Is everything falling apart?

Everything is not falling apart, though certain institutions may be falling apart.

In America, there's definitely been a breakdown of belief in its own institutions. Far more people are skeptical of things like journalism and Silicon Valley; it really wasn't that long ago that the former was constantly salivating over the latter, but now it's more of an openly vulture-carrion relationship because that caters to public sentiment. People who I would consider "normies" even don't trust law enforcement and the FBI anymore (not that they ever should have). Even the education system from K12 to college is increasingly being seen as a joke and an outright racket. We also went from the President being a more respected position to one deserving of relentless tabloid gossip. Even if one's "guy" is in office, I don't think we feel the same about it the way we did even as recent as Obama, and his administration was when we really began to see the social cracks forming.

Civilization ebbs and flows, but I think the current sentiment is unprecedented in my lifetime. This is not a high point by any stretch of the imagination, and while I see "everything is collapsing" to be hyperbolic, it seems inevitable that many things we thought were rock solid are in a transition period where either they will reform or one day be replaced with force of some kind.

Things collapsing has been a predominant sentiment in every modern generation. It's unprecedented because of our collective amnesia, that regards the familiar as a stable starting point rather than a random moment in a volatile reality.

Journalism was a tawdry, un-respectable business since its conception, but experienced a brief period of valor around the mid-twentieth century when industry concentration, Cold War ethics and regulation collectively reworked its incentives. The education system has always been in a position of scrutiny since universal education become the norm. Presidents have been the stuff of tabloid gossip since the founding fathers with the media mercilessly opting to promote scandal and controversy over respectability. Our conception of President as moral arbiter is a function of the reworking of journalism mentioned above.

The difference in peoples attitudes reflects an increased diet of emotion inducing media that accelerates fears and expectations, rather than some great pivot in volatility. Yes there are things to worry about but there always are (let's remember the twentieth century had two world wars, the Great Depression, and an even worse pandemic).

I'd argue that the greater risk of things falling apart is economic rather than political. We've built our society on two near-ponzi schemes that are in danger of falling apart. The first is pension funds which are paid into by current workers to pay out for past workers. Pension funds inherently depend on population growth to avoid shortfalls. They rely on the fact that more people pay into them then take out from them at any one time. This literally meets the definition of a ponzi scheme and it will be heartbreaking when it comes due.

The other near-ponzi scheme is the real estate market. In my city of Toronto, average real estate prices have gone from 2x average income in 1972 to 16x average income today. To continue growing at this pace they'd have to reach 128x average income by 2072. Those prices are absurd enough that it's clear there will be a slowdown in real estate prices before then. But much of our society is built on real estate growth and we aggressively encourage people to own real estate assets worth more than the entirety of their net worth. When these assets stop going up, or even worse start going down there will be major complications for society. I'm not talking about the adverse effects of a temporary market correction, I'm talking about a new normal in which real estate is flat or downward trending. When real estate is no longer an incredible investment opportunity it will have significant adverse effects on society. For instance, homes are currently a large part of people's retirement plans and selling a home is often used to pay for an extended stay in a nursing home (which is quite expensive). For many people the home represents over 60% of a retirement plan. In my parents lifetime, their home value increased to roughly 10x what it was worth. If my home increases 4x instead this is a substantial adverse impact. If my child's home increases 0x this is disastrous.

The things we fundamentally depend on to provide things as important in society as retirement are breaking badly. Meanwhile we're so obsessed with political differences that we barely talk about or work towards solving the slow economic crisis we are facing.

The constant theme since the dawn of civilization threaded through all of history is that everything is falling apart. Change is continual. History is more like the seasons. Nations rise. Nations fall. Sometimes there's revolt. Sometimes there's peace. There's a continual game of King of the Mountain being played at all levels.

So what can we say? Situation Normal - all effed up!

Enjoy this phenomenon called life. You only get one.

I remember watching the universal disdain Americans shared for high finance after 2008 and even movements like Occupy Wall Street resonated with a lot more people than one would have predicted. Then, all of the sudden, a whole new field of social engineering algorithms are unleashed on the populace, convincing everyone that their neighbor is the true enemy.

