends not spending money.
Smoking has gotten more expensive though, maybe we should subsidize cigarettes for young men.
> Even my clubbing years while fun were relatively forgettable compared to the mischief of running around with my teen friends not spending money.
When people say that hanging out is getting expensive they didnt mean when they were 10-15 or so. Its easy to not spend money at those ages. Its not when you're 20+. You cant run around the neighbourhood anymore, or eat stuff your parents bought
For most people in my parents generation, going out to eat at all was a luxury. Some of the most tightly knit cultures of the world are also the poorest.
I was a terminally online youth in 2000s, both before and after social media and proliferation of smartphones.
Money is not and issue here. I was a middle class youth in a developing country, and internet was expensive. People who didn't have the means simply didn't go online. Contrast with the present, even lower income people have smartphone with free carrier provided Facebook. Radicalization is much easier now.
I feel like this is a lazy answer because there have been plenty of examples of eras where wealth equality was much better, for long periods of time. And they weren't periods of radical communism or whatever.
We just didn't tax the middle tier of workers so intensely while giving everything for free to the ultra rich. That isn't really a part of capitalism itself. It's just the specific scenario we ended up in today.
> We just didn't tax the middle tier of workers so intensely while giving everything for free to the ultra rich. That isn't really a part of capitalism itself.
This is literally capitalism. It's the very first sentence on Wikipedia: 'Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit.' Its literally the owners get the money, so the ultra rich get more and more the money because they own more and more. There is absolutely nothing in capitalism that says that workers should get anything. Its just an annoying part of doing business, that companies do their very hardest to avoid as much as possible.
I don't think it would change at all. Look at creators on Youtube. The majority are clickbait and other crap, people trying to get money and/or influence. It doesn't require advertising by the platform. All it requires is the internet itself and nearly everyone on it. Ads might have accelerated things but the basic incentives are "more viewers = more money / influence", with or without ads. And those incentives eventually lead to where we are.
Creators on YouTube do it for monetization. There are now multiple generations of youths for which “influencer” is their desired career. If you make it, you make it big.
They might pull in more money with sponsorships but they only got there because the algorithm put them at the top where the money is.
Don’t believe me? Look up the woman who shot up google HQ when they demonetized her channel.
I know someone who got addicted to the influencer money in Tiktok and dropped out of a med school program because making 5 figures a month, taking videos of you wearing fancy clothes was way better than slogging thru med school
For those of us online in the 90s we don’t have to wonder
It was literally a utopia before business came along. Every site was built from passion, with no expectation of getting anything in return. It was a global community centered around sharing knowledge.
I’d go one step further and ban the consolidation of platforms by billionaires. The open internet no longer exists or will ever exist again
I am younger, being part of online forum communities in the late 2000s (primarily video games and art centric ones) and I truly pine for the era of the internet free from algorithmic feeds, infinite content scrolls and profit incentives. There was some profit incentive, but it was purely for administrative purposes to keep the site up.
> Every site was built from passion, with no expectation of getting anything in return. It was a global community centered around sharing knowledge.
It's a bit of false nostalgia but also it was the era of early adopters. Their concentrations in new spaces always make them better because their motivations are perpetually directed outward from where we are as a civilization. They frequently have to move on as the space they create for themselves becomes drowned out. HN has attempted to remain relatively secluded, and that has been effective up to a point.
The real dilemma there is that the early adopters who make things good need isolation while the "go with the flow" crowd needs a way to support early adopters without themselves getting in the way. Just from a basic computer science perspective, the early adopters need ways to create efficient back-pressure on later adopters so that early adopters can exist without permanently being chased and drowned out by later adopters.
The internet created something analogous to a 2D plain-world where nothing was out of reach for anyone. Without creating some 3D structure, some stratification so that people who get out of the plain can more directly communicate at longer distance, the noise is so inefficient that only those who don't value their time or those who profit off of the poor connectivity will participate.
