Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

Anything bad that happens around the world is now spread instantly via social media and is messing with people’s heads. Good news never gets attention, only the worst. Over the past half decade or so smartphones have reached saturation. Hundreds of millions of people who never learned to filter what they see online are experiencing the same craziness many of us first saw in the 90s for the first time. It’s the eternal September to its final extreme.

This has infected society in a way that is similar to what happened when TV reached saturation in the 1960s. By the end of the 60s everyone was convinced the world was going to hell because every time they turned on the TV it was war and hysteria. That’s what gets ratings. But it was just a blip in retrospect. BTW, watching Easy Rider is hysterical - truly clueless Boomers in their late 20s bitching about the good old days. They basically sound exactly like this post.

Then a new generation grew up knowing how to filter what they saw on TV and things cooled down for a while. I’ve always assumed the term “YouTube” was chosen because of its similarity to “BoobTube”. By the time I was in my teens in the 80s, we all knew what we saw on TV was mostly crap. Remember your mother bitching about the “garbage” on TV?

I feel we’re experiencing another social shift of similar proportions. Constant negative news and inability to filter is messing with perceptions.

The facts are that the air is cleaner than it has been in generations and EVs now make up more than 5% of the market and growing, which will lead to even cleaner air for our children. Water out of the tap is still the best in the world for the vast majority of the country. Crime is the lowest it’s been in decades. Children are safer now than ever. When I grew up, parents beat their children as a matter of course (I was for sure), now that’s considered the abuse it is. Illiteracy is a thing of the past as literally every man woman and child has what were once considered super computers in their pockets which need basic levels of literacy to use. And each smartphone is able to access any piece of information and tutorial one can think of regardless of socioeconomic status. Bigotry like racism, sexism and homophobia is finally being noticed and called out as is abuse of law enforcement. All things which used to be hidden away is now being pulled out into the light of day. Not all of it is pretty, but just because we can finally see it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there before. It was and it was worse. Ever talk to your grandparents and were shocked by their casual prejudices?

So yeah, we’re in a trough of low public morale, but it will get better. I’m as shocked as most of us who helped create the internet as we know it, in how everything seems to have gone sideways instead of the universal education and enlightenment we were expecting. But it’ll happen. Generation Z is already almost immune from the bullshit they see on their phones and are taking advantage of all the opportunities it provides to educate themselves. It’s amazing to see.

Definitely a fun character class for social media!

I don’t want to appear too jaded, I consider myself a realist. One component of this collapse of measurement into a single scalar is that many of us (us being those who either engineer software or are close to it, and the software lifecycle) need to do better at explaining the trade-offs. However, I would be surprised it even with better explanations the outcome, the reckoning, is any different. How many quarters ahead does your management plan? How many years? Average tenure for a Chief Revenue Officer is less than 4 years for example.

You caught the woke mind virus. Stop watching the news and it will fade.

I agree with other commenters that rosy retrospection may be at play, and that in many regards the world today is better than ever before.

That said, you might enjoy Scott Alexander's essay "Meditations on Moloch", describing how many aspects of our society are multipolar traps / races to the bottom: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

A sample:

  Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry. He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give them nicer working conditions. But he can’t, because that would raise the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper rivals and go bankrupt. Maybe many of his rivals are nice people who would like to pay their workers more, but unless they have some kind of ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to defect by undercutting their prices they can’t do it.

  Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price.