Modern Malaise
ava.substack.comInteresting article. I pretty much agree with most of the political and economic points, but one thing that’s palpably absent is an analysis of the structural patterns and habits inherently imposed by technologies, beyond their ties to the political economy.
So many of the systems and technologies for discourse we engage with have reduced the amount of content presented on a given topic at a given time down to the smallest micron possible. Even this “essay” is just a list of bullet points, each of which alone is a thesis that’s probably worth significant reflection and elaboration, but that’s simply not the dominant modality anymore. We’ve come to expect, and only make room for, bite-sized discourse. This helps ensure we remain in our internet bubbles and never develop the critical stances and motivations necessary to drive toward change because we don't make room for the complexities and nuances that inevitably arise when exploring any topic seriously.
The technologies we use to engage in discourse today establish patterns that are anti-discourse. They only support a vapid form of commentary, “takes”, reactions, but hardly discourse. Twitter has an extremely compressed character limit. Facebook is limited to similar snippets of information. Tiktok and Instagram reduce discourse to series of images with at most small snippets of text. Furthermore, there is no “program” as there was with television—we’re completely free to sporadically jump between a thousand different topics at will, ensuring the 21stcentury schizoidization of our brains really takes hold.
I agree. “The medium is the message” comes to mind [0]. I think it has something to do with broadcast media of all kinds.
When reading works from before the broadcast era, I remember authors would somehow try to converse with the reader with via their writing style as in the writer acknowledged the existence of a reader in their writing explicitly (“Dear Reader”) or via a narrative (the narrative style of Plato) and acknowledged that the reader was somehow capable of responding and that the writer could listen. Over time, writers started acknowledging that the reader was one amongst many (“Dear readers”), but still capable and worthy of being conversed with. Moving further along, wartime recruiting posters are what comes to mind of when I think of broadcast media when there is a short message often written in the imperative: the reader exists and expected to do something, but has no avenue or agency to discuss the message. There are examples and counter-examples of the styles I mentioned, but my observation has been that the prevailing writing style has changed from expecting/demanding a two-way conversation to a sort of “speaking at each other not to each other” unless negotiated differently otherwise.
I took the "numbered theses" format as being a deliberate reference to the Central European writing tradition to which you allude, e.g., Benjamin's theses on history, or Marx' theses on Feuerbach. Writing in the "merciless telegram style" implies that the reader is expected to fill in the gaps with their own store of knowledge and their own effort. Like modern mathematical writing, it's more about "high bandwidth" scholar-to-scholar dialogue than explication for a broad audience. Taken in this light, it's has the opposite intent of compressing down to "hot takes" (sparking internal dialogue with the reader vs. sparking lazy emotional acceptance of the argument).
Or maybe she's just a lazy writer who clicked "numbered paragraph," who knows.
All true, but while listing all the reasons for being depressed, it curiously misses the state of the environment.
And by that I don't just mean climate change. The terrifying truth of our time is that we are destroying life on this planet at an unprecedented rate; all life: not just megafauna but insects as well as forests, etc., in exchange for... building parking lots.
We make the world lonelier and uglier and there is zero solution in sight.
Responses to climate change have not yet begun, we have not started to modify our behavior in any meaningful way. But much more importantly, climate change is but one problem, not the only problem. If climate change was solved today, it would maybe postpone the apocalypse for a little while, but it would not make us happier.
Switching to less CO2-emitting energy sources doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things; if we use an electric truck to build a parking lot in the middle of a forest, we may emit a little less CO2 while doing so, but eventually we will still have replaced a piece of forest by a slab of concrete, and in the process destroyed life and made the world uglier.
The "loss of meaning" results from the awareness that what we're doing is not just pointless but evil, and we have no alternative.
I do not understand why this is downvoted. I see a fatalism in my peers that causes incredible stress. I think of animals that won't breed in captivity when there's too much noise or not the right food, but instead attack each other and self-harm.
We have high stress, lots of convenient unhealthy food, lots of noise and light, long hours, and the awareness that the planet is getting more hostile to human life. Of course we're biting and scratching each other, performing self-harm, and not reproducing.
I think this is under-calling both how miserable people were before the modern era and the remarkable impact good birth control has had on modern society. Suddenly there is lots of free time and a lot more choices to make than there were even 50 years ago and all the choices have unsatisfying outcomes. We live in a world that is too complex to understand, and people keep screaming that everything is about to collapse (which, in fairness, may be correct).
People have identified that both the traditional roles - child rearing and working very hard all day - are not much fun. Human society and morale doesn't cope well with hedonism. There aren't obvious alternatives. I don't see how a specific social theory could overcome these practical realities. Unusually, I don't really see economics as a factor here - everyone is, by historic standards, absurdly wealthy. Even most poor people.