Baking fresh cinnamon toast comes to mind. Some will accuse me of becoming distracted, but it used to be more common to speak on every open-access forum as if talking to another person in the room. We still do on different formats like IRC or less serious threads of less serious places, but it is diminished as internet culture emerged. Internet culture sometimes expects you to treat every conversation as a conversation with a forum full of angry combatants. A little bit of structure would re-humanize that culture by putting us back into our more human-sized enclaves where there is no need to gatekeep and no audience to perform to.
I'd like to think parents would be more involved if they had to buy their kids internet things but they'd probably end up swiping their creditcard on the same stupid stuff.
These read as all to familiar, strikes me as having all the ingredients to spiral us down into the nightmare of Sagan's Demon Haunted World. Which has been a lovely dark thread going on today.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45404373
It feels like we're deep in the whirlpool of such a radically non-empathetic zero-sum dis-reality based thinking.
" This group tended to agree with dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues came up with an unforgettable term to describe this group’s psychology: “The need for chaos.”"
My take is that a lack of opportunity / class stratification / societal mobility plays into this. It's essentially the same reason people play the lottery. When you're stuck in a seemingly intractable situation, you need the world to suddenly change around you. Maybe you win Powerball, or maybe you decide to just burn everything down out of desperation. Social media just amplifies those thoughts.
Don't you mean zero-sum? Cynicism often defaults to transactionalism and implying that people are motivated by nothing else and deconstructing any evidence to the contrary as if dopamine is never mutually released. Transactionalism is frequently and illogically zero-sum play that takes place within infinite games.
Yeah, but when an article is already giving off slop vibes, it's more evidence that the article is slop.
AI code is great - but it has compilers and linters and tests. I'm sure someone will figure out a writing workflow that doesn't produce slop, but I ain't seen it yet
I'm not sure what sentence fragments you're referring to (I didn't see any in the initial pass) but em dashes have been characteristic of Derek's work since we'll before the commercialization of LLMs
Fun fact, there are actually multiple people with the first name Derek. I post under my real name, so if you want to confirm I'm not Derek Thompson (or Derek Jeter for that matter), you can look me up on LinkedIn or the WhitePages. I'm the only Derek Tank out there
> If you've been told your whole life that you're inherently evil for your gender
I'm sorry, I'm nowhere near an expert on gender theory but even I know this is BS: nobody is telling young men they're "evil for their gender."
What they are told is the fact that they live in a patriarchy. Nobody is held personally responsible for being born into the patriarchy, and the patriarchy is just as toxic to young men as it is to women. The main people who get held responsible are the ones who enthusiastically perpetuate the system and plug their ears when they hear evidence that it might not be super great for everyone.
> I'm sorry, I'm nowhere near an expert on gender theory but even I know this is BS: nobody is telling young men they're "evil for their gender."
What they are told is the fact that they live in a patriarchy.
Well sure, this is the actual text book answer for people who understand it. Today's young people are not responsible for the systems they were born into. This includes young men born into a patriarchal system.
But it doesn't take a genius to see why a young man might get the message "you're the problem" when he constantly hears that The Patriarchy is enemy number one. It actually does require a little bit of sophistication to understand the distinction between a system and the people in it.
And I also don't think young men are the only ones misunderstanding the message! Young women too often don't understand the difference between patriarchy as a system and the young men in their lives who had nothing to do with building it. A lot of them also go on to internalize a message of "man is the problem."
The gender divide for young people in this country is stunningly large. I can't help but think this patriarchy messaging plays a role here.
> A lot of them also go on to internalize a message of "man is the problem."
The thing is, for young women men really are a problem. And no, most arent. But a relatively small number is, and they are a massive danger to their lives and wellbeing. And its really hard to figure out which ones are OK and which ones arent.
Nobody on earth has ever taken this idea too far? Even if I hadn't seen it myself this would be hard to believe. I've seen people go for the throat just because of opinions on Sailor Moon's color correction. And I mean fully treating them like a monster. The world is an awfully big place to make claims such as the one in this comment. It's one thing to say it doesn't matter or that it's not as bad as this or that, but this is the exact kind of gaslighting that's really messing with people's brains and sending them into underground avenues to discuss how they've been abused and what should be done about it. If we could just stop being so weird about this it would be a lot better. Why is it so hard to say that sexism is bad no matter who it happens to?
