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Comment by scottlocklin | Hacker News Reader

The alienation in the US very obviously has nothing to do with the internet, and in fact, I'd say the internet helped people be less alienated. I say this because pretty much every country is as online as the US is, and doesn't have the problems the US does.

The US is alienated from widespread fear of crime, immigration (aka the actual sociological results of Robert Putnam, rather than the yammerings of some Buzzfeed wanker), poisonous oligarch funded divisive politics, and the general disintegration of anything resembling a family life or social fabric in US society. There are various obvious ways of decreasing social alienation in US society; the problem with that is, most people aren't going to like it. The opposite of alienation and social atomization is basically conformity and homogeneity, and that's bad for business; and especially bad for the oligarch types who engender this kind of alienation.

Fiddling with the internet in a futile attempt to decrease social alienation is like buying a tank top to increase your physical fitness.

View on HN

>The opposite of alienation and social atomization is basically conformity and homogeneity, and that's bad for business; and especially bad for the oligarch types who engender this kind of alienation.

I'd say the opposite: the individuality in alienation is faux individuality. The individual today is "individual" by their clothing choices, consumption patterns, etc, where everything is if not mass produced, still mediated by money in a market ("underground" and "alternative" consumption is still consumption, not some original expression of self).

Add to that the widespread lack of social safety nets, non-support from community, friends, and even family, and individuals become obedient cogs to get their next meal.

It's in the non-alienated societies where the individual can be truly non-conformant and more unique, because the uniqueness there can be an actual personal expression (e.g. the old eccentrics), and because community support means the individual is stronger against the state, market forces, etc.

There are concessions to be made to get that community support, but few as heavy as the modern state/society/market/boss imposes on the individual (and they are based on historical prejudices which could be overcome within the same community - e.g against being gay - not in the inherent way the system functions - by making people consume as much as they can, nickel and dime them, treat them as redundant if they don't have money, etc- as are the modern concessions).

Consumption doesn't prevent individuality. Not growing my own food doesn't make me a fashion victim.

And yet, statistically it does.

People not "growing their own food" buy into all kind of food trends, not to mention a whole nation sticking to 30-50 nationwide chains (restaurants, food brands, etc) for the huge majority of their food.

Compared to an American of 70-80 years ago, or a modern French or Italian person this is huge conformism and sheep like consumption. And food is one of the most essential things in our life (not to mention the health implications).

Although this is not about "growing own's own food". You can still buy your own food without modern consumerism, as societies have done since forever in farmers markets, etc (and people still do in other parts of the world), where the food is not mass produced and branded by 10 major chains, nor the restaurant choices are 20-30 nation wide chains.

I think you are confusing individualism with self-sufficiency

That's an interesting idea.

Perhaps we should hope for the emergence of "be self-sufficient" as a separately motivating idea from "be an individual"?

Then maybe the instincts driving unhappy individualism would subside a bit.

Because the instinct towards sufficiency is presumably a strong one, underlying much of life, whether conscious or not. So I imagine that when the two concepts are blurred together, the instinct towards sufficiency causes people to be driven to differentiate themselves as individuals. For example, by leaving the places where they were raised, in the hope of becoming "different" from the people they grew up with.

it s not a specific idea, the concepts of individualism and self-sufficiency are orthogonal . in developed societies, markets have replaced the social dependency on each other because people want to be more individualistic. i don't think people are unhappy being individualists

Maybe we mean different things by self-sufficiency.

By self-sufficiency, I mean capable of doing well within the context of modern developed societies and their systems. Not ruggedly off-grid sufficient.

The markets don't work too well, even for individualism, when people cannot get what they need from those markets. People are often forced to conform to get what they need.

>in developed societies, markets have replaced the social dependency on each other because people want to be more individualistic

In developed societies markets have replaced the social dependency on each other through legislation, gunpower, and policies that closed down communal ways of living and forced people to seek (much worse) work in towns and factories -- often against much protest from the people subjected to that. Further laws made small scale production impossible or near, and mass production mandatory. And much later (around the '30s or so) followed advertising and other means to expand this even more through constant low-intensity brainwashing.

In the process people became less individualistic -- often confined for hours on end to the same cubicle, to come back home exhausted from some meaningless commute, in a meaningless job.

This confuses individualistic with isolated.

I'm not. In fact, I posit the opposite, that one enabler of individuality is through community support, as it means that "the individual is stronger against the state, market forces, etc."

That said, some self-sufficiency is required too. Someone that has to yield to all kinds of powers to survive because they're not self-sufficient, can't ascertain their individuality either.

> I'd say the opposite: the individuality in alienation is faux individuality.

You're not saying the opposite; atomization is good for business, and yes, it's totally fake. There's a dipshit on the same flight as me wearing a dragon tail. He probably thinks he's bold and original, but he's a weeb who participates in an infantile marketing subculture. I'm sure he'll keep people in the pharmaceutical industry employed for decades to come.

