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All the sad young terminally online men

derekthompson.org

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Re: All the sad young terminally online men

#71

Post by thefz »

Gigachad wrote: post #35
mindwok wrote: post #4

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.

Social media is probably somewhat responsible, but I don't think it's the biggest problem here. It's the fact that Gen Z is checking out on life, for many people there is no hope of owning a house even if you give up all luxury spending and grind, it's impossible for many on a typical job. It's also getting increasingly more expensive to hang out with friends in physical spaces. Every business needs to pay increasing…

> We are living in an era where the old and rich have taken over and continue to extract every last drop of wealth from the people who have the least.

That's capitalism and its effects for you, sir.

Re: All the sad young terminally online men

#72

Post by techblueberry »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #65
techblueberry wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It's also getting increasingly more expensive to hang out with friends in physical spaces.” It was a very narrow window of history, if at all where this wasn’t true. Like I spent most of my teen years at people’s houses or backyard or parks and it was fuckin great. All my best memories were spent doing nothing with people I liked. Even my clubbing years while fun were relatively forgettable compared to the mischief…

> Even my clubbing years while fun were relatively forgettable compared to the mischief of running around with my teen friends not spending money. When people say that hanging out is getting expensive they didnt mean when they were 10-15 or so. Its easy to not spend money at those ages. Its not when you're 20+. You cant run around the neighbourhood anymore, or eat stuff your parents bought

For most people in my parents generation, going out to eat at all was a luxury. Some of the most tightly knit cultures of the world are also the poorest.

Re: All the sad young terminally online men

#73

Post by rsynnott »

ViscountPenguin wrote: post #32
shoobiedoo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can agree with the original intent of the second amendment. But deliberately ignoring the most critical point of it is just insane: "well-regulated militia". People who are trained, share common values and understand the gravity of firing a weapon is kind of important. I don't think the founding fathers would see "You were born in America and are old enough? here ya go!" as what they intended.

As a non-american, I've never really understood appeals to the beliefs of the founding fathers tbh. It should really be irrelevant what a bunch of long dead people think. It's your country, the corpses of the founding fathers don't have to live in it, so their interpretation of your legal doctrines (even if written by them) hardly seem relevant.

Theory: the US was a very early republic (it's probably almost the oldest contiguous one), and, at the time it was created, it was _normal_ for countries to have a degree of mysticism about their leadership (generally a monarchy).

So, it attached a certain amount of that magic to the 'founding fathers'. And this never entirely went away. Meanwhile, republics became more common, and, elsewhere, the need for mysticism faded (it's not even particularly common in actual monarchies these days, Thailand excepted). "Is this really what [whoever came up with the current constitution] would have wanted" would be a pretty weird question in most countries, those people being recognised not to be omniscient. But a fairly standard question in the US.

Re: All the sad young terminally online men

#74

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

Gigachad wrote: post #66
FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are living in an era where the old and rich have taken over and continue to extract every last drop of wealth from the people who have the least. Exactly as capitalism always intended. We are finally reaching the dream of the system, arent we happy all!?

I feel like this is a lazy answer because there have been plenty of examples of eras where wealth equality was much better, for long periods of time. And they weren't periods of radical communism or whatever. We just didn't tax the middle tier of workers so intensely while giving everything for free to the ultra rich. That isn't really a part of capitalism itself. It's just the specific scenario we ended up in today.

> We just didn't tax the middle tier of workers so intensely while giving everything for free to the ultra rich. That isn't really a part of capitalism itself.

This is literally capitalism. It's the very first sentence on Wikipedia: 'Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit.' Its literally the owners get the money, so the ultra rich get more and more the money because they own more and more. There is absolutely nothing in capitalism that says that workers should get anything. Its just an annoying part of doing business, that companies do their very hardest to avoid as much as possible.

Re: All the sad young terminally online men

#75

Post by FeloniousHam »

thefz wrote: post #71
Gigachad wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media is probably somewhat responsible, but I don't think it's the biggest problem here. It's the fact that Gen Z is checking out on life, for many people there is no hope of owning a house even if you give up all luxury spending and grind, it's impossible for many on a typical job. It's also getting increasingly more expensive to hang out with friends in physical spaces. Every business needs to pay increasing…

> We are living in an era where the old and rich have taken over and continue to extract every last drop of wealth from the people who have the least. That's capitalism and its effects for you, sir.

Ugh, capitalism

Re: All the sad young terminally online men

#76

Post by pyuser583 »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #2

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 Saga…

Partisan people have higher rates of political participation. This has been the case for a long time.

Re: All the sad young terminally online men

#77

Post by derektank »

BergAndCo wrote: post #56
derektank wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what sentence fragments you're referring to (I didn't see any in the initial pass) but em dashes have been characteristic of Derek's work since we'll before the commercialization of LLMs https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/job-...

He said, forgetting he was signed into an account with Derek spelled the same way.

Fun fact, there are actually multiple people with the first name Derek. I post under my real name, so if you want to confirm I'm not Derek Thompson (or Derek Jeter for that matter), you can look me up on LinkedIn or the WhitePages. I'm the only Derek Tank out there

Re: All the sad young terminally online men

#78

Post by codpiece »

anigbrowl wrote: post #17
codpiece wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Em dashes —once the sign of a sophisticated writer— were prominent in The New York Times.

s/sophisticated writer/Mac user. It was a pain to type them on Windows so most people just used the regular dash - accessible on any keyboard.

I had no idea! I was a typesetter, we would have to manually create them using keyboard shortcuts on both systems.

Re: All the sad young terminally online men

#79

Post by incomingpain »

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.

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