Yeeep. I don’t consider myself terminally online, but am a mid-20s male who doesn’t see the path forward. I make software money and can’t buy a house locally without it feeling really irresponsible. I have no idea where women who think the way I do would be. Everyone I meet in my age bracket is unbelievably immature, or married.
AI might take my job in the next single digit years, so taking on liabilities seems foolish anyway.
The stuff about being told I’m evil for skin color or whatever doesn’t resonate much with me. Sure, I’ve heard it from fringe people, and I guess I could see how someone could get wrapped up in it, but it doesn’t really stick with me.
I feel like you outlined actually all the messages of online and then said say that “online communities offer them a far more rewarding life than the hostility of meatspace.”
Like almost all toxic feminism is an online/media phenomenon. Most people aren’t these extremes. Meatspace is the solution to all of the messages you fault.
> If you've been told your whole life that you're inherently evil for your gender, told you're inherently evil due to your race, cannot earn enough for a dignified life supporting a family, see no path to owning your own home, have watched as your country has been flooded with millions of military-aged foreign men, have few to no serious dating prospects, and watch powerlessly as laws are passed to persecute you for complaining about any of this... Why bother?
This seems like a distorted world view of someone with a massive persecution complex and who is already susceptible to conspiracy theories. Nobody's telling lonely white men they're inherently evil for their gender. Nobody's telling them they're inherently evil due to their race. And nobody's passing laws to persecute you for making these silly complaints on HN.
Most people benefit immensely from and are indeed dependent on our existing institutions. They pretend they don't and aren't because it's cool and edgy to seem apart from it all. Yes, there are people who fall through the cracks, but by and large, things like public education, public health and safety, emergency services like fire departments, infrastructure like roads and airports, water, sewage, waste management services, libraries, museums, and so on, all benefit far more people than not. As someone else quotes: "They're like housecats: convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand."
I do agree that more and more people cannot earn enough for a dignified life supporting a family, and see no path to owning their own home, and that's a real and growing problem. But that's no reason to nuke the whole country and start over.
I couldn't find the part of that web page where they said anyone was inherently evil based on their race or gender, or that young men were "the problem", or that anyone was "excluded". Maybe you can point it out for me. I didn't follow each and every link there, so I might have missed it. In fact, they specifically call out "young people and students" as a priority! Inclusion of groups A, B, and C does not imply exclusion of all other groups.
They were complaining about the "who we serve" messaging not specifically listing "White" and "Men", much like people whine that the phrase "black lives matter" is exclusionary to whites. Or like the people that complain when a restaurant adds a single vegan option with messaging "happy to serve vegans!" as if it invalidates the complete rest of the menu.
First of all, evil was not my word--it was what the OP (setterle) claimed people were "being told their whole life."
I do empathize with young men who believe they're being persecuted. They are suffering and are in great need of intervention: likely counseling and possibly mental health treatment. It's a shame mental health resources are unavailable to and under-utilized by many Americans, and I wish for all our sake that access to such resources was straightforward and non-stigmatized. Ironically, some of the very institutions that people want to toss away in their desire to "raze the whole damn thing"[1] are institutions that could help them.
Social media companies have managed to figure out what can keep a person glued to a screen for hours on end. The result is a clearly fucked up generation that took in endless staged content as reality and their brains have been shaped accordingly. Young men do not have a working model of the world that is based in reality.
Congratulations to the social media companies and their infinite ad revenue, and so sorry to the rest of us who have to live in a Tiktok society.
>I don’t know how to stop political violence in America.
"sad young terminally online men" is not an American thing it's a global phenomenon yet America has something that most other countries don't. Simple as that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_gun_laws_by_nation...
Not even mention this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_carry_in_the_United_State...
Political violence is an American pastime. I don’t think undoing this tradition is as simple as you allege.
We keep repeating ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens[1] over and over...
1: https://theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation...
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Particularly the victim had decided this. I don't know if he thought he'd be a victim of gun violence, or if it was an instance of "gun violence for thee, but not for me", but democracy is all about the tyranny of the majority.