I think some things are falling apart but not everything. If you had the foresight/luck/guidance to get into a stable white collar career, find a partner, and buy a house before 2022 I think you're on "the train". This train is currently pulling away from a burning station containing everyone else who hasn't done those things yet. It's still possible to escape the station by running down the tracks but at this point the train is picking up speed so your odds aren't too good. Obviously this is a young single person's perspective but I think we're by far feeling the shifts in society and the economy the most right now.

Alternative, darker analogy: everyone is on the Titanic. It's currently breaking in half and about to sink, but people like the author of this blog post are on the upper half looking down.

I feel generally that everything is falling apart. I also have an article still pulled up from earlier this week titled Why Pessimism Sounds Smart. It seems pessimists are sometimes wrong! But sometimes they are right too - especially in the last couple of years I have observed incompetence seemingly everywhere I go. But is this the changing world, or my changing perspective? It's really difficult to pin down. At the same time, I read books that were published before I was born that allude to many of the same problems that seem so prominent in our society today, reinforcing the idea that We Didn't Start the Fire.

Still, the decline in quality of goods and services seems to be backed up by data as well as anecdote. I go to schools, churches, businesses. I see lightbulbs out. Things that are broken that could be repaired if only someone would put in 10 minutes of effort. My opinion: Everything is maybe falling apart in America specifically. I hope I'm wrong, for my childrens' sake.

We were getting close to a fairly positive future.

There are three basic constraints to material and non-material goods:

- capital - labour - energy

There are other raw materials, but they aren't limiting factors. For example, processed Lithium is in short supply right now, but it's not raw Lithium that's the constraint. We don't have enough Lithium mines and processing facilities. capital/labour/energy, in other words.

We had a glorious period in the post-WW2 era where the price of energy & capital was dropping dramatically so the world was labour constrained. Wages skyrocketed, and the middle class emerged and prospered.

Then the 70s halted cheap energy and the 80s halted cheap capital and the world has stagnated since.

In 2019, things were looking up again. Capital was cheap, and green energy prices were dropping in their own version of Moore's law so it became crystal clear that energy would be very cheap soon.

But we can't have the proles regain the power they had in the 60's. Low unemployment, cheap energy and cheap capital means that power will shift from the rich to the middle class. So a crisis was invented. Let's pretend that the inflation caused by a supply crisis and a war in Ukraine is actually caused by cheap capital. That way we can get rid of cheap capital and throw a ton of people out of work so the rich and powerful can maintain control. While we're at it, we'll use the war as an excuse to stay on the petro-economy.

Luckily, it's not too late. I expect inflation to quickly turn negative as bottlenecks free up and high interest rates throw the economy into a recession forcing the fed to reverse the interest rate hikes.

We need to return to federalism and bring an end to activist politicians. (Good luck with that, I know...)

The reason the American Experiment has worked so well for a few centuries is because we knew how to leave each other alone. If I'm in New York City, it's really none of my business what's happening in Albany, let alone Albuquerque New Mexico, so long as some basic standards of universal liberty are upheld.

Today that's all out the window. Activists for every issue want every issue solved at the federal level. Well, the problem with that is the US is a big country and the federal government should do the bare minimum, not the maximum. Both parties have completely forgotten this and it's really heightened tensions.

No, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to obtain our status as a nearly Type I civilization (we are currently 0.73 on the Kardashev scale).

But we do have a lot of what some describe as sludge. For example, in the USA, with the awful state of healthcare, where even with a good job and "good" benefits and being in the so-called 1%, it can be a struggle to obtain certain kinds of medication, and insurance companies will absolutely fuck with you to avoid paying, giving patients the runaround and making them waste hours and days in endless phone call black holes until you give up. Doctor's offices and hospitals will and do double- and even triple-bill you, then bully you into paying by sending you to collections. God forbid you should get a catastrophic illness. There are so many similar and related examples that we could have entire threads about. There was a book recently written about this but I cannot find it right now...will update when I do.

There certainly is the sense that we are losing a lot in terms of core values, especially as technology evolves (we seem to be resembling the movie Idiocracy more and more), but this has also been the case with other, now fallen civilizations. The ancient Greeks thought that books/the written word would bring about the destruction of their society because people would lose their ability to use their memories.

