Why We're Living in the Age of Fear

For this to work, there would have to be solidarity among the other platforms, all of them turning off on the same day (yes, even HN!)

But I can actually imagine the world's productivity boost on such a day.

I very much belong to those negatively affected by this phenomenon. I'd wager many a HN commenter is. My RSS feeds are a carefully crafted web of information, as much of a not-echo chamber I can create. From stuff I don't agree with on almost anything - Breitbart and its national counterparts, neocon blogs, libertarian thinktanks - to sources I think of as pretty neutral - like the simple feeds of press conglomerates just feeding headlines - to the stuff I agree with vehemently and thus view as most dubious, I get it all, all day, all the time. Even syndicated across devices. I'm very rarely the one to ask "what are you talking about?" and constantly the one to explain topics. It's okay, being the AP of your social circles isn't the worst role to fill.

But it does something to you, doesn't it? I feel like my view of this world has darkened over the years. I'm only thirty years old now and I feel like we're headed for disaster on a dozen different concurrent tracks. My view of man has become shrouded in a perpetual gloom, my idea of a future a cycnical dystopia.

I know that isn't fair or true, but it's become increasingly hard to think otherwise.

This sentiment brings to mind the movement to Design for Time Well Spent[0]. I don't know how the movement is doing. But I like to keep its principles in mind whenever I inflict things upon others.

[0]: http://timewellspent.io/

More broadly, the best thing I've done for my focus and mental health is slowing and controlling my information intake. Disabling push notifications, choosing aggregators over direct feeds, and reading international sites for domestic news have all helped reduce and refine my intake. Beyond technical approaches, I've pushed news out of my social media feeds and self-imposed a ban on on-going "personal drama" news stories (Casey Anthony, Oscar Pistorius, etc).

This has been good in itself, and has also come with surprising side benefits. I read more long-form content, not by force of will but because I have less occupying my 'media consumption' time. I also consume more "pre-digested" stories - that can lead to spin issues, but it also cuts down on emotional immediacy. I'd rather go through an interesting historical account of a crime than hear about every stage of the unfolding investigation.

I've come to value "no new inputs" time more than almost all of my active input stretches. I can't overstate the value of that processing time.

I also think unplugging for an entire week or more every year is healthy. Go camping for a week, or go somewhere remote, and get the hell away from the computer and phone.

Making similar arguments, Tim Ferriss introduced concepts he called the "media fast" and "low information diet" when he published The 4-Hour Workweek back in 2007. The overarching idea was that you should devote some time and energy to actively identifying the least useful information you're consuming, and stop consuming it. IIRC, his taxonomy was that information which requires your action or affects you directly in the near future is useful, everything else is not. So he didn't follow election coverage at all for example.

I still think of this as one of the most useful ideas I've ever come across and have taken it pretty far over the years, for instance disabling all notifications on my phone, culling my Facebook feed very aggressively (and uninstalling their app), and following very few media sources--because most news is non-useful in this sense. It definitely gives me more peace of mind, and when I slip and start reading more crappy useless information I notice myself getting more anxious.

It's also made me feel that the world would be better off without ad-based media as we know it, because the companies which publish it are the ones most responsible for putting out this low information, amygdala-terrorizing crap. If you really need it (and you probably don't), you can get a pretty good, reasonably unbiased feed of what's going on in the world via news wires like Reuters and AP. But we have this giant industry which basically spins and distorts what those organizations produce, slaps ads on it, produces clickbaity headlines and gives it to you for free. It's free because deep down inside, we all know it's not useful. If it was useful we'd pay for it. We're reading it because our lizard brain hungers.

What if what we are seeing is that what used to be mainstream media is now niche media, though it is still distributed through the same channels? What if the fringe is the same, it is just that the mainstream no longer watches tv, or that cord cutters are politically similar in a way that upset the previous equilibrium?

Alternate theory with the same implication: what if television advertising has become so marginal that it no longer supports the serious business framework it once had?

Either way, my theory can be phrased as: What if television has become fringe media?

The funny thing is though, the anxieties that you see on TV are pretty much fear of anything but those things. You will see big-league fear-mongers using "hit them harder" with more extraordinary rendition and "climate change is a con to handicap us" lines of thought.

Not my government, but still I can't help but wonder why it should matter that they are American citizens. A very large multiple of citizens of other countries is murdered in this way and from where I'm sitting I don't see much difference between the two.

Critical thinking, this is the antidote. Protect your mind with critical thinking, and don't let any idea enter unscrutinized. It's better to dismiss it then let it enter unscrutinized. But don't dismiss everything, or you'll develop confirmation bias. Put in the effort to reflect on/research some of them..

> Our government, in the last 8 years, used remotely operated drones to carry out extrajudicial killings of American citizens -- including a teenage boy.

Governments have done all manner of terrible things to their own people and others throughout history. What's new in this era is it's becoming harder and harder to hide such acts.