> I don't know if he thought he'd be a victim of gun violence
This is exactly the problem with advocating for gun rights. If you can't think past the first-order consequences, you're not taking it seriously.
This is the problem with making any tradeoff. If you think only the benefits will apply to you, and the downsides to other people, you're being delusional.
I can agree with the original intent of the second amendment. But deliberately ignoring the most critical point of it is just insane: "well-regulated militia". People who are trained, share common values and understand the gravity of firing a weapon is kind of important.
I don't think the founding fathers would see "You were born in America and are old enough? here ya go!" as what they intended.
As a non-american, I've never really understood appeals to the beliefs of the founding fathers tbh.
It should really be irrelevant what a bunch of long dead people think. It's your country, the corpses of the founding fathers don't have to live in it, so their interpretation of your legal doctrines (even if written by them) hardly seem relevant.
This is because the founding fathers are a major component of the US "civic religion". The founders are seen to be unequivocally good and prophetic, to the extent where questioning anything they thought or did is considered unacceptable. It is strongly preferred for people to tie their ideas and initiatives back to the founding fathers in some way, instead of going against the grain and suggesting that people could be fallible or that some centuries-old laws may need to be updated once in a while.
The US is a very backwards-looking country, which leads to some good things but also other effects that aren't seen in most other countries. A major legal theory in the US now is that laws should be interpreted based on what we think the people at the time meant by them, rather than what the writings actually say. Any large-scale political reform is disfavored - the US has effectively stopped editing its constitution half a century ago, and under the sea of laws that were derived from its "founding documents", you still have 18th century law. This, in combination with the founding fathers stuff, means that every political argument is given an escape hatch - why prove that your idea is actually good for anyone, when you can just try to hammer down that this is "what the founding fathers would have wanted"?
I think this is an easy position to state but difficult to hold and defend. Norms and traditions are important just look at America right now when the president decided the norms established by a bunch of dumb dead people don't matter. I think the position is easy to state because a lot of people of the past did horrible things in the context of the present. But they also at many different generations opposed horrible things when no one else did. What Thomas Jefferson said for example in the declaration of independence all Man are created equal mattered for the emancipation in 1865 and also mattered to woman 1920.
The words of dead people shape a tremendous amount of law and norms that make the world better. The importantance incrementalism cannot be overstated nor can the infuration at that said incrementalism can be overstated, in the past and now. To say we don't care because we can't see the relevance is observational error.
I'd be curious of your country of origin because I guarentee you have legacy members of culture that matter politically speaking. But there are also examples of mathematicians long dead that have had lasting effect on things we still teach today. They are founders of a different field of sorts.
I actually agree that Norms and Traditions are important, but I don't think they have a functional link to the beliefs of historical figures. Norms are better understood, I think, in the same vein as oral tradition; passed down directly from one generation to the next, slowly changing over time.
On the other hand, I'm not particularly invested in the personal moral evil or good of people in the past. When I see similar opinions to mine expressed by Americans, they often give an argument of that ilk, but it seems to me to be rooted in the same belief that these long dead people should somehow have a say in the present. The fundamental reason their opinion is irrelevant isn't because they're evil (a subject which I haven't studied, and won't present an opinion on either way), but because they've been dead for a couple hundred years.
I'm Australian, and while like all countries we have important historical figures, the culture surrounding them isn't at all like what I observe from the United States. While, for example, you'd be hard pressed to find someone arguing that Edmund Barton wasn't an important figure, I don't think anyone in the modern day really gives a shit what they thought.
The most mythologized figures in Aussie history would probably be: Captain Cook, Curtin, and Whitlam; but I don't think anyone views them in a similar vein.
I suspect the reason we don't have similar figures might come down to our lack of a civil war. We separated peacefully from the UK, and didn't really come out with any heroes to mythologize.
> just look at America right now when the president decided the norms established by a bunch of dumb dead people don't matter.
The current administration isn't taking the US in some completely random direction, they very knowingly exploit the unquestioning reverence for old-time America to their advantage. Thanks to originalism, the US has its best shot at going back in time by being able to shake the foundations of modern laws. The conservatives' best chance at snapping away some of the civic rights that were granted in the 20th century isn't actual policy proposals, its reinterpretations of old laws and rulings.