Things are not falling apart any more than they have in the past. What we are witnessing is a shift in power structure brought about by new communications technology. Humanity has been through this many times before. The invention of writing in the first place empowered the scribes. The printing press disempowered the scribes and empowered publishers . Radio disempowered publishers and empowered broadcasters. The internet has disempowered broadcasters and empowered the unwashed masses. Every time this has happened there has been accompanying social upheaval. We will probably figure this out. But until we do (and it could take a while) things will be a little chaotic.

I've had some thoughts lately that these issues are closely linked with physical borders.

In the old days, people with similar ideals would gather in physical proximity. Eventually, their common values would form nations.

In today's world, it is trivial to find people who share similar values - but they might be on the opposite side of the world.

We are doing nation building in a virtual space, but we are unable to realize them because we reside within physical borders that we did not draw, cannot change, with mismatched governance.

The values of everyone around us have changed - and we are stuck in some type of twisted hell of a prison where we can't escape those we don't share values with. Your neighbours are now on the Internet. Some of those people might be your physical neighbour, but many aren't.

This is a bit of an oversimplification of the argument. Technology is argued to be a wedge, but this is in the context of well documented social division. In recent memory we were significantly less divided and the most consumed media sources served as moderators. Brushing this off as just another prognostication and everything is always messed up is missing the seriousness of this.

It is perhaps fortunate that the Ukraine situation is demonstrating once again that just about the only time America can function in a coordinated manner is when there is an agreed upon external threat. Perhaps the next external threat will be carbon climate cancer? Or will our internal divisions prevent us from effectively dealing with that. It is going to be a rough ride one way or the other. The current war will be our first experience with global famines since the so called green revolution.

Hits close to home. Several years ago, people from one end of the political spectrum mistook me for another person on the opposite end of the political spectrum and doxxed me. I haven’t been able to correct the record to any real extent, and I basically live in fear that the whole situation will flare up again, and all it will take is for one crazy person with a lethal weapon to find me and make me pay, and that’ll be it.

Which is just to say that I experience these self-reinforcing divisions at a visceral and existential level, which I suppose is the case for everyone. It only leads me to want to withdraw. I would like to try to explain who I actually am to people who think I’m the devil, but i think that would just backfire. So the solution at an individual level is to pull back my online presence and, I don’t know, buy a gun. Which clearly doesn’t help at the macro level.

Edit: typo

Further edit: I guess the second paragraph there illustrates how the prisoner’s dilemma comes into play to reinforce the mass psychology of tribalism. I long for the days of my youth, when I could still talk with my ideologically-different family about issues, but extending that to others on the internet feels fraught with danger, leaving me more exposed. It feels like the best strategy is to stay in my bubble and armor it up—safety in numbers, and all that. Which must be the same on the other side. The better solution is cooperation, but given the unknowns, everyone has to act suspicious and fortify instead.

It's easy to lament polarization, but the reason it's not going away is that there are important differences in how people view the world, and calls for unity are really closer to "It would be so peaceful if we could eliminate the opposing viewpoint once and for all".

I think there are two intersecting issues. The first is the dwindling of easy resources. The second half of the 20th century was so easy it was wasteful, and we don't want to give that up -- that abundance of resources, readily available and on the cheap.

But the bigger issue right now is the end of the US/NATO empire. It matches with the end of other empires like Rome: the spending, the inflation, the corruption and the splintering/partisanship, where groups hate other groups because they blame them for what's going on. They say, "if it wasn't for this group, or if only they would agree with our side, we'd be fine again," but in the end nothing was going to stop it. What goes up must come down.

It is very interesting to see this come up so much here. I, personally, don't feel epistemically equipped to have an opinion on this, but it seems a lot of people do.

My main takeaway from this piece and the fellow comments (but not Haidt's piece, which is just Substack doomerism), is that you could probably roughly approximate salaries based on someone's stance on this, whether they are right or wrong.

So many comments, especially, make this clear, if still under the surface. And that makes sense! If you have a business, a mortgage, or whatever critical long-term investments, you have to be at least somewhat inclined to, 1., think positively about the way things generally work right now, and 2., to feel confident that history is skewing towards progress and good things, however qualified.