> how miserable people were before the modern era
Materially, maybe , but judging by the way people live in rural communities even today, it's closer to the truth that they were happier overall, as they had a social support net, more socializing than they can handle and more time in nature. It's a qualitatively different life than urbanized domestication
Our family lives in a major urban metro. We go to a traditional urban church. We have everything you mentioned. No diss to our rural brethren, but rurality is not a prerequisite to this life. Most city people problems are of their own choosing.
My wife and I currently suffer from the more socializing than we can handle.
But this requires people to care for religion, which again is a self imposed change people have decided on.
We can criticize Reagan and thatcher till the cows come home. However to claim we are living in their utopia is false. Their utopia was highly religious and would not allow the shifting social norms we have seen in the past few years. The article is actually quite irresponsible in only bringing up thatcher and Reagan's economic revolutions while failing to bring up the sexual revolution.
> But this requires people to care for religion, which again is a self imposed change people have decided on.
Self-imposed? People can't just choose to beleive in God, and most religions like their adherents to sincerely beleive in their stuff.
I mean at the end of the day everything the article complains about is people not believing in God.
Americans have a clear religion and its god is money.
Also, I'll point out the religious belief is basically inherited. A lot of the problems we see today are the previous generations refusal to pass on values and attitudes passed on to them.
Which God? Am seeing that leads to violent conflict every single time and undermines your argument a wee bit.
Happiness has steadily decreased since social media has grown in popularity.
Most of us feel it. It's real. Don't let anyone gaslight you. You aren't sick: our culture is sick. (For those alone and struggling).
Social alienation is the source of much mental illnesses. Poverty itself isn't the source of most people's misery. Our society is our preservation matrix. If we cannot reproduce or at least contribute to something beyond ourselves that bears the promise of persisting, we are left alone with death.
This lonely dance with death, which I have danced for years as a poor housebound reclusive, can cause a disintegration of mind. I suspect the brain tries to rewire itself so it can find a new interpretation of life...one in which it finds a way of surviving in isolation. Many delusions can arise as a result. Also, mystical and religious experiences are common under such conditions. I've experienced them. Many strange things happen to the mind when we feel like we are connected to nothing that will preserve us. It's an unnatural, or abnormal state, which humans cannot ordinarily adapt to. We are microrganisms part of the macroorganism of society. Being alone is utterly abnormal and the brain isn't equipped to deal with it.
American culture makes the poor feel like trash. That's why so many of us become crazy lunatics, drug addicts, or vengeful people. It's the social alienation and isolation that condemns most of us.
However, this condition is not limited to the poor. Even rich people feel alienated. In fact, wealth often turns every relation into a suspicious one--is she just using me for my money? Everyone craves the sense of belonging that comes from genuine love, but it's hard to find. So we see many wealthy people, famous people, the most connected, also feeling disconnected.
Rich or poor, what matters most is feeling connected. We have a connectivity problem. One that leaves many individuals left alone to dance with death. This is what is causing the modern malaise above all things...however, the material conditions discussed by the author ultimately contribute to this disconnection.
Love is the answer, but this solution is so profound that we can hardly comprehend it. In the absence of understanding, we spend billions on psychoactive drugs and label people as "mentally ill" instead.
I believe in hard work, sacrifice, and family… ideals and virtues that have provided solace and guidance to humanity for our entire existence.
It seems to be the hyper-online types that reject traditional values that are the most depressed and apocalyptic in their mindset. Myself - I look outside and the sun is shining, my kids are playing, everything is good in the world to me.
I'm legitimately happy you are content and satisfied.
I have a half dozen coworkers who value family, church, and hard work. Most of them are stress-eating themselves to death. They binge shop on Amazon, buy cars and houses they can't afford or enjoy, and generally seem to hate going home at the end of the day. I've seen them beg to be allowed to come back into the office, so they can escape their family. They seem to have loveless marriages, and dread the weekend.
I don't agree that traditional values is the cure for all humanity's woes. Perhaps some of these people you talk about would be happier with a traditional life, but then perhaps some people with a traditional life would be happier with something more freeing.
And perhaps there's many more dimensions at play, not just values.
"hard work" is not a traditional value. That's an American thing which is relatively young as far as tradition goes.
Do your friends value an integrated life? Community? Leisure? These are the traditional values missing and they're so missed even so called conservatives have forgotten they exist.
Yes there was no such thing as hard work before America. All of civilization sprung up from nowhere in a life of leisure where everyone relaxed, then America came around and made everyone work hard.
That's not at all what I said. I merely said that excluding leisure and an integrated life as similarly important traditional values is ahistorical. Work is a traditional value in western culture, but it's not the only one.
You feel well connected through your family. That's all people really need. As you say, your children are your world.
Some people don't have this family structure. Many come from broken homes with no good role models to look up to. They mimic their parent's maladaptive behaviors and end up in bad relationships. The degenerative cycle repeats. Many of these broken homes were the result of economic devastation or cultural disruption. Instead of going to church, for example, many families stayed home and watched T.V., completely degrading their social skills.