The US has never been as concerned with what dead people wanted as it is now, because dead people can't speak for themselves, and the US admin will exploit it by putting words in their mouths through reinterpretations of old writings. It's the strongest argument, because it lets them get away with not arguing anything important, but rather rely on the near-religious love for all things "old America" and then justify that this is what the people would have wanted, this is true freedom as they envisioned it. They aren't moving away from their legacy, they're weaponizing it with full knowledge of just how unshakable the civil religion is.
While all countries have their beloved figures, I can't think of any place quite like the US where so much air is wasted arguing not on the merits of things, but what someone thinks these dead people would've thought about in the past. Being able to tie your proposal to the founders in some way is a very strong argument for you, regardless of anything else. There is a difference between revering the mathematicians that discovered fundamental truths that we're building on to this day or writers who have laid the groundwork for modern culture, and thinking that (undoubtedly influential and intelligent) politicians from over two centuries back have had godlike foresight to set the one true course for all of society forever, and that questioning or altering any of their decisions is completely unacceptable.
Theory: the US was a very early republic (it's probably almost the oldest contiguous one), and, at the time it was created, it was _normal_ for countries to have a degree of mysticism about their leadership (generally a monarchy).
So, it attached a certain amount of that magic to the 'founding fathers'. And this never entirely went away. Meanwhile, republics became more common, and, elsewhere, the need for mysticism faded (it's not even particularly common in actual monarchies these days, Thailand excepted). "Is this really what [whoever came up with the current constitution] would have wanted" would be a pretty weird question in most countries, those people being recognised not to be omniscient. But a fairly standard question in the US.
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I'm kind of mixed on this take.
The country I come from (Australia) has a similar`ish racial makeup (about 70% white in Australia, vs about 63% in the USA), but I struggle to think of a similar set of values that ties us together. Notably, we also have significantly less political violence, so I don't think we're headed towards anarchy for a lack of one.
On the other hand, I see similar arguments coming from neighbouring countries. Notably both Malaysia and Indonesia have strong civic mythos.
I often wonder what the internet would look like if we just banned paid advertising. Facebook, instagram, X, TikTok, they’d all have to start charging users to stay alive and I don’t think anyone would choose to pay for the brainrot. I’d like to see us remove the incentives these companies have for just gluing us to our phones.
Social media is probably somewhat responsible, but I don't think it's the biggest problem here. It's the fact that Gen Z is checking out on life, for many people there is no hope of owning a house even if you give up all luxury spending and grind, it's impossible for many on a typical job.
It's also getting increasingly more expensive to hang out with friends in physical spaces. Every business needs to pay increasingly high rents, and charge increasing amounts. You could go out to the bar and spend $100, or you could stay at home and play video games for free.
We are living in an era where the old and rich have taken over and continue to extract every last drop of wealth from the people who have the least.
“It's also getting increasingly more expensive to hang out with friends in physical spaces.”
It was a very narrow window of history, if at all where this wasn’t true. Like I spent most of my teen years at people’s houses or backyard or parks and it was fuckin great. All my best memories were spent doing nothing with people I liked. Even my clubbing years while fun were relatively forgettable compared to the mischief of running around with my teen friends not spending money.
Smoking has gotten more expensive though, maybe we should subsidize cigarettes for young men.
> Even my clubbing years while fun were relatively forgettable compared to the mischief of running around with my teen friends not spending money.
When people say that hanging out is getting expensive they didnt mean when they were 10-15 or so. Its easy to not spend money at those ages. Its not when you're 20+. You cant run around the neighbourhood anymore, or eat stuff your parents bought
For most people in my parents generation, going out to eat at all was a luxury. Some of the most tightly knit cultures of the world are also the poorest.
I was a terminally online youth in 2000s, both before and after social media and proliferation of smartphones.
Money is not and issue here. I was a middle class youth in a developing country, and internet was expensive. People who didn't have the means simply didn't go online. Contrast with the present, even lower income people have smartphone with free carrier provided Facebook. Radicalization is much easier now.