>Fiddling with the internet in a futile attempt to decrease social alienation is like buying a tank top to increase your physical fitness.

Disagree. For the innovators out there, please keep fiddling.

Funny how I can interact with strangers in the real-world and sometimes walk away refreshed but I am not sure there's a single time I have ever read a stream of tweets from strangers and felt anything but anger and nausea?

Reading unrefined emotive sentences has the damning effect of "this is a proclamation, this must be true!"

Where-as if you had the conversation with a stranger, you would realize there are dramatic pauses, "umms" where they aren't so certain of their statement, trailing inflections in their voice where they're actually asking a question instead of making a statement.

Most people are not sophisticated enough to write in a way that accurately conveys their emotions.

So the tweets all read as grand proclamations.

And it sucks. Participating in these "social" sites cause stress.

Keep iterating. How can we experience online, the emotion of in-person chats? Video chats are from perfect and come off stale and more akin to the experience of a CB Radio.

Async video group chat - all participants record video clips/responses? Along with fairly accurate transcriptions of the video, so that the content can be searched?

Why do you allow yourself to feel anger and nausea over something as trivial as a tweet? Social media is just entertainment and a game, not something that sensible people actually take seriously.

Oh boy, I have to tell you about this old guy from New York...

I wonder how many millions of productivity hours have been lost in the past 3 years as people direct all of their emotional energy at the president

Few people are so perfectly stoic as you presume. Often times spreading anger is the game people are playing on Twitter, and it spreads like a virus. Emotions are contagious.

It doesn't take perfect stoicism not to react with anger and nausea to every expression one encounters on social media. Most people aren't that sensitive.

I suspect this is the social adaptation that the generation that grows us with Twitter will have. Unfortunately, it may be hard to adapt to for those that weren't. I'm somewhere in the middle and I've mostly just chosen to dial down my interaction with politics online because I noticed it made me less happy.

I agree that it shouldn’t be taken seriously (or even just not participated in), but not everyone is a master of stoic detachment. Some people cannot help but have strong emotional reactions to things like this.

And that is precisely why everyone should study stoic philosophy and seek to become a master of stoic detachment. The ability to control our reactions is what separates humans from lower animals.

I have to agree. The internet is a badly distorted view of reality. Who cares if some wacko posts some crazy stuff online?

When the Tweet expresses some abhorrent view (like "she deserves to be treated badly because she is $RACE", terrorism apologism, etc) and it garners hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets, it causes me quite a lot of stress, doubly so if it comes from or is endorsed by major publications or political officials.

Arguably, I shouldn't feel stress for things so far beyond my control, but at the same time I have a vested interest in my community and its future (and if so many people feel this way, it certainly _feels_ like a credible threat).

I think stress is natural reaction to learning that your community has abhorrent views, but you could train yourself to minimise that reaction in a stoic manner.

Training is in many ways a body thing as well as mind. E.g. learning to modulate fear and disgust reactions, heart rate, breathe so as to let the adrenalin spike pass (if you want), change muscle posture, etc.

And you should anyway on intellectual grounds, because words' intepretion is often different, at least in degree and shades and layers of meaning, than the intent of their author. For example "$X apologism" is often a misinterpretation of words someone was using to try to reduce the amount of $X in the world (due to the world and people being complicated). Many issues are "no matter what you say, or where you are coming from, someone will think you mean almost the opposite, and sometimes they have a vested interest in thinking that".

But reducing stress doesn't have to mean stop caring.

It can make you more effective at caring.

For anyone with an interest in their community and its future, I'd advocate for deciding which reactions to keep, maybe even develop (e.g. various ways to channel anger constructively, such as politics, community organising, creating new institutions), and training yourself to reduce stress and other intense reactions that you decide are not so helpful (e.g. anxiety from watching the news).

My main point is to encourage people to think of stress and anger as being a mix of constructive and destructive types.

My approach these days is to first try to overcome my anger and despair at knowing how many people seem to think what they do, and when I (eventually!) calm down, ask myself how can I affect the world to change this. I must admit, it is challenging these days because I've come to think of large numbers of my fellow humans as jerks who are happiest when damaging others!

But it isn't a game.

A made up example to illustrate:

Say 100,000 people from your locale +1 the tweet "she probably deserved to get raped [euphemism for gang-raped and murdered brutally while guys are laughing, recording it on their phones and sharing it with their mates], women need to be reminded of their place, those guys should be let off", and 1,000 people reply with about half of them approving, that's a serious, non-game signal about the real world in your locale.

A signal that tells you something life-threateningly important about the people around you, how they think when they see you, what you should be looking to protect yourself from, and how.

If it was just a game, you could safely ignore the words.

But it isn't just personal safety: Those balance of opinions end up determining how the local police think. Do they investigate, or do they brush it under the carpet? How the local government officials think. What they prioritise, what they even care about. Whether anyone even gets prosecuted, what the law ends up being. Even who ends up in government.