Also, some people think about the bigger picture. It's great that your mind can rest within the bounds of your backyard. Less parochial types can be more apocalyptic because they are thinking where we are headed. If we look back, we see the most apocalyptic events ever endured by mankind--the great world wars. If we look forward, we may see the potential of even worse things happening.
What makes matters more difficult is that comments like yours can be interpreted as saying that you are well made, have good values, have a square head on your shoulders, and others have something wrong with them. They aren't "traditional," like you--that's their problem. If only they embraced traditional values, they would be set right--put on the straight and narrow, like you. This is really an oversimplification of what's happening to some people. Material and social conditions affect how people develop.
It's easy to look at a person from a ghetto and say, "If only they had good values, all this would clear itself up. It only they believed in working hard, they would pull themselves up by their bootstraps and seize the day." I wonder why we can't whisper these magic words to people and solve their problems.
Edit: Hyper-online types are clearly looking for a connection they don't have in real life. The internet is almost like a honey pot for these types. Their rejection of traditional values may simply reflect their lack of faith in it because they saw their parent's bad marriage, or it may reflect a rebellion against the old order which seems to have failed them. Liberalism in particular is a home for lost souls looking for forms to express their discontent. It too is a honey pot for these types.
It’s one thing to be raised in such a way that you have no knowledge or example of how to live a productive, healthy life.
It’s another to actively reject traditional structures like hard work and family. There is a sizable cohort of online-types that actually thinks society would be better if the government ran everything, work was outlawed, rich people went to jail, and all manner of extremely insane ideas that they blame their own problems on. They actually think the world is ending because of global warming, democracy is under attack, and doom scroll every day reading horrible nonsense that will never happen.
I would argue the human condition is to think everything is failing and the apocalypse is coming at any moment. This a frequent phenomenon throughout history and every generation has this narrative. However instead of religion now it’s environmental destruction but I see that as another type of religion.
Narcissism is rampant throughout society and no one wants to feel any pain or have to struggle whatsoever for success. We live in the greatest time that ever existed and some people are more miserable than ever.
I choose to be happy and appreciate what life offers rather than despair at things I can’t control and ultimately don’t matter.
It's the best of times and the worst of times. Some are taking joyrides to space. Others are struggling to keep a roof over their heads. The inequality is real and tremendous. You may blame people for their lack of work ethic, etc, but there are many reasons for nihilism among the lower classes. Especially the industrial proletariat who has seen industry shipped overseas and suffered a dramatic decline in their quality of life. Many places that were once bustling with hard working Americans now look like warzones, or even worse: post-apocalyptic wastelands, replete with drugged out zombies. Generations of hard working Americans had the rug pulled out from underneath them. The myth of hard work = success and good life have been empirically proven to be false by their own experience. The same may be said of the American farmer who has been slowly strangled to death by big agriculture. Some of the hardest working people in this country have ended up with less than nothing--drowning in debt because larger economic forces sought to crush them.
I understand that from your position, things are great. But not everyone is living under the same material conditions as you. Desperate people, who feel crushed by the system, call for extreme measures--like complete government control a la communism.
Ultimately, you have a vested interest in maintaining your worldview because it secures your serenity. Unfortunately, this unwillingness to address the grievances of others and to ignore the material reality that proves that this is not the best of times for many people, will set you up to be blindsided by the furious subterranean forces building up under the guilded surface of this country.
Things were way, way worse in the past. The US fought a civil war. The cities were systematically looted and burned in the 1960s and all manner of figures were assassinated. It is far, far from that today.
It is far easier today than ever to get material support with food stamps, section 8 housing, the EITC, food banks, and things are so good that we literally can’t stop the poor masses from illegally crossing our borders in order to live here.
There is a fever dream in the woke / intellectual left in America that some long struggling proletariat will rebel. This is against the ethos and culture of America as a bootstraps, capitalistic nation that even the leaders of the Democratic Party have to bluntly reject socialism (see Nancy Pelosi’s shouting at the question).
My wife is Vietnamese and her parents were boat people. The entire extended family despises democrats and specifically faults their hatred of meritocratic education as a sticking point. The left has no idea what minorities really think because the party is run primarily by rich white people who exist in an echo chamber.
America is the land of opportunity. It will continue to be so provided we do everything we can to stop the deranged, intolerant, anti-business left from ruining what makes our country the best in the world.
Even if that's the case, corrupt politicians and institutions will use the disgruntled proletariat to gain power.
Also, many corporations are pushing for central government too. Walmart now is a private company. In the future it may be "The Glorious Walmart of the New People's American Union." In other words, large corporations have the potential of becoming a part of the government and retaining their status...plus the untouchability of being an arm of the government. I would say we've been set up for this.
So what may happen is this. Large institutions may use the proletariat to overthrow the middle class and institute oligarchic collectivism, like 1984. It happened in China, and clearly the elites have no qualms about their system--given our utter economic interconnectedness with them.
