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 dislike that they cut this off at 2003. On those graphs it was clearly already an upward trend.
Afterall, the actual issue derives more from the 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
Your thesis that the social issues are caused by the internet would become very weak; seeing as this started during the dial up era; pre smart phones, pre social media.
>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...
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.
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.