Now, although that's a strong example with details made up (but not unrealistic, sadly), there are countless examples on social media where it is clear that the tweets, likes, comments and other things have a large, profound, physical effect on many people's lives if you trace the effect of the influence of words.

Because behind a tweet is a person. A person with a mentality to think a certain way. A way that might be harmful to you. A way other people think. The tweet itself is nothing, but what it represents can be massive.

If someone tweets that all left handed users of hacker news who use custom CSS should be banned from the internet, no one gets mad because that tweet doesn't represent some widespread group of humans. It is so outside expectations people will assume it is sarcastic, but even if they were convinced it was real, unless it came from someone in power or showed traction, it would be ignored and none would be mad.

When someone tweets that you doing something you see as natural should result in you being imprisoned under threat of death, and there are entirely communities backing that view and perhaps even a history of people being imprisoned for the same, it gets far more personal.

Much of the time I'm pretty sure it's not a person behind a tweet (or reaction to a tweet). Lots of bots out there now. And even when there is a person tweeting, many of them are trolls or paid provocateurs. The whole platform is a total joke. If you take it personally then you're missing the point.

It's not just the loss of data in communication, though that might be part of it, it's our lack of mechanisms to deal with the scaling of the number of interlocutors. If you messages are being read by 1000s of people it is a certainty some will be psychos of one shape or another. The medium will reward with attention precisely the unhinged who will say the most extreme nonsense with little fear of real world repercussions.

I wonder if there could be an online equivalent to the premise "say it to my face".

Meaning, if you wanted to tweet/response at me, you should be required to see my emotional response to it in real-time, and you must be open to me asking any follow up questions to your response.

And if you're not open to that, you don't get to respond to me.

You'd have people queuing up to insult you so they could watch the reaction.

The real world "say it to my face" really means "say it somewhere I can fight you if you're rude enough".

Yes. The underlying threat of violence, or at the very least social exclusion, if one goes too far is what keeps most in person conversations far more civilized than their online counterparts.

Social exclusion works online -- and did work on usenet, until platform owners disabled it in order to promote engagement/enragement for ad impressions.

A little bit. It was a lot easier to escape exclusion by changing your identity in Usenet compared with the real world so motivated trolls would often do that.

Not really - it certainly didn't work against spammers, and the whole thing was entirely unauthenticated.

Even assuming the correctness of your argument, the threat of violence only applies where it is credible. Strong bullies aren't intimidated by their victims, men generally aren't intimidated by women, and so on.

There is in fact an orthogonal effect where people will fear expression in the face of violence. Is "civilized" expression dominated by the strong better than the rudeness of online communication, where there are different power dynamics? I don't know, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.

Perahps at least a portion of the "uncivilized" speech you see online is the outcry of those who are not allowed to express their opinions elsewhere.

You assume one-on-one conversations. In a group setting even a strong bully can be subdued by the group. In such a group, a man isn't going to be allowed to insult a woman without other men stepping in. But you bring a good point. Should insulting, disrupting voices be tolerated in a conversation in the name of freedom of speech? I would say no, because they make further speech impossible, but I see the problem in deciding what constitutes disruption/insults.

That's the real-world implications of an in-person conversation.

Obviously extending this to online, two people could be far from each other. But it still would require one person to see the emotional response from the other, which may or may not be pleasant.

Not exactly, the real world implications could go well beyond observing your targets emotional response.

And how would that work exactly? Strap the other person into a chair and force them to watch you "Clockwork Orange" style?

As an adult your emotional responses to communication are entirely your own affair.

> Async video group chat - all participants record video clips/responses

Isn't that Snapchat?

> I am not sure there's a single time I have ever read a stream of tweets from strangers and felt anything but anger and nausea?

Don't read those people then?

It is a bit of an art to find a Twitter community who are nice, but fandoms are generally a better place to start than politics.

>Isn't that Snapchat?

No. Video isn't required. Texting is allowed and used liberally with Snap.

Snap's consumption of video tends to be one way - from the followee to the follower. Or two friends, one sends video, the other sends a text response.

With my idea, the required video response clips would force participants to reveal themselves. Their mannerisms, their current emotional state.

Ahahaha, good luck finding non-toxic communities on fandom twitter, I've spent many years organizing community events and have given up on that platform for fandom fun considering the near daily dogpiles and harassment campaigns I see. And I wish that was an exaggeration.

> Funny how I can interact with strangers in the real-world and sometimes walk away refreshed but I am not sure there's a single time I have ever read a stream of tweets from strangers and felt anything but anger and nausea?

Really? I find the opposite. There are few people I can talk to for hours, most face to face communication even with people I like is exhausting after just a few minutes. But I can spend all day online and feel refreshed.