> All meritocratic platforms are winner-take-all, with the top 1% of performers collecting a vastly disproportionate share of rewards.
Even if you simulate an economy where every participant starts out with the same amount of money, and all trades are completely random, over enough trades the participants' wealth will still end up in a power-law distribution.
This seems to be a basic principle of biology which fractally translates to entire societies. Piketty's data shows that historically, the curve was flattened only when the economy itself was upended, i.e. after wars. We need to engineer peaceful ways that violently rearrange the economy. A parallel money system like cryptos might have been used for that, but so far it has done the opposite
> We need to engineer peaceful ways that violently rearrange the economy.
Why not simply make sure that life is comfortable on the tail end of the of the curve and call it a day? The simple fact that so far only war makes the curve flatten suggests that this is not a curve we want to flatten. Nobody comes through a war feeling good.
Define 'comfortable'. It's always relative as people aspire to be what others have become. Wars have always happened, naturally, so it's nothing 'unnatural', and perhaps nature's way to flatten the curve. Our current feelings about war may or may not be correct - wars have many benefits too.
You've never been to war, eh?
> Define 'comfortable'.
Hot and cold running water, a toilet, shower, electricity and internet, shelter, medical care (not dying of easily curable diseases, for example.)
Really, IMO, the baseline is what folks at the Google campus have. If everyone in the world had that QoL as a baseline I think we could declare victory and go home.
the soviet union provided this level of 'comfortable', decent basics for literally everyone . somehow its people didn't 'declare victory and went home'
So, your answer to the original question
> Why not simply make sure that life is comfortable on the tail end of the of the curve and call it a day?
Is that "that's not enough"?
Where are you going with this?
Nit: Power law distributions aren't specific to biology. Even the sizes of asteroids follow a power law. Absent some law of physics or another, your null hypothesis of any measure of just about anything is a power law.
Biology deep down is physics. But not everything is a power law.
A top 1% on it’s own is not a problem. It is the power they have over everything to not only keep things that way but make life worse for everyone else. For example by lobbying for laws that help corporations not people.
I mostly agree, except corporations aren't being helped; people are. Might be through higher dividend payments to shareholders, higher salaries to employees or lower prices to consumers, but the corporation isn't a thing in itself that benefits.
Yes the corporations are a representative. Some are fully owned by a one or few people so their ethics align with those people for better or worse. Others are run by boards for shareholders but those board members ethics would come into play there. Then there are associations that lobby. So it is people but various groups acting in complex and different ways.
Calling those groups "corporations" just masks that complexity, and not in a useful way.
This is also my intrinsic gut feel but can you point to any academic research work that supports this claim?
Not exactly academic research, but this has been known since biblical times..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_rich_get_richer_and_the_po...
It seems to be built into the world.
> Even if you simulate an economy where every participant starts out with the same amount of money, and all trades are completely random, over enough trades the participants' wealth will still end up in a power-law distribution.
True, but more so today than 50 or 100 years ago.
>How can the world get better if no one is steering?
Did it get better when somebody was steering? hitler was a strong and popular leader. Democracy is about people being self-governmed, not about having a strong leader
Individualism is the ultimate goal of this Enlightenment era that we are still part of. The goal was to take away the power from the monarch and the collective, and empower the individual, and our civilization is succeeding at it, but our politics do not adapt. There is a reason why social democracy is unpopular in europe now: younger generations realized it was an unsustainable ponzi scheme. Our future is individualist, but our politics is hopelessly centered on the worship of The Leader
There is no proof of social democracy being unpopular in Europe.
The only relevant political movements that advocate against social democracy are mainly extreme right wing. Even those are not growing - and usually collapsing afterwards - because of their individualistic approach to society but because of their appeal to people that feel migration is not good, that climate change doesn’t exist, etc.
Also, every time I read about “social democracy being a Ponzi scheme” along the demographics argument I feel an urge to remember that social democracy isn’t only the pensions system. Healthcare, education, infrastructure aren’t Ponzi schemes neither feasible from a pure individualistic approach.
social democrat parties are in major decline all over europe, even in sweden.
Well, social democracy is also the welfare system, and it also requires high social trust, and it also incurs debt for future generations.
I may be wrong, but i think social democracy was only possible during the (not so brief) moment of the boomers.
It does not incur debt. Sweden or Denmark has been having debt to GDB ratio constantly declining.
I think social democracy can work but it’s hard and requires huge discipline from government and people. Also, it seems much easier to introduce in smaller countries.
Incurring debt is different than the ratio of debt to gdp (or anything else).
Are our societies ready for a real democracy, that is a direct vote on all issues type of self-governing rule where anything can be put up to a vote including votes for execution of members of the society?
Or did you mean something else?
I think we are; unless you can point out politicians/representatives whose individual contribution is so much better than what the average citizen would do. There are no strong politicians in europe (barring autocrats) or in the US (which was until recently led by a cartoonish bully and now by someone who is in obvious cognitive decline), and for decades, it is pollsters that run the show.