That means, as a citizenry, we're collectively confronted with topics which, in the past, were kept hidden from us. That in turn means we have more "triggers" of fearful responses, and of course industries are growing to exploit that, but ultimately we're talking about something which is a Good Thing(TM).

A lot of the most potent fears are black swan issues - something like bioweapons terrorism obviously isn't going to be reflected in everyday murder rates. Other issues are predictable and measurable, but not yet devastating. Environmental issues - not just warming, but things like drought and antibiotic resistance - are real and obvious problems. The fact that their harms will be suffered in the near future rather than now is no reason to neglect them.

Very simply, the statistical argument for current safety is true but unrelated to a lot of what concerns us.

I'm curious about this. Care to point to some references on this?

Just imagine for a second how it would be living in a world without penicillin. You will realise that your fear is caused by the pigbearman.

I have a feeling the future will look more like the past than we'd like to believe. That eventually, similar to banner-blindness, we'll develop clickbait-blindness and long form, carefully researched and nuanced pieces will be a prerequisite if one wants attention.

That or /r/forwardsfromgrandma, but I hope it's the former.

No, it's the result of leaving nonfiction communication to the lowest-common-denominator of market forces. Just look at Great Britain: sure, they've got Rupert Murdoch, but they've also got the BBC.

I value a well-researched, well-analyzed, 3000 word Guardian piece far more than a 200 word CNN piece. But if I click through one of the former and three of the latter, I'm conveying (roughly) three times the value to CNN. And if I click a link, the 'transaction' is made (for CPC, at least); it doesn't matter if I hate the piece and click away.

This has left us in a place where you can either be niche (producing high user value) or manipulative (producing high user volume). Both interfere with detailed, consensus-reality news. Thoughtful, public-interest journalism in the vein of Murrow is the lowest-profit option for embedded advertising.

We've incentivized for a news model which is not just hostile to society, but hostile to users. I don't want my how-to guides to come as slideshows with slow page refreshes between panels, but that's what I get. And I don't want my news to come as hyperbolic fear-mongering with clickbait headlines, but that's also what I get.

So I think we're a little doomed, because humans inherently respond to drama and uncertainty, so we get a race to the bottom. But not truly doomed - I value lots of other things as well, and it's the monetization model that emphasizes our baser instincts. We don't need to nobly abandon market forces, just find a way to monetize that's based on something deeper than "pages loaded".

sure, all you need to fix that is a prescription for the latest anti depressants that the nice pharmaceutical companies have made to help you deal with all the existential angst that our society has been engineered to cause you.

It was NEVER top of mind. Remember, the only news was evening broadcasts for 30 minutes or ap/upi reports in local papers. New York times didn't make it to my state except Sundays. It was NEVER a conversation growing up. Back then to find out if your team won you would have to wait for the paper 2 days later if it was not the local team.

<drafted into a WWII or Vietnam War situation would feel like We

Wwii everyone enlisted. No question. Different times. Vietnam draft was real anxiety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After

The early boomers were scarred somewhat (and still are) by red menace training. They might take stuff like Red Dawn as a serious drama, while it was a bit more like Rushmore for the rest of us.

If they had Facebook back in the days of the cold war, the country would have gone insane with fear in less than 1 year. Social media is an amplifier for base, brutish emotions.

If you want a fear based church, there's still some that handle snakes in Kentucky (despite being illegal). But these are closed-set churches, that some poor souls are born into. We don't see growing attendance or large community involvement in these places.

I agree with your overall point that a different apocalyptic view is becoming the mainstream in religious circles: that the end-times is imminent. I disagree that the religious systems are the cause; I believe that these viewpoints are becoming more popular as anxiety increases among these groups. Rural (Evangelical) Americans are genuinely experiencing decreased economic opportunity; young Muslims in Europe also experience an inability to be accepted in society and are locked out of the job market far worse than Christian youth.

I don't disagree with your analysis but I thought I should add some more information because I think it's interesting.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennialism#Reformation_and_...

Rolling Stone did retract the story, and has done some considerble introspection on the topic.

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/a-rape-on-campu...

A key point of the story for me, having seen multiple other instances of people claiming narratives which proved false, is that it is difficult to guard against someone who is committed to telling and promoting untruth. The more so if the person appeals to you as sympathetic or persuasive. This is at the very heart of the con.

It's why being both compassionate to someone who's claiming wrongdoing, and making triply-certain you've dotted all 'i's and crossed all 't's is so crucial.

Hoaxes and (bogus) conspiracy stories, financial and business cons, and political cons work like this. They press all our psychological levers which are geared toward belief, and twist them. Piltdown Man, Crop Circles, Clever Hans (the more so as the perpetrator himself was by all accounts among the deceived), the Chess Turk, and other hoaxes.

I could draw more examples from current headlines, though that might prove more divisive.