Granted I stay away from cesspools like Twitter. Really I go out of my way to not spend time online in places that don't add some sort of value to my life.

I think it's a difference in communication preferences that gets magnified by your environment growing up.

Short: 'Censoring Digital and Social Fake'?

REM: 'Tyrannys have concentrated views.'

I think the difference is the GP is thinking of cesspools like Twitter, and you're thinking of more uplifting communities.

This hasn't been my experience, I regularly see interesting and refreshing stuff linked from Twitter. The Outer Worlds bug thread was only a few days ago[0]. Here's another story about deaf astronauts if you want something recent that's more general than programming.[1]

I do think there are things we can do better, and I don't think everything is fine, and on average I even advise people to stay away from sites like Twitter -- I don't think they're super-healthy right now. But overall even the toxic parts of the Internet I frequent (like Twitter) are not nearly as toxic as people make them out to be.

There's been this kind of push in the media lately that maybe all of this was a mistake, and that's just laughable to me. Of course the Internet has been a net good for society. There are a lot of problems, and a lot of stuff I hate, but I am overall trending towards optimistic, not pessimistic -- especially when I look at efforts like Mastodon, PeerTube, and Matrix. I think the Internet is rough, but not fundamentally flawed. So please keep iterating, but also stop being so pessimistic. The Internet is honestly kind of good. We did a good job building it.

I was thinking the other day -- I need to start indexing some of the things I see online that make me happy, so when I see comments like this I can just more quickly list them out.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21779583

[1]: https://twitter.com/TheSpaceGal/status/1205258285412020225

I think a big part of why there is so much antagonism in Twitter threads, Facebook politics and the like, is due to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.

Even if people weren't actually more angry online, and even if communications in text didn't come across as more antagonistic, the BAP tends to amplify the negative in any large group.

Closely related is the way that it only takes a Tiny Number Of Assholes to ruin things for a large group. That happens in verbal discourse, face to face social groups, and community organisations too.

The effects on targetted individuals can be devastatingly traumatic, and sometimes take years to recover from, especially when they interact with other difficult things happening in people's lives. It's hardly surprising, if some people's lives are turned upside down completely, that for a larger circle of people in the vicinity there's an instinct towards unhappiness and anger in general, just from proximity, without necessarily having a clear, fixed target.

If we can ever figure out how to create a Bullshit and Asshole Damage dampening field, that would be great.

I think it is worth mentioning that those fears are largely unfounded. The US is a much safer country today than it was 20-30 years ago. Especially the situation and social standing for many black Americans have improved tremendously. The US is not unique in that -- crime has fallen in most of the Western world -- yet people are more afraid than ever!

That may be true, but media has warped out perceptions. The internet makes every mass shooting and earthquake and police brutality instantly reported to the entire planet and so the perception is that we are in more danger than ever before.

> widespread fear of crime, immigration (aka the actual sociological results of Robert Putnam, rather than the yammerings of some Buzzfeed wanker), poisonous oligarch funded divisive politics, and the general disintegration of anything resembling a family life or social fabric

This is just a collection of sky-is-falling narratives promoted in the media. Stop letting the endless cycle of negative political and media fads drag you around mentally and emotionally, and instead focus on improving your personal health and the lives of those around you in actual reality.

The fact is that people are being dragged around mentally and emotionally, and telling tens of millions of people to just stop doesn't seem particularly likely to reverse the trend. This is a systemic problem and it demands a systemic response. That response could well be public education programs for processing fear mongering (if you can overcome the obvious political problems).

I thought I'd share a snippet from Robert Putnam's research, since you mention it, and I wasn't previously familiar:

> In the short run, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. In ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9477....

In the United States and the West more broadly, we need to begin thinking about immigration with a more rigorous and serious perspective. The US is built on immigration and I want us to have a robust immigration system, but it's important to recognize that immigration must be managed and take into account social, cultural and economic realities. In recent decades it seems we have disregarded these considerations, allowing both illegal and legal immigration to rise year after year without any reflection on the broader negative impacts this massive influx of people may have.

I want to stress that the large majority of people coming into the US are probably good people, but that doesn't mean we are free to ignore the possible systemic effects of mass immigration. Good intentions can often lead to negative outcomes when we don't look beyond the immediate future and our idealized conception of things.

It doesn't help that any discussion around reducing immigration is immediately slandered as racist. How deluded have we become when even attempts at reducing illegal immigration are ridiculed and rejected?

I'm not sure you have a choice in this. Climate change is going to cause a huge increase in the number of migrants.

Rather like the drug war, the war on immigration requires exponentially increasing violence to maintain. How many dead south Americans is US social cohesion worth?

>the war on immigration requires exponentially increasing violence to maintain

This claim is flat out wrong.

Deporting people and building a wall doesn't have to cost any lives.