This also kind of explains how it seems generational too. Kids and millennials are without a lot of wealth, have little investments, and are most likely just in terminal debt and paying rent month-by-month. There isn't really the sense of a tomorrow for many, much less accumulates ROIs.

I have noticed a pretty strong trend of "falling apart" in specific niche. It seems related to the combination of inflation and people being fed up with low wages. It's hard to get workers for low paying jobs, and the things those places are selling have gotten more expensive.

So we're paying quite a lot more for services and goods, but the quality of those things are declining at the same time. Declining quality both due to the providers buying lower quality supplies and due to the workers willing to take the lousy jobs not giving a shit.

I see it pretty strongly in areas like restaurants and retail.

I think there's a bit of the Copernican fallacy at play here; the assumption that things are getting worse is pretty dramatic but it's not clear that it's supported in any real way.

We point to the riots last summer, and while there are debates about how severe they are, we willfully ignore that there have been riots in the past, even much more pervasive and deadly ones, even with a significantly lower population and population density than we have now.

There's political divisiveness, but students aren't getting shot at Kent State, and the Weather Underground isn't blowing up bombs in Manhattan, and there are no open wars being fought between private armies, militias, and government forces in West Virginia. Maybe once upon a time people were as passionate about George McGovern as people are now about Hillary Clinton, but passions fade and people forget.

There will be implications for the direction of history based on social networks and open information exchange, but likely we won't recognize them until far in the future. I'm sure there were dozens of upstart anti-Catholic movements that preceded Martin Luther and had the advantage of the printing press but fizzled out into nothing are are forgotten to history before the circumstances led to his success, but we can't see the invisible failures, only the visible successes, so we try to take lessons there.

I appreciate the sentiment that 'it's always been like this.'

That said, I am of the view that the mindset of optimizing for efficiency and the tools we've acquired over the last 50-100 years for doing so may, in addition to the benefits, have unintended consequences on a large scale. A couple of examples; in yesterday's discussion of nurses want to leave the profession, it was observed that the buyers of EMRs are optimizing for different things than the nurses that use them, to the detriment of nurses and patients. And, Boeing's products may be less safe now that it is optimized for capital rather than engineering.

To vastly oversimplify, it seems to me that optimizing for efficiency will eventually remove all margin for error, and so errors will be more frequent. The larger the span of influence of the optimization, the more these errors will accumulate in all kinds of places and all kinds of ways. So, my running joke is that the spreadsheet may be the death of Western civilization, and it remains less funny to me as time goes on.

The printing press story always seems to focus on the Protestant-vs-Catholic conflict, but let's also recall it fostered an explosion of scientific and mathematical knowledge across the continent. For example, the print runs of Isaac Newton's Principia:

https://www.livescience.com/200-more-copies-newton-principia...

I'm not sure if social media has contributed in any similar way to the spread of useful scientific and technical information... there's an argument that it has of course, but this is a very small fraction of the total content. The Internet overall has (long live sci-hub!), however.

> The framing begins with appreciating how closely intertwined the divisive and unifying effects of information technology can be.

The author speaks as if "unifying", as opposed to dividing, is the redemptive quality of information technology. I don't see it as an unmitigated good and, somewhat ironically, the story of the tower of Babel is about how their single-purposedness (?) was the source of the problem altogether. Genesis 11:6: "And the Lord said, "Lo! [they are] one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they have commenced to do. Now, will it not be withheld from them, all that they have planned to do?"

I find all the comparisons to previous technological changes lacking for one very simple reason. Previous technological changes never had granular data on individuals the way today's technological revolution does.

Since most such pieces are written by journalists, or written by people who think about these things but are also writers, they tend to focus on the idea distribution medium aspect of today's technology. So that would be the internet, or social media platforms, or chat platforms, etc. That's the most easily comparable part to past information technologies such as the printing press.

But the novel danger with what we're facing today is not the fact that everyone is on social media, or that stuff can go viral. Even though these are turbocharged versions of past technologies, they are still versions of past technologies (being turbocharged can still make it meaningfully different, but for now I'll ignore that). The novel danger is personalized data collection. It's the fact that major companies can built extremely accurate and granular profiles of every single person on their platforms.