> We are living in an era where the old and rich have taken over and continue to extract every last drop of wealth from the people who have the least.
That's capitalism and its effects for you, sir.
Ugh, capitalism
> We are living in an era where the old and rich have taken over and continue to extract every last drop of wealth from the people who have the least.
Exactly as capitalism always intended. We are finally reaching the dream of the system, arent we happy all!?
I feel like this is a lazy answer because there have been plenty of examples of eras where wealth equality was much better, for long periods of time. And they weren't periods of radical communism or whatever.
We just didn't tax the middle tier of workers so intensely while giving everything for free to the ultra rich. That isn't really a part of capitalism itself. It's just the specific scenario we ended up in today.
> We just didn't tax the middle tier of workers so intensely while giving everything for free to the ultra rich. That isn't really a part of capitalism itself.
This is literally capitalism. It's the very first sentence on Wikipedia: 'Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit.' Its literally the owners get the money, so the ultra rich get more and more the money because they own more and more. There is absolutely nothing in capitalism that says that workers should get anything. Its just an annoying part of doing business, that companies do their very hardest to avoid as much as possible.
I don't think it would change at all. Look at creators on Youtube. The majority are clickbait and other crap, people trying to get money and/or influence. It doesn't require advertising by the platform. All it requires is the internet itself and nearly everyone on it. Ads might have accelerated things but the basic incentives are "more viewers = more money / influence", with or without ads. And those incentives eventually lead to where we are.
Creators on YouTube do it for monetization. There are now multiple generations of youths for which “influencer” is their desired career. If you make it, you make it big.
They might pull in more money with sponsorships but they only got there because the algorithm put them at the top where the money is.
Don’t believe me? Look up the woman who shot up google HQ when they demonetized her channel.
I know someone who got addicted to the influencer money in Tiktok and dropped out of a med school program because making 5 figures a month, taking videos of you wearing fancy clothes was way better than slogging thru med school
For those of us online in the 90s we don’t have to wonder
It was literally a utopia before business came along. Every site was built from passion, with no expectation of getting anything in return. It was a global community centered around sharing knowledge.
I’d go one step further and ban the consolidation of platforms by billionaires. The open internet no longer exists or will ever exist again
I am younger, being part of online forum communities in the late 2000s (primarily video games and art centric ones) and I truly pine for the era of the internet free from algorithmic feeds, infinite content scrolls and profit incentives. There was some profit incentive, but it was purely for administrative purposes to keep the site up.
> Every site was built from passion, with no expectation of getting anything in return. It was a global community centered around sharing knowledge.
It's a bit of false nostalgia but also it was the era of early adopters. Their concentrations in new spaces always make them better because their motivations are perpetually directed outward from where we are as a civilization. They frequently have to move on as the space they create for themselves becomes drowned out. HN has attempted to remain relatively secluded, and that has been effective up to a point.
The real dilemma there is that the early adopters who make things good need isolation while the "go with the flow" crowd needs a way to support early adopters without themselves getting in the way. Just from a basic computer science perspective, the early adopters need ways to create efficient back-pressure on later adopters so that early adopters can exist without permanently being chased and drowned out by later adopters.
The internet created something analogous to a 2D plain-world where nothing was out of reach for anyone. Without creating some 3D structure, some stratification so that people who get out of the plain can more directly communicate at longer distance, the noise is so inefficient that only those who don't value their time or those who profit off of the poor connectivity will participate.
Baking fresh cinnamon toast comes to mind. Some will accuse me of becoming distracted, but it used to be more common to speak on every open-access forum as if talking to another person in the room. We still do on different formats like IRC or less serious threads of less serious places, but it is diminished as internet culture emerged. Internet culture sometimes expects you to treat every conversation as a conversation with a forum full of angry combatants. A little bit of structure would re-humanize that culture by putting us back into our more human-sized enclaves where there is no need to gatekeep and no audience to perform to.
I'd like to think parents would be more involved if they had to buy their kids internet things but they'd probably end up swiping their creditcard on the same stupid stuff.