Depends if you think "ruining someone's life", "separating children from their parents", "breaking up married couples", "destroying someone's legitimate business", "forcing someone to live in an alien place with a language and culture they have never known" or "abruptly terminating someone's life-critical healthcare" counts as costing lives.

I guess they usually don't die...

Laws must be upheld and people who break them must be held accountable for their actions. The nations most migrants are running from are lawless nations. Because they are lawless, they are not particularly good places to live. That's why people leave and come to America, which is an amazing place to live in large part because we are a nation of laws.

I want it to stay that way.

Most migrants are not running from lawless nations. Fact.

A large number of deported migrants are not running from any nation at all - many of them were raised from a young age in the country that will deport them once they become adults. They have known nowhere else; it is cruel and arguably immoral to send those somewhere else.

Some of them will be surprised, as they won't know they were from somewhere else.

Another large number are people from different countries who simply fell in love and want to be together in spite of law preventing them from doing so legally. It is cruel and arguably immoral to prevent them from being together.

A third large class are not breaking any law at all, it is the authorities breaking the law by not applying their own rules correctly or consistently. See also "deport first, appeal later" legal systems, where of course you can't really appeal once deported as it is impractical to do so.

A fourth class are people for whom the law is simply arcane and insane. For example people deported because one of their bank accounts dipped briefly below some threshold for a moment and there is an arcane rule saying it is not allowed. Or for not having long held a class of insurance that nobody knew about until one day people were being told to leave for not having it, and nobody can say how to obtain it anyway. Or for correcting a minor error caused by their accountant in their tax return, as encouraged by the authorities, and then being labelled a terrorist and threat to nations all over the world due to abusive misapplication of "bad character" law that wasn't created to be used that way.

And then there is the fact that nations of laws change their laws from time to time. Causing people who were once legally entitled to permanent residency to become unwelcome overnight.

You missed the next two sentences which paint the complete picture:

>In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross‐cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.

In short, short-term pain and long-term gains.

That's not what the study says. It's more: short-term pain and maybe (hopefully) less pain in the long-term.

Besides, I'm not sure how applicable the examples given in the study are to a modern nation state. (You can't run a nation like a military, and religion and nationalism are on the decline, so those are probably not sources of future social cohesion either.)

These 'more encompassing identities' have limited applicability. For example, Polish-, English-, and German-Americans no longer view themselves as separate from each-other, but they still see themselves as separate from African- and Asian-Americans. They've all been in the US for a few centuries now, so it's not limited to a short-term effect.

If you look at other parts of the world, the development of more encompassing identities is anything but guaranteed. From the Bosniaks, Uyghurs, or Roma, groups can live side by side for centuries, without developing joint identities, or developing very fragile ones.

So pretty much the opposite of the identity BS that drives so much of the culture war.

in the long run, there is peace. in the short run ...

this is why Toronto is one of the most multi-cultural and also depressing and coldest cities

Seconding your though. A very good observation about this is that "letting masses into the internets" is very much like the historical period in Europe when popular masses got their hands on the printing press.

Did people immediately utilised the press as a tool of mass enlightenment, and began printing academic literature? No...

The very first popular printed literature were books on witchcraft and on Jew/Moor/Huguenot/Hussite burning.

I love this point, assuming it’s historically accurate. Gives me hope that the issues around privacy, disinformation campaigns, walled gardens, and more, are mostly just inevitable growing pains from trying to harness this incredible capability we’ve built.

This never stopped. Popular stuff is usually unoriginal and mediocre. It s not going to change

> The opposite of alienation and social atomization is basically conformity and homogeneity

Not sure I agree with that, you don't have to be like other people to get along with them. A strong social fabric at it's root is things like being willing to talk to all walks of life and not nurturing a fear of the unknown.

>Not sure I agree with that, you don't have to be like other people to get along with them.

I can't think of a single example of a heterogeneous society that has lasted a comparably long time. Would you care to point to one, or cite some studies to show their effectiveness vs those that are homogeneous in nature?

I'd argue that a strong sense of shared identity, such as that provided previously by religion in the West, and which still currently holds strength elsewhere, is crucial to the success of a given society. The War state, and then post-War state, of the West also had a strong sense of shared identity and bound together as a result. Evidence points towards it.

The current state of the West is a testament to the disarray caused in a heterogeneous society with no sense of shared identity and the mutual obligations that result from it. The divisions and gaps are only widening, the issues around it are only becoming worse, and those who stand to benefit from it are using it to its full advantage.

>I can't think of a single example of a heterogeneous society that has lasted a comparably long time.

Comparable to what?

I mean, just as one well known and google-able example, the Roman empire was obviously thoroughly heterogeneous. Maybe the key is that most people couldn't really travel? So no one from Lutetia ever really knew any woman from Alexandria for instance. Whereas today in Paris, obviously, a large number of people know people from Alexandria.

