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Comment by serjester | Hacker News Reader

While I don't necessarily disagree with his thesis, I think the author cherry picks points and creates a narrative where there isn't one. He mentions the last "shared cultural moment" was Buzz Aldrin landing on the moon. Personally after watching it live, I'd argue Space X launching humans into space is one of those "moments". This all comes down to your own interpretation of the events and there's so many other examples in the piece. Narrative fallacy at best, but mostly pseudoscience in my opinion - world progress can't be binned into a coherent storyline.

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I don’t disagree with: >world progress can’t be binned into a coherent storyline

But if you think SpaceX has anywhere close to the cultural impact of the moon landing, you really need to get out of your bubble.

Yeah, it’s obviously all anecdata here but I don’t run in tech circles outside of work, and genuinely can’t remember a single post, tweet, or meme about Space X that didn’t come from my coworkers or few tech friends.

Tiger King though, whew. Even my grandmother tried out her new Netflix subscription with that.

Yeah I think it’s pretty heavily a tech thing. Even in the (biomedical) sciences, I think people are only vaguely aware of what SpaceX is.

I'll agree with your point but his 4 other examples were "steamship, railroad, assembly line, and commercial aviation" which are comparable. With that said it felt like everyone I knew watched it (I associate with mostly non-techies) so to each his own. But yes the moon landing was on another level.

> steamship, railroad, assembly line, and commercial aviation" which are comparable

Also pretty dubious.

Regardless of what you and your friends did, you have to admit that there’s a whole wider world that didn’t watch it. Just looking at the numbers, the SpaceX launch got about 10.3 million viewers (https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.space.com/amp/nasa-spacex-as...)

That’s good, but about as many as an important cricket match in India (https://medium.com/@refsrc/indias-streaming-service-hotstar-...).

The Super Bowl often gets 10x that viewership.

Cont.

I think that cultural bubbles are mostly harmless, but I’m surprised at how so many people seem to not realize they’re even in a bubble. Who seem to think that 95% of the world, or even America, lives like the average SV tech worker.

The author defines his shared cultural moment as "some feat of technical mastery". Obviously sports, politics and celebrities are always going to eclipse these. I'd put money on an order of magnitude more Americans caring about Lincoln's assassination than the steamship.

>Personally after watching it live, I'd argue Space X launching humans into space is one of those "moments".

There's no way that Space X launching humans, something we've done dozens of times, is as significant as the first time someone walked on the moon. 94% of households in the US watched that. I'd be surprised if 0.94% of households watched Space X.

That said, he is still wrong. 9/11 was definitely a shared cultural moment. At least shared across the US.

To me there's a pretty big difference. The moon landing was a national effort envisioned by the President and involving thousands of employees in the public sector as well as massive media coverage and public funding + support for close to a decade. SpaceX is a private company. Their accomplishments, while impressive, are nowhere near the same national-level endeavors as the Apollo program.

Also, if you ask anyone who was at least 5 years old in 1969, they will tell you the two events were nowhere near the same on an emotional and pure coverage level. The moon landing was by far the most-watched television broadcast in history up to that point, and held that record for a decade - 650 million viewers for a live event. Demo-2 was less than 11 million (with probably a billion more people having access to it than in 1969). It kind of saddens me that America has gotten to the point where people think these two events are equivalent. We've really lost the sense of what national identity-defining big projects even mean.

The last shared cultural "moment" was much more recent--the COVID lockdown.

Probably more accurate but there’s probably also a pretty big urban/rural divide.

Why is not the internet a shared cultural moment? Why is the smartphone of today a lesser innovation than the Saturn V? I really don't get the nostalgia in the article

The Space roadster, followed by three rocket landings, is also one of these moments. My mother still talks about it.

> I'd argue Space X launching humans into space is one of those "moments".

Why? It's been done decades before. It just isn't that impressive from a feat perspective - if you gave anyone enough money to get top engineers you could do the same.

> Narrative fallacy at best, but mostly pseudoscience in my opinion

I think that’s the wrong heuristic to apply. I don’t think he’s making testable hypothesis as much as trying to create a lens through which we can consider our current events.

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