I love how Derek centers on (and summarizes) Jay Van Bavel's characteristics of online discourse, and the four "Dark Laws" he comes out with:
> 1) Negativity bias increases clicks. 2) Extreme opinions increase sharing. 3) Out-group animosity increases engagement. 4) Moral-emotional language goes viral.
These read as all to familiar, strikes me as having all the ingredients to spiral us down into the nightmare of Sagan's Demon Haunted World. Which has been a lovely dark thread going on today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45404373
It feels like we're deep in the whirlpool of such a radically non-empathetic zero-sum dis-reality based thinking.
" This group tended to agree with dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues came up with an unforgettable term to describe this group’s psychology: “The need for chaos.”"
My take is that a lack of opportunity / class stratification / societal mobility plays into this. It's essentially the same reason people play the lottery. When you're stuck in a seemingly intractable situation, you need the world to suddenly change around you. Maybe you win Powerball, or maybe you decide to just burn everything down out of desperation. Social media just amplifies those thoughts.
Partisan people have higher rates of political participation. This has been the case for a long time.
> non-zero-sum
Don't you mean zero-sum? Cynicism often defaults to transactionalism and implying that people are motivated by nothing else and deconstructing any evidence to the contrary as if dopamine is never mutually released. Transactionalism is frequently and illogically zero-sum play that takes place within infinite games.
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Many good writers used the em dash long before LLMs. (Where, after all, did LLMs get the idea from?)
Em dashes —once the sign of a sophisticated writer— were prominent in The New York Times.
s/sophisticated writer/Mac user. It was a pain to type them on Windows so most people just used the regular dash - accessible on any keyboard.
I had no idea! I was a typesetter, we would have to manually create them using keyboard shortcuts on both systems.
Microsoft word would add them for you long before AI
Entering two dashes on the iOS keyboard inserts an emdash, I would use them frequently when I had an iPhone.
Yeah, but when an article is already giving off slop vibes, it's more evidence that the article is slop.
AI code is great - but it has compilers and linters and tests. I'm sure someone will figure out a writing workflow that doesn't produce slop, but I ain't seen it yet
I'm not sure what sentence fragments you're referring to (I didn't see any in the initial pass) but em dashes have been characteristic of Derek's work since we'll before the commercialization of LLMs
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/job-...
He said, forgetting he was signed into an account with Derek spelled the same way.
Fun fact, there are actually multiple people with the first name Derek. I post under my real name, so if you want to confirm I'm not Derek Thompson (or Derek Jeter for that matter), you can look me up on LinkedIn or the WhitePages. I'm the only Derek Tank out there
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> If you've been told your whole life that you're inherently evil for your gender
I'm sorry, I'm nowhere near an expert on gender theory but even I know this is BS: nobody is telling young men they're "evil for their gender."
What they are told is the fact that they live in a patriarchy. Nobody is held personally responsible for being born into the patriarchy, and the patriarchy is just as toxic to young men as it is to women. The main people who get held responsible are the ones who enthusiastically perpetuate the system and plug their ears when they hear evidence that it might not be super great for everyone.
> I'm sorry, I'm nowhere near an expert on gender theory but even I know this is BS: nobody is telling young men they're "evil for their gender." What they are told is the fact that they live in a patriarchy.
Well sure, this is the actual text book answer for people who understand it. Today's young people are not responsible for the systems they were born into. This includes young men born into a patriarchal system.
But it doesn't take a genius to see why a young man might get the message "you're the problem" when he constantly hears that The Patriarchy is enemy number one. It actually does require a little bit of sophistication to understand the distinction between a system and the people in it.
And I also don't think young men are the only ones misunderstanding the message! Young women too often don't understand the difference between patriarchy as a system and the young men in their lives who had nothing to do with building it. A lot of them also go on to internalize a message of "man is the problem."
The gender divide for young people in this country is stunningly large. I can't help but think this patriarchy messaging plays a role here.
> It actually does require a little bit of sophistication to understand the distinction between a system and the people in it.
This is a great argument for doing a better job of educating young people. Problem solved, let's get to work.
Hang on, I'm getting word that the pro-patriarchy people with an iron grip on the throats of every aspect of the government are are gutting education.
> A lot of them also go on to internalize a message of "man is the problem."