One issue is that current states have accumulated too much power . A second one is that individual rights need to be untouchable. But otherwise i think our current representative systems are just fertile grounds for corruption.
The second issue is why I think we won't see our societies self led until we have technology that can prevent tirany of the majority. This has been an issue with democracy as long as it has existed, Socrates is one of the victims of this system. Because what is to prevent 66% of the population voting that you be publicly dismembered? This would be perfectly democratic.
And if you think this is some unreasonable edge case you must remember that humans are beings guided by emotion as much as reason, the whole COVID panic and hysteria that happened just two years ago has enough examples that emotion will trump reason even in situations that aren't even that dire.
My theory is that technology will get us there eventually (direct democracy), and we'll get closer to a better, more functional and more inclusive society than the modern representative democracies which are starting to show their massive shortcomings.
It was a stroke of genius to call what we have now in most of the world "democracy", as in "government by the people", when it's anything but that.
I am not sure that’s going to happen. Most of the people does not care about choices. They just want to have comfortable life without worries.
Another thing is that people must feel that their participation does have an effect.
One more aspect is that most of the decisions is not a popularity vote but must be based on knowledge and science. Average people can’t make that choices unless you have extremely well educated population.
Overall, a simple introduction of a technology which will enable more direct democracy is not enough. We need more ground work which will promote individuals with certain values and behaviors.
However, I also do believe that introducing such technology might accelerate that ground work.
My hopes for the future are the same.
However, until we get there, the current system is quite good at maintaining a stable society with increasing gains in technological development and social welfare. It is far from perfect or ideal, and it is full of lies, but until we have something better that is tangible and real, and not just theoretical, I wouldn't touch it.
We share the same hope for the future, but I do not think our current "democracies" are quite good, as you say. I think they're terrible, and the alternatives are even worse.
Sadly we don't have anything to replace them with at the moment, and we're just a hair away from some societal and political event to convince people that this very charismatic leader has all the answers and we should vote for them.
Maybe my standards are too low but the fact that we don't have societal wide unrest, mass murders, famine, revolutions and the like that was pretty common just 100 years ago is good enough to provide for an environment where scientific and technological progress can happen.
We have enjoyed 70 years of peace in this corner of the world, but I wouldn't say we've solved the government problem. Give it a couple centuries first, but seeing how the post-war enthusiast has turned into unrest and widening inequality even in this side of the world, I think this peace is "just a phase".
It's hard to see it (and admit it to oneself) because of recency bias and thinking this time it'll be different, that we're smarter than our ancestors but history tends to repeat itself.
One of the important questions is where to put the line beyond which humans should be independent of their neighbors. E.g. what democracy is not able to touch.
Most people would reject the idea of a city voting what everyone's compulsory dinner will be. But when it comes to zoning and building codes, that's already grey area.
What if the one steering didn't need to be a person? What if it was an idea or an ideology? Are we better off in a world devoid of purpose? Or did we never truly have purpose? Did our past generations delude themselves into thinking that they did? Or did we delude ourselves into thinking that our past generations did have purpose?
Ideologies and religions are behavioral tools. Whether we re better or worse with them depends on how they are used by the ones who control them. Delusion is the natural state of humans, at any time we believe that our core beliefs are established (e.g. belief in science) even if we dont have sufficient arguments to convince ourselves. it seems we constantly seek some model structure to explain and guide our behavior
In the states we feel like we're just coming into perspective on social democracy. Can you tell me a bit more about why it doesn't work? (genuine question) I'd like to think I sharply understand the differences between communism and socialism - and social democracy - and that some of my older family members confuse these all as the same thing. Why is social democracy unpopular in Europe?
It... really depends on which bits of Europe you're talking about. The bits where corruption is endemic and the money never actually winds up going to help anyone? Sure, certain policies are floundering there. The state pension systems? Yeah, people are a bit miffed about mismanagement there.
But like... very few people sitting here arguing that e.g. a right to decent healthcare isn't a thing we want; that education shouldn't be accessible to as many people as possible; that we shouldn't provide public services such as libraries, parks, and sports centres for all; and in a bunch of places there's a general feeling that the pendulum swung way too far against welfare, in the bid to force people to work, that it's now not helpful for the people it was meant to help.
It appears the person you're replying to lives in Germany; so do I. The parties (e.g. the FDP) here which would like to tear down what Germany has built have a minority of the votes compared to those which have social democratic or broadly neutral policies.
demographics. The boomer years was that sweet moment where social democracy dependent on intergenerational debt became possible, but only assuming endless growth of population and economy. Then the neoliberal years came and prices of everything went up, so everything is unreachable for younger generations. They tried to replace the missing population with immigrants but that channel also got saturated. Younger people are just not feeling that level of support that previous generations did
Hard not to see parallels with the end of the Roman empire. We know we could do better, we can't be bothered trying very hard and we'd rather moan about the good old days. All it needs is the more motivated (not very) barbarian hoarde to decide they'll do the social reconstruction we won't.
