All the sad young terminally online men
derekthompson.org
All the sad young terminally online men
1–10 of 79 posts
Re: All the sad young terminally online men
#2I 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.
Re: All the sad young terminally online men
#3I 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…
" This group tended to agree with dark pronouncements, such as “I need chaos around me” and “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’ ” Petersen and his colleagues came up with an unforgettable term to describe this group’s psychology: “The need for chaos.”"
My take is that a lack of opportunity / class stratification / societal mobility plays into this. It's essentially the same reason people play the lottery. When you're stuck in a seemingly intractable situation, you need the world to suddenly change around you. Maybe you win Powerball, or maybe you decide to just burn everything down out of desperation. Social media just amplifies those thoughts.
Re: All the sad young terminally online men
#4I 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.
Re: All the sad young terminally online men
#5[flagged]
Re: All the sad young terminally online men
#6I 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…
> non-zero-sum
Don't you mean zero-sum? Cynicism often defaults to transactionalism and implying that people are motivated by nothing else and deconstructing any evidence to the contrary as if dopamine is never mutually released. Transactionalism is frequently and illogically zero-sum play that takes place within infinite games.
Re: All the sad young terminally online men
#7[flagged]
Many good writers used the em dash long before LLMs. (Where, after all, did LLMs get the idea from?)
Re: All the sad young terminally online men
#8I 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'd like to think parents would be more involved if they had to buy their kids internet things but they'd probably end up swiping their creditcard on the same stupid stuff.
Re: All the sad young terminally online men
#9Re: All the sad young terminally online men
#10>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...