This is completely unprecedented. Throw in even rudimentary AI, and I can target my message to match every individual's unique psychological profile. This was never possible in the past. The most you could do is target something based on a few broad aspect of someone's personality. Where they lived, what religion they followed, what language they spoke, etc. But there were thousands if not millions of people who filled that mold, and there were vast variations within those people, which still allowed for non conformity.

Today, however, you can target every individual and even the same individual differently depending on whether it's the morning, or evening, or if they are working or relaxing.

It's this that's truly novel and truly dangerous. You don't even need Social media to be involved for this to be a problem. The Chinese government, for example, famously has a highly intrusive citizenry score for its citizens based on a variety of such micro targeted factors. And pretty much every government across the world is also doing the same. Corporations have gone even further because they have all the data.

The tower of Babel is a story of how man tried to create their own salvation through technology and was punished by God. The punishment was the fracturing of language.

The fracturing isn't the subject or metaphor. The metaphor is people attempting to create their own salvation in a very ignorant and shallow way and being punished for it.

I hope I am not being too inflammatory by saying this but it's ... quite amusing how sheltered Americans are in thinking that a little political tension is a danger to their own country.

Bosnia was about to be destroyed and more recently, attempted to be divided by neighbors and they're still fine.

Look at anywhere that's not Americas or Western Europe.

With 500+ comments I doubt anyone will read this - and please don't - but "it happened before and we survived, so it's going to be okay" doesn't really resonate with me. We survived perhaps the bloodiest period of European history, where people set about to exterminate each other based on religion. Catholics in England weren't really given their full rights back until after the 1920s. And the schism in Christianity was like the Tower of Babel. So I'm not any more sanguine about the future after a the author brings up what became about 300 to 400 years of very bloody and repressive sectarian violence as a ... as a way to say it's going to be okay? Holy shit! If it's anything like the protestant-catholic sectarian fighting in Europe, it's going to be hell.

Technically speaking, yes [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

How devoid of intelligence it is to consider this manufactured divide as the reason things may fall apart. The group of mass media big-shots is extremely cohesive, as per this author's own perception of integration. Yet they fuel both sides without a single care about whether this may cause things to fall apart, and they're not wrong, which becomes clear if you actually look at the world and try to understand it instead of just absorbing mass media without practicing intellectual self-defense.

Our eyes are being averted from the actual problem, because it's believed that the more we look at it, the worse it becomes. I reject this anti-intellectualism, therefore present you why everything is actually falling apart.

The more humanity advances, the more we lack eros (loosely love for things we do not have) and the eros we have becomes weirder or outright bizarre. As this happens, we lose hope, that's the fatal hit. For example, access to porn has demonstrably been extremely detrimental to sex. For every passion we lose, we lose hope or replace it with a fetish. When we lose a healthy passion for clothes, we stop caring about what we wear or (more common in the west) become fetishized with bizarrely priced brands. When we lose passion for work, we stop caring about the future entirely (common in the third world) or become parasitical bureaucrats. It all adds up and often materializes into drug abuse. For an extreme example, look up the catalytic converter gangs in Kinshasa [0]. This loss of hope is monotonically increasing globally, and the manufactured divide has nothing to do with it. In fact our elites believe a little infighting and polarization may be good, as extremists are generally hopeful when they see things going their way, and more traditional solutions like education don't seem to be working these days. I don't think this theory has a name yet.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20210927195719/https://nypost.co...

He speaks of "the magnitude of the attendant change in social structure: a movement from national toward international social organization."

This can't work because it is not associated with growing prosperity in developed world but rampant inequality, the decline of good jobs for the non college educated, and growing resentment about this. Particularly in America, labor has been crushed.

The substitution of "international" for "national" elites has worsened the problem and made the resentment worse not better. Because there is a material basis for the discontent it is indeed likely that we will fall apart.

Well if Malthusian scientists are to be believed then we only really have another couple of decades at best before the global population level causes society to collapse. So you could interpret recent events to be the first warning signs of that.