Edit: I actually place great faith on coming generations. The kids are alright.
This is a popular trope, but could you say exactly when the Roman empire ended?
If we are in a Rome scenario, the good news is that we probably won't live long enough to see the real collapse.
The reason I liked it was precisely because how long it took. Also, the barbarian hoarde was pretty un barbarian, it instituted the emergent states through the dissolution of the holy Roman empire. Really, Gibbons was sort of wrong. The invaders became "us" in almost every sense. Sucked to be Roman, but then.. it didn't.
Very few of the "lost arts" were truly lost. I could have gone to the democratising effect of the rise of Islam, where much "lost knowledge" was recovered in due course but that's a whole other story (depreferencing inheritance over functional ability)
The key point for our functional decay as a society might be the ubiquitous rise of cynicism combined with increasing joins over gerontocracy and kleptocracy.
https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f... is good
Oh gosh. If anything, we're entering a golden age. Yeah, climate change is going to be a real pain. But nothing really more than that on a civilization scale. Global poverty is at an all time low, hunger has never been lower, overall health is the best it's ever been, education is going great globally, we've never been more equitable between the genders, our access to clean water is the highest ever, etc. And all these metrics are just going to get better, more or less.
I don't know how people reconciliate metrics like all time poverty low with the article linked.
> All it needs is the more motivated (not very) barbarian hoarde to decide they'll do the social reconstruction we won't.
Putin thought he could be that horde. He is failing, and failing badly, in Ukraine.
I don't really see a gap between the value placed on labor by the traditional left and the new ethic of anti-work. The difference lies in alienation. The old style predated Fordism and valued the manual trades, and those were/are the "jobs" where you still find individual workers largely in control of their own economic fate. When that kind of autonomy is taken away (or surrendered), what remains is anti-work and bullsh*t work and quiet quitting.
> But our society has conditioned us to believe that consumption and status are the only things that provide happiness: the smartest children of our generation are going to Stanford and MIT to join Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and FAANG
I take slight issue with this framing. Why is there an implicit assumption that these really smart kids end up working at these places because they’re deluded that money and status are all that provide happiness? I’m sure there are lots of people on HN that work at these places/know lots of people that work at these places, and I’m willing to bet that a significant portion choose to work there because it’s intellectually stimulating for them. Sure, you can argue that too much value accumulates to these jobs for reasons outside of their control, but I think the assumption that that’s why they’re doing it is wrong.
This also ties in with the article’s mention of the general public resentment towards tech, see how widely used the derisive term “techbro” is used in online discussions. There’s this perception that everybody in tech is only in it for the money, and they enjoy using their smarts to exploit everybody else. I’ve been hit with this from people I know personally, and it’s insulting.
I think one just has to acknowledge there are no feasible solutions to these problems. The actual solution is to let the next generation do a better job, and believe that they can. Unfortunately, as people live and work for longer, the cycles get more drawn out and some generations lapse with no impact.
I keep thinking about these topics. The constant rants, the food waste, the bs jobs.. I see a few ideas but it seems i'm too radical (I believe people enjoy heavy activities as long as they're rewarding intrisically and socially)
> https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1335725267340251137
Even people in the top 10% are making basically nothing. This was taken two years ago, but I would suspect the current situation is the same or worse. I'm not sure how to fix this, but I think something should be done. People in the top 1% or 0.1% should make more per month than someone in the top 10%, but the difference shouldn't be this stark.
Why should the difference not be so stark? That's how the power law works, most people follow only a few accounts.
Because inequality beyond a certain excess makes a system unstable, and given the chance, even wealthy people would rather be wealthy in a stable world than an unstable world.
There is not only one power distribution, there is a whole set of them.
Can you refer to any evidence that inequality makes systems unstable? There is no reason that I can think of for that. OnlyFans looks pretty stable, in fact. And It doesn't make sense that a political system gets unstable when some people get wealthy. Political systems fall apart when large numbers of people can't afford food (an issue which has nothing to do with equality).
Inequality much more extreme than that was quite stable. Antoinette was only wealthy compared to people in the 1700s. She was basically an equal to the peasants wealth-wise compared to the inequality we've seen since after the industrial revolution.
We've probably got more poor people today than were alive then in absolute numbers, and our wealthy are orders of magnitude more wealthy. And the situation is much more stable.
Except that if food is plentiful, but not everyone has equal access to food, then it has everything to do with equality.
Actually, many wars and rebellions in history have been due to some kind of inequality, whether perceived or real, when individuals or groups were motivated to fight to seek redress. And wars are very much unstable.
I don't think it's stark. That's how the entertainment business naturally works. Footballers, youtubers, actors, etc...
Onlyfans has a very low barrier to entry and being better than a 100 other people isn't all that hard, assuming you have the body for it and the marketing chops.