EDIT: I realize that if you were in the Roman Army, you were an exception to the general rule of people not knowing people from other parts of the empire. Obviously, Romans had to fight together against the barbarians. (Or rather, against the other future Romans.) But that would be an example of one of the few ways your average Joe in Marseille would get to know your average Joe in Leptis Magna.

But I digress. Most large, long lasting empires were not only enormous, but heterogeneous by necessity. Rome, China after warring states (even before actually), definitely Persia. In fact, I can't really think up any examples of contemporaneous homogeneous societies that could have even dreamed of competing with the historic behemoths.

I think the heterogeneity of empires is a contributing factor to their eventual dissolution though. They tend to last a century or two at their height, and then start to break apart as more cohesive nations emerge. That’s not such a long time as far as societies go.

And the issue at hand isn’t whether homogenous societies could “compete” with empires, but whether they’re more likely to persist (and have less alienation among the people).

But China, Persia, and Rome lasted a whole lot longer than a century or two.

If memory serves, most of the college books considered the height of Roman quality of life, as well as Roman influence in the world, to be the time of Diocletian's reign. (I think he was the tetrarchy guy, but people are free to correct me if there are real historians out there.) In any case, obviously Rome was heterogeneous, again just going by memory here, but it must have been at least before the first century BC. (Assuming the Bible is to be believed. Also, why else would we call it "BC" and "AD"?) So that's like, at least 4 centuries right there.

Persia you can probably go what? At least a thousand years. And that's assuming you only start at Cyrus the Great.

China is China. Different dynasties like the British, but even if you only counted the dynasties that ruled uncontested over all of the different ethnic groups, you'd be talking about a millennia or two at least as a political grouping whether by birthright, marriage or usurpation.

Just pointing out that while some heterogeneous empires certainly fail, all of the empires in mankind's history that were great and long lasting, were unquestionably heterogeneous. I mean, some people may correct me on some details here and there, but in essentials that can't even be debated. It's extremely difficult to take out these empires. And despite what is generally believed, the historical evidence indicates that well run empires are not at all likely to fail on their own. (Even in the face of élites fighting each other, well run places just stand by and watch the old emperor get assassinated, and then, Hey! New emperor in Rome today!) Even at their heights, unless you have a few millennia to wait for failure, they typically just haven't gone away as fast as the homogeneous empires have.

Subjugation is not multiculturalism though. Those cultures weren’t free

> I can't think of a single example of a heterogeneous society that has lasted a comparably long time.

Hellenistic Greece perhaps? Lasted for 300 years or more, and it was very diverse.

All empires were multi-ethnic, multi-religious. That doesn’t mean they were tolerant, of course, or that they did anything to promote tolerance and culture mixing. The fear of the emperor/king/sultan kept them all together.

Another example is Yugoslavia. Or USSR

The common ingredient in all of them: Unfree

It s perhaps not an accident that liberal democratic nation states were culturally homogeneous

Change causes instability. We are only just now entering an era when large segments of the population aren't defined by a large tribe like religion or where they were born. The instability right now is arguably the result of cultural whiplash as older generations and their view of themselves are heavily out of sync with how younger generations live their lives and see the world. In any case there are so many factors at play here that assigning multiculturalism as the key factor when it's always existed seems to be excluding a lot of other key issues.

It’s all well and good to encourage understanding and whatnot, but the question is what actually works in reality on a societal level. It might sound nice to say “a strong economic system is not based on greed but on a willingness of each person to contribute to the best of their ability,” but it turns out that philosophy doesn’t work very well when dealing with large groups of people. I think the same could be said about your statement.

you have to define "be like other people". Racially, you don't have to be, perhaps not even religious-wise. But try being a libertarian in sweden, or a boomer among millennials

>I'd say the internet helped people be less alienated.

Have you spent much time around teens to people in their early 20's? Social skills no longer exist or most of them. They can't look at you, they can't give you their attention, they can't carry a conversation in person. They stare at their phones, feeling underprivileged because their favorite social media accounts seem to have better, flashier, fancier lives than them so they too highly curate what they show to the world.

As a 34 year old I can look at the generation before me and the generation after me and see a stark difference in social skills.

You used to fall into one of a few groups, now everyone thinks they need to find individuals exactly like them which requires them to search the world far and wide to find someone that identifies as some random string of letters (not necessarily representative of their gender and sexual preferences).

I suspect people in general feel more alienated, more alone, than ever before in human history because of the internet.

Just in the past week there was a thread here on HN about a hair cutting robot and the number of people claiming that they hated having to go to the barber because, God forbid, the barber/stylist might attempt to talk to them [1] was just flat out shocking. They'd rather have a machine cut their hair than have to be around other human beings!

Go out to eat, or go walk around in a populated area (outside or inside). What do you see? People staring at screens, people with earbuds in, throngs of people ignoring each other to interact with strangers on the internet. People sitting at the same table, eating food, texting other people or even texting each other instead of having actual conversations.