Personally I remain unconvinced of that, though. Or at least, it seems to me that humans have the unique benefit of being able to problem solve their way out of the issues related to population growth, at least for a while. We don't have to be gazelles grazing themselves to death or to act merely on selfish instinct.

I think this kind of framing of the question is very close to being a sly form of gaslighting.

What people want to know is not whether the current state of things is "normal". After all, death, sickness, war, hunger, disease and crime are all perfectly normal. Everyone gets that at some level. What most people want to know is what the fuck happened with the metanarrative that we were fed for the last several decades. Is it defunct and debunked? If it is, that has obvious implications in terms of who we should trust and who we should empower.

> "... We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”

Since when did we ever "speak the same language or recognize the same truth". We've always been cut off from one another. Racially, regionally, econonically, etc. The civil war being the obvious one. America is a country of many nations. America, the empire, is an empire of many countries.

> It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families…

This is just silliness from the media. This snapshot that the media portrays doesn't really exist in the real world. People just live their lives. Go outside and see for yourself. And even if it did, it doesn't matter. The red/blue, left/right, etc doesn't matter.

Things fall apart when the elites are divided. And the two dominant forces in american life (political, media, economic, cultural, geopolitical, etc ) are imperialism and zionism. I don't see any division amongst the elites on that. Left/right, red/blue, up/down, flat earther/round earther, etc. So I don't think anything is falling apart as there are no signs of fracture.

My impression is that optimism peaked in the '50s -- some time before I was alive -- and has been in decline ever since. That's not to say that there haven't been major achievements since then -- I wouldn't have a career without them -- but increasingly, we have seen experts throwing up their hands and saying "I don't know how this will ever be solved". The most optimism right now comes from people who think major societal problems will be solved by machines that can solve more problems than people. That of course does not contradict the idea that humans are having more and more trouble solving our problems, even as we continue to move forward in the near term.

We have never had a unified cultural perspective on this phenomenon -- it is either an artifact of regressive politics, a warning sign of the limits to growth, a reflection of deep failings in the basic structure of society, a punishment from Heaven for our disregard for tradition, or [choose as many as you like]. But as it continues to become more visible, the possible conclusions clash more and more. So while social media appears to create divisions in society, I don't think it's the only cause, and I don't think the only causes are things for which we can so easily allocate blame.

The argument that things will work out in the end is not particularly reassuring when it still rests on the idea that I will have to spend most of my adult life in turbulent times.

Just as I wouldn't have liked to live through the Protestant Reformation and the wars of religion, I'd much rather have spent my adult life in the peace and prosperity of the late 1900s than on the trajectory people agree the world is headed for now.

"The story of Babel,” Haidt writes, “is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.".. it could be Germany from 2015 and beyond..

> By that I don’t just mean that I see social media, and the internet broadly, sustaining a trend we’ve seen at earlier technological thresholds, such as the print revolution—a trend toward more tribes, often narrower tribes, and sometimes more intensely combative tribes.

I keep expecting some kind of system of phyles. Like "pick your own adventure", but for real life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Phyles

Instead, bad people weaponized k-means clustering to lock-in us-vs-them.

> The inexorable march of information technology, combined with the psychology of tribalism, has heightened turbulence, loathing, and delusion before, and it’s doing that now.

Yes and: Decreasing costs seems to accelerate winner-takes-all outcomes.

We technoptimists thought that improved production, distribution, discovery, and consumption would lead to a better signal-to-noise. We were wrong. Sure, we got a lot more content. But now anti-information dominates.

Why? Some scattered notions:

I guess we didn't anticipate the attention economy, how an over abundance in content (opinions) would create a scarcity of attention (deliberation).

I definitely didn not anticipate automating the hate machine with recommenders. (Parisi's filter bubble thesis was a near miss.)

And I was totally ignorant about rent seeking, financialization, and usury. How our economy's transition from manufacturing to services would accelerate inequity. The resulting anxiety is a huge part of our current hysteria.

h/t Clay Shirky's obervation about power laws, Chomsky's theory of the 5 filters, Brandolini's law, Marshal McLuhan's Understanding Media.