I don't understand why you'd want a company doing the government's job, that's what taxes are for.
Did you comment on the right thing? I don’t understand how that relates to what I wrote.
> That's how the power law works
who says that the payout distribution has to follow the power law? And even if it does naturally, OnlyFans doesn't have to just let it happen. They could take a bigger cut from the larger accounts, and distribute it such that the payouts are more linear.
>who says that the payout distribution has to follow the power law?
The payout distribution is proportional to the number of subscribers, which follows a power law.
>And even if it does naturally, OnlyFans doesn't have to just let it happen. They could take a bigger cut from the larger accounts, and distribute it such that the payouts are more linear.
How is taking a larger relative cut from the content creators bringing in the most traffic a good (much less optimal) business decision?
If you're a new creator, and you look at this:
https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1335725267340251137
are you really going to want to start an account on that site? Your comment seems to align with typical capitalist motives: focus on short term gains, ignore everything else.
>are you really going to want to start an account on that site?
If I thought it would benefit me and was worth my time, then yes? Is the implication one shouldn't try to earn extra income because someone else earns more?
>Your comment seems to align with typical capitalist motives: focus on short term gains, ignore everything else.
That's somewhat of an ad hominem. Anyways I'm all ears if you have a superior evidence-based economic model, instead of selling utopia.
> Anyways I'm all ears if you have a superior evidence-based economic model
Do you have sources or evidence that this linear payout system can work? Any businesses, platforms, or countries that have successfully used this type of model?
Do you have sources or evidence that this linear payout system wont work?
Nope. But I'm also not the one claiming a new model I've invented will work and should replace the current system. Your claim would be more convincing if you could point to an existing business or platform that uses the linear payout successfully.
Right, because its a brand new model that I created, one that has never existed, or even been imagined before:
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistribution_of_income_and_weal...
Okay, but that's in the context of the state which can use its monopoly on violence to enforce such a redistribution. How might that work in private organizations? If you think governments should get involved, what do you think of the side effects? Such redistribution is effectively a tax on the top performers and a subsidy for the bottom performers. A popular saying is that "you get more of what you subsidize and less of what you tax". Why should we encourage more people into selling intimate pictures of themselves? Is that a policy that governments should really be pushing? You could argue onlyfan producers have some duty to their community or whatever, but they already pay income taxes. Why must they face additional redistribution compared to lawyers or programmers?
If they do this, won’t they just fracture and drive the larger accounts elsewhere?
If every single user wants to be a soulless robot (pure capitalism), then yes. However if the userbase understands that larger accounts will be subject to larger fees, in order to support smaller accounts, then I would like to think at least some users would support that. Not everything in life has to be decided on a purely selfish basis.
So OnlyFans should pay people to post nudes ? (Rather than providing a place to post pictures and charge other people for them, in case you missed it)
I see this same argument made about Tinder, from guys who can't get laid.
You realize it's just a platform don't you ? Those are real human beings on the other side of that screen. OnlyFans can't choose for the humans on the platform.
Hang on. Capitalism means private ownership of the means of production. It sounds like you are talking about choices made by consumers.
Communist systems have consumers who make choices, too. Soviet citizens were perfectly free to choose which goods to queue up for.
Do YouTube, Insta, and TikTok also have similar distributions?
Maybe slightly less skewed but these sorts of networks seem to promote a winner-takes-all situation for each differentiated subsegment.
In the 80s Thatcher and Reagan broke down trade barriers and ceded government power to banks and corporations. This created a consumer world driven by debt, where everything was assessed by utility. Politics essentially “became a wing of management, saying that it could stop bad things from happening instead of imagining how things could be better.”
Consumer debt has fallen since the peak in 2007-2009 or so.
https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/...
Rather spending seems to be driven by the wealthy, upper-middle class, who don't need as much debt to consume and boost the overall economy.
Now politics feels like pantomime, with both parties bickering over social issues while neither has the political will to meaningfully affect the economy. Curtis: “Online psychodramas create waves of hysteria that make it feel like the world is transforming. In fact, nothing actually changed in the last four years. Trump made himself a pantomime villain, and we booed rather than imagine an alternative.”
Agree. I think the power of the federal government to affect change peaked in 2001-2008 or so, first with massive buildup homeland security and defense apparatuses following 911, and then in 2008-2009 during the financial crisis . After that the federal government has significantly stopped having influence as far as policy is concerned. Rather, much if its power is through administrative functions, like the FBI , NSA, IRS, SEC, etc.
Money became our religion, and now money is starting to run dry, as the world’s largest economies slow in their growth. Both democracies and dictatorships are in a moment of crisis.
Money is like a religion, but scant evidence to suggest it's running dry. As stocks and home prices boom since 2020, there is more wealth than ever before.
Purchasing power hasn’t changed in the past 40 years, according to the Pew Institute: “Today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
Again, you have to look at the top 10% or so. That is where the purchasing power is coming from...stuff like Disneyland tickets, NFL tickets, lifted trucks, expensive elective cosmetic procedures, home renovations, and so on.
