Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Who Cares Era

dansinker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 765 posts

Re: The Who Cares Era

#381

Post by Animats »

> Hanif Abdurraqib, in one of his excellent Instagram mini-essays the other week, wrote about the rise of content that's designed to be consumed while doing something else. In Hanif's case, he was writing about Time Machine, his incredible 90 minute deep dive into The Fugees' seminal album The Score. Released in 2021, Hanif marveled at the budget, time, and effort that went into crafting the two-part 90 minute podcast and how, today, there's no way it would have happened.

Expecting people to pay full-time attention to 90 minutes of talking about some hip-hop group from the 1990s is a big ask.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#382

Post by delusional »

gilbetron wrote: post #347

The future is gone. I'm in my 50s, and for nearly all of that time I thought, dreamt, and worked towards a future that I read about, researched, talked to others about, and consumed media about. But over the past several years I realize it is gone. I thought maybe it was just my age, but it seems like the world is doing the same, so maybe not my age. Another thread mentions that no one talks about "life in the 22nd c…

I'm in my 30s but feel pretty much the same way. It's an odd sort standstill where we're spinning our wheels real fast, yet we don't seem to move anywhere. Everything is constantly "changing" yet the few things i actually care about see no meaningful change. It's impossible to argue that we haven't seen big technological breakthroughs in the past decade, but what _real_ and _tangible_ difference have they made.

My mom has a smartphone. She hates the thing. It confuses and scares her, but she uses it, begrudgingly, to browse Facebook. What does she do on Facebook? Text her friends and acquaintances. Nothing she couldn't do without it. It is wild that Facebook, the start of a cultural revolution, a trillion dollar company, and a technological cornerstone of the new internet order, is of that little utility to the user. Yet she still has her smartphone, pays her phone bill, and visits facebook for that tiny sliver of utility. She's part of the "modern revolution" even though it informs nothing in her life, which is primarily occupied by tasks in the real world.

This story, in my opinion, repeats itself all over. It's impressive how much weight we lend to technological developments that don't end up materially effecting us.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#383

Post by deathanatos »

kittikitti wrote: post #340
0_____0 wrote: post #5

I was just kvetching about this to my partner over breakfast. Not exactly, but a parallel observation, that a lot of people are just kind of shit at their jobs. The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left. The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?) Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.…

Can you explain the meaning of kvetching and where it comes from?

Just Google it? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kvetch

> To whine or complain, often needlessly and incessantly.

I'm not sure the parent is quite using it correctly: either they're just using it to mean "complain" (which I'd disagree with; the word to me definitely carries the "needless" connotation.) or they're engaging in a bit of self-deprecating humor that just isn't really coming across fully.

It's a bit of a regional word, in the US. (Regional to PA, IME.)

Re: The Who Cares Era

#384

Post by Spivak »

jaccola wrote: post #15
maxehmookau wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An embrace of mediocrity in one's work, specifically, though. In many countries, the UK for example, wages have become stagnant over the last 15 years and "getting on in life", "social mobility", whatever you want to call it, appears to have stalled entirely. Maybe "Who cares?" is the correct response for many people.

Maybe (and I mean this genuinely, I don't know for certain) "Who cares?" is a cause of wage stagnation.

This is my read on the situation. I have been weirded out when I get "excellent" service at a restaurant. Like my friend, you literally aren't getting paid enough to give this much of a shit. You're doing me a favor by working this drive-thru job so I don't have to cook while I'm sick. The gratitude goes the other way.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#385

Post by flkiwi »

I keep experiencing absolutely mediocre middle manager types challenge my feedback in my area of professional certification and expertise by citing, with great confidence, "I asked ChatGPT and..." The outsourcing of the most basic thinking by people who would rather do anything other than think is, paradoxically, creating a bonanza for people like me who end up having to do the thinking for them (and clean up their messes). And yet they continue to fail upward.

I'm not even anti-AI. I use these tools all the time to make "zeroth draft" documents that I can build on. It actually saves me a lot of time! But everything is in service of me delivering products I care very, very much about getting right, and I don't assume their output is anything other than very sophisticated text autocompletion.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#386

Post by cjohnson318 »

icelancer wrote: post #313
Night_Thastus wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit I genuinely think this is a factor in some ways. 500 years ago, what were people worried about? Their immediate concerns, those of family, and neighbors. Realistically, there was no way to get caught up in the minute-by-minute concerns of…

People are expected to care about things they have zero control over and have ~zero impact on their lives or their family's lives. It's ridiculous. I get a ton of crap for not reading the news or caring about stuff happening 3500 miles away that I can't do anything about.