Take something like a dating app. Instead of walking up to someone and saying hi, you mindlessly swipe pictures waiting for someone to swipe you back. Then your match tries to find all of your social media so they can quickly see if you are worth the effort of getting to know, instead of actually asking you questions and getting to know you.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21804089

Going to leave this here:

https://manybooks.net/titles/forstereother07machine_stops.ht...

"The Machine Stops is a short science fiction story. It describes a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in isolation in a 'cell', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Most humans welcome this development, as they are skeptical and fearful of first-hand experience. "

E.M. Forster wrote this in 1909

A bit of an aside, the barber issue is interesting. I used to hate getting my hair cut because the social interaction was awkward. But when I became better off financially and had higher appearance requirements professionally, I started going to a high price salon. Other than the first trip, never felt anxious or like my social skills were lacking. That wasn't really due to me suddenly becoming better at conversation, it was due to the higher price salons hiring those with good communication skills. Likely this goes beyond just making clients feel comfortable but also is a good skill to have to understand what it is the client wants done to their hair.

> from widespread fear of crime

But crime, particularly violent crime, is at or near historic lows.

Yes, but this is fear of crime. Over the past few decades, in general more Americans have believed crime is increasing than decreasing [1].

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1603/crime.aspx

I only went halfway down the page, but haven't yet stumbled upon the trend you're referring to?

The first few questions specifically asking about the topic show the opposite of what you claim.

The section I’m referring to is “Is there more crime in the U.S. than there was a year ago, or less?”.

Very interesting. The big swings in opinion don't seem timed to line up with national violent crime statistics. Maybe they correlate better with economic boom times and recessions. Or maybe perceptions are more weighted toward property crimes that have less reliable national statistics. Look at that dizzying drop in "more crime" responses between 1997 and 1998. The "more crime" responses stay low until 2002.

Or maybe there's just a lot of noise in the responses. "More crime" gained 10 points between 2004 and 2005.

There is not necessarily a direct relationship between the spread of crime and the spread of fear of crime. I see this as being related to the difference between risk and perceived risk.

Yes and the increased perception of crime is likely due to the US becoming a lower trust society than it previously was.

Yes, but if you watch the news that fact is never reported. Instead you get story after story of robbery, murder, assault ...etc.

TV news stations care about ratings, papers care about circulation. Fear stories keep people watching/reading.

However, this has been true for as long as news reporting has existed, but the level of paranoia and isolation in society has not always been as high as it is now (although there have been similar periods in the past).

I don't think that the nature of media reporting, while likely a factor, is a sufficient explanation.

There's also social media though, which amplifies everything for people who believe what they consume through those channels.

They would claim that all the paranoia, helicopter parenting, incarceration, worked to reduce crime

They can claim it, but all the objective evidence says they're wrong.

Well, I mean, the poster did mention:

>poisonous oligarch funded divisive politics

That is probably a large part of the reason people believe in the widespread crime myth.

Thats why I used the words "fear of crime." Mostly due to clickbait journalism and media lionizing of (alienated) whackjob mass murderers.

> There are various obvious ways of decreasing social alienation in US society; the problem with that is, most people aren't going to like it

There are also not-so-obvious ways. For example, returning to a society where most of our trips are on foot and transit rather than by the isolating and dehumanizing bubble of personal automotive.

As always with public policy, the question arises of what's the better way to address problems. The gulf from recognizing a problem and implementing policy to solve a problem is vast.

I've often thought that the loss of smoking means less mixing of classes that wouldn't have reason to say one word to each other.

Smoking creates small favors and the need to ask for them. Phones don't do this.

Honestly, as a Canadian the US society has always been fascinating to me.

Our sister country is so similar, yet so different, we have very compatible laws, have plenty of immigration and the same outlook on plenty of topics.

In addition, every single American I have interacted with , has been kind, cool and caring. Yet for some reason, Canadian society just seems healthier and more content, at least as far as the overall well being the population goes.

Perhaps I'm just too naive and am missing something obvious.

Canada just has better marketing. Canada's points-based immigration system, for example, would be decried as fascist by many Democrats: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/canada-imm....

> Canada, unlike the U.S., is a country where nearly all arrivals come in through the front door, in the open, during daylight hours.

> Almost everyone who immigrates to Canada has to first apply from overseas, and before they’re granted entry they’re subjected to extensive vetting by Canadian authorities. Those who make the cut have to wait months or years for their turn in line before being let in. Over the past 20 years, about 5 million immigrants chose Canada. But the vast majority only entered the country after Canada also chose them.

As someone who has lived in Canada, I would have to disagree. Canadians loves to talk about how much better their country is than the US, and it leads to a lot of stifling of self-criticism and justification “oh, at least we’re not as bad as the US”.