You are correct that it's global, though like many negative-cultural things, America is currently clearly "leading" the way, and the west of the developed world is trailing far behind, though, unfortunately, they are trying to catch up.

I think fear is a natural human attribute left over from an earlier time in human existence, I really do.

From a young age, if we're lucky enough to have parents, we flock to them because we perceive that the monster under the bed will get us.

In our teenage years, we fear the next steps of our lives and I'd dare say that even the most introverted kid wants to fit in.

In our twenties, we fear being successful or not.

These are gross oversimplifications, but I think the point is illustrated. I think there are two parts to this fear thing. I think we humans are naturally fearful due to thousands of years of biology, and I think we look to leaders out of fear, there's certainly enough evidence of this if you just look at society as a whole and how we behave. Time and time again, societies throughout history look to leaders to placate our fears. The Stanley Milgram experiments touch on this too.

Now for what I perceive to be the dark part of this whole thing. Our leaders have learned that we can be controlled through fear. I say learned, but I possibly mean that this is biological too. If you look back throughout societies, all great societies either were, or eventually became autocratic. We live for someone else to make the scary monsters go away.

Sadly, I think we need fear. Have a look at the Universe 25 experiments to see what happens when a society has all needs met. Spoiler: It appears to end in death and mentally ill behavior.

Also is the shift from mass broadcasting to targeted messaging. The degree of information available to exploit you, your weaknesses and biases is a new phenomenon.

The erosion of social loyalties and ties, which can be linked to one century of neoliberal policies, is also a change (although it happened in the past: see the Corruption and decline of Rome: http://www.historytoday.com/stephen-williams/corruption-and-...)

And that is western world. Look elsewhere, you can find tons of inescapable unfair misery (150 million dalits in india, anyone?).

Add peer pressure, instant seeing of highlights of other's lives which makes some depressed.

I do think there is actual corruption on all sides, simply because of the fact that money and campaign donations are such huge factors in the political process. I think every American should be horrified by this and should be doing everything they can to take money out of what is effectively our hiring process for high-level government officials.

However, I fear that this is not what [some survey] picked up on. I fear that [some survey] picked up on fans of politician X believing X's accusations of corruption on the part of politician Y were true, while simultaneously not believing allegations of corruption about their own candidate. And vice versa. I fear that all [some survey] picked up on is the sheer toxicity of the process nowadays, and not people who are concerned about the integrity of the political process itself.

Same goes for some friends that I'm not in active contact with.

You can disagree with how other people conduct their lives, but I'd be careful to conclude it's "brainwashing".

Social media is what you make of it. If the beginning and end of your exposure to current events, politics, and information is Facebook, then yes, there's likely to be some uninformed opinions being created.

I have the same experience when I ask people why they read The New York Times.

By whom? And does this entity know whether or not you already have your share of anxiety?

(if it's yanked off youtube before you can watch, the title is 'hypernormalisation')

This isn't just America. See the brexit vote.

America is the same. Despite all of the rhetoric about the election, gun violence, and policing the US is largely a safe and stable country. Are there major issues to address? Sure - but every country has those (Europe has seen a similar rise in politicians such as Trump, every OECD country is having similar growing pains related to the changes in employment/housing patterns, and violence related to gangs/drugs is an issue just about everywhere).

The challenge of course is to stay aware of the issues facing the world and society without getting caught up in the fear. Stability doesn't make addressing issues such as police shootings, mass surveillance, or terrorism are any less important.

  > Well maybe we should stop backing people into a corner then?

  > For example, why don't back down on immigration?

For example, if my country Germany is any guide, the parts of the country with the most fear of immigration are the ones least affected by it! Given that missing connection, how would it solve anything to listen to the demand of people in those regions to limit immigration?

I agree with you - but only if the people demanding something are actually affected by it, both ways (i.e. by the thing itself as well as by what they demand).

We've already seen this kind of thing (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-37227313) happening more after Brexit. Listening to people who are dangerously wrong on the facts just encourages other people to agree with them.

Whatever the right word for people who turn on immigrants like that is, it's definitely not scared. They're the ones doing the scaring.

Likewise with refugees: there's not really any policy change we can make to stop refugees coming, other than trying to fix the conflict they're fleeing. They're already fleeing death, you're not going to scare them with paperwork. Are you going to deport them (including women and children) to a warzone?

(It's rather like crime: the amount of crime you and your family have ever experienced is a number that can only go up, whereas the probability of becoming a victim has been generally declining over time. So people think crime is rising when it isn't.)

At the same time, these same communications mechanisms allow falsehoods to be debunked much more effectively, assuming that readers would rather believe hard boring truths than comfortable exciting falsehoods. Then again, I've seen enough people (even on HN!) say things like, "I would rather be passionate about a lie than bored by a truth" (paraphrasing) that I wonder if even this is true.