The thing is, for young women men really are a problem. And no, most arent. But a relatively small number is, and they are a massive danger to their lives and wellbeing. And its really hard to figure out which ones are OK and which ones arent.
Nobody on earth has ever taken this idea too far? Even if I hadn't seen it myself this would be hard to believe. I've seen people go for the throat just because of opinions on Sailor Moon's color correction. And I mean fully treating them like a monster. The world is an awfully big place to make claims such as the one in this comment. It's one thing to say it doesn't matter or that it's not as bad as this or that, but this is the exact kind of gaslighting that's really messing with people's brains and sending them into underground avenues to discuss how they've been abused and what should be done about it. If we could just stop being so weird about this it would be a lot better. Why is it so hard to say that sexism is bad no matter who it happens to?
Yeeep. I don’t consider myself terminally online, but am a mid-20s male who doesn’t see the path forward. I make software money and can’t buy a house locally without it feeling really irresponsible. I have no idea where women who think the way I do would be. Everyone I meet in my age bracket is unbelievably immature, or married.
AI might take my job in the next single digit years, so taking on liabilities seems foolish anyway.
The stuff about being told I’m evil for skin color or whatever doesn’t resonate much with me. Sure, I’ve heard it from fringe people, and I guess I could see how someone could get wrapped up in it, but it doesn’t really stick with me.
I feel like you outlined actually all the messages of online and then said say that “online communities offer them a far more rewarding life than the hostility of meatspace.”
Like almost all toxic feminism is an online/media phenomenon. Most people aren’t these extremes. Meatspace is the solution to all of the messages you fault.
> If you've been told your whole life that you're inherently evil for your gender, told you're inherently evil due to your race, cannot earn enough for a dignified life supporting a family, see no path to owning your own home, have watched as your country has been flooded with millions of military-aged foreign men, have few to no serious dating prospects, and watch powerlessly as laws are passed to persecute you for complaining about any of this... Why bother?
This seems like a distorted world view of someone with a massive persecution complex and who is already susceptible to conspiracy theories. Nobody's telling lonely white men they're inherently evil for their gender. Nobody's telling them they're inherently evil due to their race. And nobody's passing laws to persecute you for making these silly complaints on HN.
Most people benefit immensely from and are indeed dependent on our existing institutions. They pretend they don't and aren't because it's cool and edgy to seem apart from it all. Yes, there are people who fall through the cracks, but by and large, things like public education, public health and safety, emergency services like fire departments, infrastructure like roads and airports, water, sewage, waste management services, libraries, museums, and so on, all benefit far more people than not. As someone else quotes: "They're like housecats: convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appreciate or understand."
I do agree that more and more people cannot earn enough for a dignified life supporting a family, and see no path to owning their own home, and that's a real and growing problem. But that's no reason to nuke the whole country and start over.
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And that's a bad thing how?
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I couldn't find the part of that web page where they said anyone was inherently evil based on their race or gender, or that young men were "the problem", or that anyone was "excluded". Maybe you can point it out for me. I didn't follow each and every link there, so I might have missed it. In fact, they specifically call out "young people and students" as a priority! Inclusion of groups A, B, and C does not imply exclusion of all other groups.
They were complaining about the "who we serve" messaging not specifically listing "White" and "Men", much like people whine that the phrase "black lives matter" is exclusionary to whites. Or like the people that complain when a restaurant adds a single vegan option with messaging "happy to serve vegans!" as if it invalidates the complete rest of the menu.
Grievance Culture is real.
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First of all, evil was not my word--it was what the OP (setterle) claimed people were "being told their whole life."
I do empathize with young men who believe they're being persecuted. They are suffering and are in great need of intervention: likely counseling and possibly mental health treatment. It's a shame mental health resources are unavailable to and under-utilized by many Americans, and I wish for all our sake that access to such resources was straightforward and non-stigmatized. Ironically, some of the very institutions that people want to toss away in their desire to "raze the whole damn thing"[1] are institutions that could help them.
1: Also OP's words
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White Fragility said that they had inherited guilt for being white. That's pretty close to "inherently evil".