The Who Cares Era

What the author is describing is an inevitable consequence that happens when the cost of producing something falls dramatically.

It long ago happened with manufactured goods. We like to say "they don't make 'em like that used to", and we're right. Quality clothes (think "Sunday best") from, say, the early 1900s were incredibly well made because they were so expensive - they had to last for years, and people cared about the quality. A few years ago SNL had a skit about using Joseph A Banks suits as paper towels because they're so cheap as to be disposable.

With journalism, while producing journalism has been (until recently) still pretty expensive, the distribution became so cheap with the Internet that you saw a flood of low quality, "who cares"-type content. Now, with LLMs, even the production of stories is getting much cheaper, so you'll see this flood of "eh, good enough"-quality content.

The same thing is happening with software, which is why I'm glad to be leaving the profession. Before the Internet, it was so expensive to fix a bug in shipped software, so you really had to care about the details and making sure things were correct. With Internet distribution, fixing a big is super cheap, so shipping fast became the most important metric. Now, despite your view on LLMs, they should reduce the cost of making software, so you'll see a ton of "vibe coding, 'works well enough'" low -quality, "who cares" software.

There's more than just technical ability at play when comes to what to do with a bad performer. Because if you hired them, or pushed for their promotion, or whatever and it doesn't work it makes you look bad too. Hence its actually problematic for someone to complain about poor performers because it makes them look difficult and possibly as though they're not people-oriented enough to manage relationships.

I suspect that people are reading more than you think, but instead of long form content like books, it's now short form content like tweets and Facebook posts. And of course video content from YouTube and tiktok instead of the television we had back in the day.

> 1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society

I saw one on twitter the other day and was struck by it's take:

"in the 1900s, it was common to dream of the 21st century. when was the last time you heard talk of a 22nd century? it's like we don't believe we're going to make it anymore, but to endure, we MUST dream of futures worth suffering for. please, dare dream of a 22nd century."

https://xcancel.com/DavidSHolz/status/1926775363801088191#m

Like, yeah, I'm not really thinking about the year 2125 and what that will be like. I just kinda assume it's beyond some tech singularoty or something that I can't imagine.

Part of it too is that the world seems 'solved' in a lot of ways. Like, we're not worried about the great economic debate of capitalism or communism. We know which works better. We don't care for climate change right now but are worried about it a lot, yet we all kinda know that we just have to get our act together to solve it and that's not going to happen until things get really bad. The gender and color barriers are broken. The trans barriers are like, something I guess. Sure light speed, but all the physicists say that impossible. Mars, yeah, I guess, but that's a lot harder than we thought it would be. SpaceX is doing cool stuff, I guess, sorta, when things don't blow up in the sky or with their boss. The AIs are here and they kinda just took our jobs and all the fun out of the world. Video games are cool, but we all know it's just coasting through time. You can order a pizza now at the south pole, it's hot when it gets to you. That dude fell out of a balloon for Red Bull, I guess. All the rivers are mapped, it's just people speed swimming them now. Poverty isn't a question of if, but which asshat to get out of the way.

I mean, this is usual with humans. Same goes for corruption and politics. It's all just muddling along without a lot of 'zazz' to it. We're just stuck waiting for enough bad to occur to get over that activation energy and get moving. Like a frat bro piling more garbage onto the already overflowing can, eventually it will get taken out, by someone, maybe me, but not right now.

Like, what could the future hold that is worth actual suffering for, per the tweet? It's all just oatmeal beige.

But that's the same answer? Like, the answer you're giving is still a WTFC answer - it's just "leave".

The things that are broken at that company, which are the things people keep reacting to in this thread as "why is service X so bad?"... they're going to stay broken. It's still not caring.