My point was more towards how our countries are so similar yet different. Of course Canada isn’t perfect by any means and you’re right, perhaps there is stifling of self criticism going on but we have a different attitude towards the social well being such as healthcare and accessible social services. Of course these come at a cost of making compromises such as paying higher taxes and relying heavily on fellow Americans for both security and trade.

Computers, not the internet, allowed for banks to issue and track huge sums of debt at near zero cost. This allowed land prices to trend up to the maximum possible amount that people could service the debt at.

This means people are now working as slaves for banks, making life pointless. This is why people are angry.

> This means people are now working as slaves for banks, making life pointless. This is why people are angry.

Many people, perhaps, but not all. Many, maybe most, of my friends and family are nothing like slaves for banks, and aren't carrying anything like a burdensome load of debt.

Are they people who either already had access to land, are in a high enough wealth bracket that they can purchase land, or don't care about owning land?

Perhaps the OP's statement could be modified to "Many people are angry because they care about owning land but are unable to do so without becoming slaves to banks".

A couple own land outright, but most don't care about owning land at all.

Your restatement makes more sense, but speaks to a specific subset of the general population.

> Many people, perhaps, but not all.

Yes.

> most, of my friends and family are nothing like slaves for bank

Anecdote.

> The alienation in the US very obviously has nothing to do with the internet, and in fact, I'd say the internet helped people be less alienated.

That is a very bold statement, with no data, that I can disprove by a simple counterfactual: me. I often feel more alienated because of the internet, mainly because I find it easier to replace "real" human interactions with, well, things like this, typing into a screen.

Of course, I have no idea if I'm representative of a significant sub-population of the US, but stating your opinion as a "very obvious", and somehow implying it is based in fact, is a logical fallacy.

You can replace US with Western Society, because everything you described I can find analogs too in the UK/Europe. Fear of immigrants - check, fear of crime from immigrants - check, oligarch funded politics - check (Brexit). Maybeeee, there is a touch of truth to the family part with the US's high incarceration rate for African-Americans that could impact families in ways that Europe doesn't have; but wage stagnation also means young adults aren't leaving the home as early as previously so there's that. I just don't think what you laid out is unique to the US.

>there is a touch of truth to the family part with the US's high incarceration rate for African-Americans that could impact families in ways that Europe doesn't have

Black americans are a minority though. So if they are, say 20% (which I don't think they are even that), what explains the alienation in the other 80%?

I'm not saying overall alienation isn't a fact. But the GP laid out a list of reasons why it was problematic in the US and my point was those reasons a) mostly aren't unique to the US and b) probably not as big a contributor to alienation as they think. The mentioning of the high incarceration rate was to address their specific reason that the US is somehow unique in no longer having cohesive family units.

I think you're not parsing his sentence the way he intended it to be read "alienated due to fear of immigration" vs "alienated due to immigration". Of course, the EU also have their own share of immigration, at least in the past few years. But even with a whopping 15% of their residents being foreign-born, often the remaining 85% look the same, sound the same, are members or atheist ex-members of the same church, etc

>The US is alienated from widespread fear of crime, immigration [...] It's roughly the same in Italy, are you sure that those problems are only USA's problems? I think those are pretty widespread today.

> The opposite of alienation and social atomization is basically conformity and homogeneity, and that's bad for business; and especially bad for the oligarch types who engender this kind of alienation.

What a racist and poisonous stance. This seems to indicate a preference that the US should just be a homogenous White Anglo Saxon Protestant society, along with "good family values" such as sexism and keeping women "in the kitchen".

No thanks.

> I say this because pretty much every country is as online as the US is, and doesn't have the problems the US does

Are you sure about that? Australia has similar issues.

One thing that I've never understood as a Scandinavian is why people for their own pure interest doesn't want a wellfare state. Why would you rather have a paranoid society than one where crime and drugs are the exception?

Compare south Europe too. Scandinavians have replaced the family/kin based support system with extensive welfare safety net. The south is trying hard to do the same and ends up with corruption. Because people don’t see the same incentives

Sweden has a population 1/4 of California... and 1/40th the size of USA. Scandinavia is generally culturally homogenous and quite wealthy. American problems are more complex than meets the eye. It’s easy to be happy with a welfare state when most of your citizens are motivated and educated, and you have a large pool of wealth.

America still has more money per capita that most of Scandinavia (perhaps not Norway). "Culturally homogeneous" is just a dog-whistle for "nordic white". Plenty of "cultural homogeneous" places are very bad, and many "culturally diverse" places are quite good.

At the end nothing of that has to do about the possibility of having a welfare state. The decision is just political.

I don't think we can make the Internet and tech blameless here. I personally feel like it is playing a part, but I would also like to see some research here so we can point to evidence when deciding what to do about it.

That being said. I would argue this is the result of being data driven to blindly make decisions.

We're seeing niche groups and products being killed off because they're not in the average of that area.

> and the general disintegration of anything resembling a family life or social fabric in US society

What exactly do you mean by that?

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