All meritocratic platforms are winner-take-all, with the top 1% of performers collecting a vastly disproportionate share of rewards. Look at Substack and Onlyfans. This is not a conspiracy engineered by anyone: when anyone is allowed to compete, a small percentage of people tend to capture most of the profit.
It's been like this for a long time, and recent trends have only accelerated this. The Ivy League is more importent and competitive than ever before; Covid has not changed this at all. Same for top 50 schools overall. Same for high stakes testing, math competitions, top tech & finance jobs, etc...everything more competitive and difficult. More people applying, fewer people getting in. Winners get bigger and bigger, whether it's top Substack content creators or Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.
The American dream, the idea that anybody could make a good living for themselves and their family through nothing but hard work, has become far less realistic. You know the Steinbeck line about how Americans think they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires instead of exploited proletariat. But they don’t believe that anymore, do they?
It's still realistic if you have a high IQ, choose a good career, and have good work ethic...people in tech, consulting, finance, healthcare, law, etc. making record income even after accounting for student loan debt and inflation. (The so-called school to career STEM pipeline.) Reddit 'FIRE' subs are full of such individuals, in their 20-40s, doing just that, with not uncommonly millions of dollars. But for those at the middle/left-side of the IQ distribution, maybe not so much. They tend to rely more so on lottery-like systems of success/promotion compared to more meritocratic ones. https://greyenlightenment.com/2022/03/19/losers-iq-and-the-l...
This clearly isn’t true, since people obviously aren’t free: they’re controlled by socioeconomic circumstances.
And also biological constraints, like again, IQ. But I have also read many stories on Hacker News and Reddit of people born in the lower-middle class or worse circumstances rising up due to high intelligence and getting scholarships and landing decent-paying jobs.
Good article...a lot of food for thought.
The problem is not that wages are growing too slowly, that is the symptom.
The problem is that productivity is growing too slowly.
Fixing the problem requires far more technology and automation than we have delivered.
If productivity grows primarily because of enabling capital, the proceeds from this growth will accrue more to the owner of capital than the laborer, roughly proportional to the contribution of each.
The problem is that human capital has saturated for many people. This is borne out by stagnating gains in education.
If productivity gains occur mostly because of technology with little human input, then that further bifurcates society between owners of that technology and everyone else. This does not help alleviate the modern malaise.
People are quick to point out the dropping of the gold standard, the end of cheap fossil fuels, the neoliberal economic changes, etc. that all occurred during the 1970s, and those all matter. But there's another factor which is that educational outcomes began to stagnate.
I don't think returning productivity growth to the postwar rate would have as much of an effect as it did then, because more of the productivity growth would be because of technology with concentrated ownership rather than broad gains in human ability.
Always a good read: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Tech and automation alone will not work. You'll need to change the laws to cater for the redistribution because the jobs will dry up while the capitalists reap the benefits and only give conditional, token sums.
I was taking this article seriously until I arrived at the Terrence McKenna bit. His opinions are highly subjective, based on personal experience with drugs, and they aren't a compelling, testable, or comparable line of thought. Not to mention that TM is pretentious as hell and basis his whole outlook on life on doing loads of DMT (he hardly talks about anything else).
> I was taking this article seriously until I arrived at the Terrence McKenna bit.
Is possible to think some parts are good and other parts not so good?
That's not fair, he also talked about doing loads of mushrooms.
Quote is in number 14 if anyone wants to read it themselves. You'll also see that the Ayn Rand quote mentioned in the sibling comment comes with critical commentary.
Re: testability
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf0fLKjCKHA&t=73s
"So then the people who don't do psychedelics say 'well this is something it's like channeling or all this other stuff'. No it isn't, because we are not like those people. I mean, I maintain this rigorously, that our bit is intellectual rigor, not airheadedness. We're willing to put as much pressure on the ideas as you want we just believe in fairness. So, that it's not ipso facto that there's no such thing as elves. It's that if you think there are elves, prove it to me! Well, then the problem is that the skeptic, the critic, says, 'well the notion that are elves is just, you know, you're sadly deluded. You're living in your own private Idaho.' But then, you say, 'well, the proof of the pudding is a 15-minute DMT trip. Are you willing to carry on this criticism after having made the experiment, sir?' I mean, we're not like UFO enthusiasts. We're not telling you to stand in cornfields in the dead of night and pray. No, no, this will work! This will work on you, you the reductionist, you the doubter, you the constipated egomaniacal father-dominator. It'll work! And they say at that point 'You know, you are a menace, is what you are!'.
The bullshit jobs and authenticity reference wasn't enough to write the guy off as a butthurt marxist doing more harm than good because he won't be pushing the actual incremental improvements we need for our system of free markets that actually works relatively well? He is going to have some grandiose reimagining of the system from some base principles (that are wrong).