America is having a Pluto return. Traditionally this is a period of time when nations are dissolved or at minimum completely transformed in their nature.

It's currently turning retrograde and will scrape back across the US natal Pluto on July 12th, and will be conjunct again December 28th for the beginning of its next 246 year cycle. If it matters by that point.

The elephant in the room is that the Industrial world wanted alot of people, and the post Industrial world does not. Not only in terms of production, but in terms of having a livable environment for everyone.

So what happens to what are now "excess" people? The answer to that question is gonna define pretty much everything.

If you only look at your lifetime things might not look great at this exact moment. But this too shall pass.

Expand your lense to include a few hundred or thousand years and you'll realize we're doing fine. Things have never been better. However the perception of what could be has shifted because memory is short.

During the course of history every period post pandemic has brought drastic change, what makes this one so different[1]? Institutions that have not fared well are the media, colleges(dropping attendance due to high paying jobs everywhere). Urban cities have also seen record numbers of residents leaving, SF lost 6.7% of its population in a year and a half. For some that are connected to those places/institutions things are really falling apart. For everyone else things are slowly getting back to normal.

1 - https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/04/29/w...

Humans just tends to repeat themselves every 50 to 100 years. But the good thing is - with each iteration we are learning. It's just a bit but maybe in a thousand years we will come out of our puberty.

And no - the world won't go down due to climate change. It won't go down because of some silly war either. It's not a simple graph showing where we are heading to. Especially not an exponential graph.

And we are still repeating history because we haven't learned the simple lesson which Leo Tolstoi already knew: Everybody wants to change the world but nobody themselves.

But this is where the real change starts. And do not believe all those angst people out there.

Life is way too complex and beautiful that we will ever understand it's secrets and twists it's capable of.

Well, the view that history may be in fact (perhaps not objectively, but to any observer cultured enough to entertain himself with observing it) not a time line into the future but cyclical, with civilizations rising and falling, is not new [1].

Perhaps this time what's different is that due to our information age and accelerated rates of change, cultural history's process of change has been pushed from being viewed closer to evolution (the next step of the change being defined by "environment and chance", that is, stretched out over long periods of time and caused by factors not directly being under human influence) to being much closer to immediate, accountable, man-made history (the next step of the change being defined by "environment and choice", that is, actors making active choices causing outcomes) [2]. And so, because most humans, even humans of influence making the choices altering the life outcomes of populuations not over generations but even within single, half or quarter lifetimes, are terribly selfish and stupid and unwise, the outcomes of bad choices just never seem to stop coming.

I'm no expert, but topics like shifting balances between global powers which are interested in different kinds of change (from hegemonic US in a post-WWII word to a very multi-polar world order to xyz) causing metrics like HDI to even out between global population groups have been "hot" since when? the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s? So sure, things might keep falling apart for one population group but still improving for the other group(s).

Another interesting take on "falling apart narrative" interpretations of current history might be a take on how looming juggernauts like climate change, migration waves and so on play into it. This kind of change may be good for something, but surely not perceived stability in the factors that make up human societies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West

[2] "Environment and change", "environment and choice" --- words borrowed out of recently read "Red Mars" by Kim Robinson.

I think if the debate is "everything is pretty bad" vs "everything is kinda bad, but..." then it's not going to go anywhere.

I wish that Wright had focused more on Haidt's concrete suggestions in his article. For example, towards the end of his article, Haidt writes,

"Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district. One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting. A version of this voting system has already been implemented in Alaska, and it seems to have given Senator Lisa Murkowski more latitude to oppose former President Trump, whose favored candidate would be a threat to Murkowski in a closed Republican primary but is not in an open one."

And that's an idea that may have pros and cons! But it focuses the debate on specific proposals to improve the situation, rather than just a general referendum on "How Bad Are Things?"

Doesn’t this get brought up every few years and the answer is neither yes or no but instead everything is changing. When companies disrupt others they put them out of business but it doesn’t mean they do a complete replacement . When Google and Facebook disrupted text advertisement local reporting disappeared. The Internet made companies that can have services anywhere but the people who make them work moved to the coastal cities which unemployed many people. Just in time manufacturing shifted it to other places and the rise of computers made manufacturing in the US much less than it was before.