On top of the things that we have zero control over, that do have an impact on our lives. DEI outrage killed a Girls in Tech summer program at our local children's museum. Similar cuts killed a lot of kids summer programs at our local library. Fewer summer programs at the public library and other institutions means thousands of extra dollars in extra camps we have to find and pay for over the summer so that we can sort of work during the day, between drop-offs and pick-ups.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#387

Post by dsego »

cafard wrote: post #326
icelancer wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are expected to care about things they have zero control over and have ~zero impact on their lives or their family's lives. It's ridiculous. I get a ton of crap for not reading the news or caring about stuff happening 3500 miles away that I can't do anything about.

An archduke shot in Bosnia, or an incident near a bridge in northern China?

There is a great netflix documentary made in 2018 called "the long road to war". By the time the shooting happened a lot of other pieces had fallen into place. Basically, there were people in military circles and in the government that dictated the geoplitics game based on which country has leverage, who has the train tracks or a port to handle the logistics of war, and there was a certain zeitgeist, an egregore if you will, and things were ripe for conflict.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#388

Post by ncr100 »

clolege wrote: post #221

I agree with many of the comments here, but also feel part of this is caused by the declination of our collective physical and spiritual health. It's easier to care about your job when you're capable of doing a good job. But the average person nowadays is more likely to be dealing with obesity, hormonal imbalances or a variety of other modern ailments/vices that make it harder to think clearly or perform consistently…

Yes. And in my view the concept of expectation plays I think a vital role in how an individual relates to society.

If the individual expects that society doesn't care about the individual than the individual has no / less reason to take care of oneself for the benefit of society.

A solution to this is to be more conscious of one's own values. What do you value for how strangers who are nearby you should be treated? Kindly? Aggressively? If those values are being met and are shared by your immediate society, then it's a chance that you might also feel like you are being taken care of. Which then might meet your sense of stress and satisfaction which might then allow you to feel comfortable interacting with society in a playful manner more comfortably bringing up your own needs in the group, and having a shoulder to cry on when when you need to, and having a group just help step in and take care of some of your needs because they have the bandwidth to do so. And they also care because they share your values.

Values are, I think, an underappreciated concept, these days, partly because of all sides shaming, but also because the algorithm as they call it is what is supplanting our values. The algorithm is pushing views on us. And you know the old saying, you are what you eat, that also applies to you are what you read.. we're undergoing conditioning by reading all this stuff about all these different ideas about all these different things which we were supposed to care about. So our values are becoming a little soft and squishy, about what it is that we want or need. We are trying to get what we need from a environment which is being driven by the algorithm and its values.

So anyhow, pay attention to your values... And shape your interactions with the world including social media based on those values. And you'll be happier.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#389

Post by mieubrisse »

cafard wrote: post #326
icelancer wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are expected to care about things they have zero control over and have ~zero impact on their lives or their family's lives. It's ridiculous. I get a ton of crap for not reading the news or caring about stuff happening 3500 miles away that I can't do anything about.

An archduke shot in Bosnia, or an incident near a bridge in northern China?

I think the problem is signal-to-noise. For every thing that actually turns out to matter, there are hundreds of thousands of things that you're told are Important but turn out not to be. It's basically impossible to filter "Which remote events are actually important vs just ragebait?" until after the fact.

Re: The Who Cares Era

#390

Post by pchristensen »

Animats wrote: post #381

> Hanif Abdurraqib, in one of his excellent Instagram mini-essays the other week, wrote about the rise of content that's designed to be consumed while doing something else. In Hanif's case, he was writing about Time Machine, his incredible 90 minute deep dive into The Fugees' seminal album The Score. Released in 2021, Hanif marveled at the budget, time, and effort that went into crafting the two-part 90 minute podcas…

On the flip side, most people shouldn't pay attention to it, but for those that care, it's an incredible gift of creation.
Post reply on HN