There is a specific danger that will form the context for evaluating the destructive power of social media: The invasion of Ukraine will have costs. Innocent people will die. Obviously in Ukraine, but people who ate the grain produced in Ukraine and Russia may die of starvation because Ukraine's ability to plant an harvest large areas has been destroyed. Prices for the available grain in the world will go up.

Starvation and price rises will provide new opportunities to fearmonger and divide. Social media is ill equipped to stop Russia and others from using it to manipulate fearful people.

It seems a little odd to try and reassure me that everything isn't falling apart by referencing the Protestant Reformation as the "we've been through this before and come out of it" example.

The Protestant Reformation was something of a disaster. Everything DID fall apart. It got rebuilt again into something better but the transition period was an era of war and strife and bloodshed. It is not at all reassuring to lean on that as the example. (Ditto broadcast media (radio, TV, film) and its associations with the rise of fascism and bolshevism in the early 20th century.)

I think this is a great article, which doesn't say "everything is fine" but analyzes underlying root cause, and that the problems are older than we think. But also, wars have been fought due to the kinds of changes we are experiencing. I am truly concerned for the fate of Democracy in America.

This has a similar to e to Jon Meacham's "The Soul of America" which looks back through times of great division and bitterness brought about by rapid societal changes. It is well worth a read if you like US history and think this was a good article.

My take is that people and technology are part of the same system and the details of technology and how it is deployed really do matter.

Also I strongly recommend another Haidt book called "The Righteous Mind".

We are seeing the slow collapse of the globalized economy and it will be painful and last for a couple of years as things relocalize. The constant chasing after larger margins lead to centralization of key industries in a few countries. We are starting to see that unwinding as some of those countries can no longer be trusted to be partners.

Not sure what it means long term politically but it’s easy to imagine big block politics rearing it’s head again. I am however unsure if the west had the will to stand on principles anymore.

"Everything is falling apart" if you are someone who contributes information to the public sector in the form of analysis, scientific studies, news reporting, etc and your audience was built solely on your credentials, or the organization you belong to being respected. Those credentials and institutions are collapsing and they need to rebuild public trust by providing legitimate value instead of spending the next 10 years whining about how the commoners just don't get how valuable they are.

The answer to a headline is usually “No”. Some things are falling apart, as always, but civilization marches ahead exponentially through war and famine and plague, again as always

Who cares what people feel like is happening? Just look at the data you care about.

For example, I think it’s interesting that many major cultures are dying because they have below replacement rate demographics.

The trend looks like a slow-moving Black Plague, except at the end of the rollercoaster you are left with old people instead of a bunch of young people (that survived the sickness).

This is certainly a new experiment by humanity that hasn’t happened before quite like this, so we are in for interesting times :)

It’s becoming increasingly inconvenient for the minority to control the majority in this country. This shift has been discussed for decades. I would expect more “dumb” to come.

Immigrants bring Covid so we need to control the border, but Covid is a conspiracy. My candidates won on a ballot where my candidate that lost on the same ballot was cheated. The democratic presidents showed weakness to Putin, but somehow the insurrection does not.

Most Americans are unprepared to compete against others who view life objectively and earned advanced degrees and practice introspection. The math books are threatening. Teachers shouldn’t teach grade schoolers subjects taken from graduate courses (CRT). There is no way this doesn’t backfire. Too many contradictions to enumerate.

The media want you to show that the world is falling apart for all kind of reasons. The social media shows you posts about the world falling apart for same kind of reasons - it generate views and sells ads. The world hasn't been falling apart for the last decade as far as I can tell. Not in the US and not in many other parts of the world.

Those of us who have been around for awhile haven't respected the Presidency for far longer than Obama, nor trusted the institutions of government to work on behalf of the American citizen. Further, what is now called the "deep state" has been an issue for many decades, previously referred to as the administrative state. I worked for a company shortly before I retired that employed full time lobbyists. They would arrange meetings with various members of Congress to discuss pending legislation. Not once, in ten years, did the actual member of Congress attend the teleconference, always staff and agency personnel. Big Tech has become a tool for elitists to control the narrative. It's not necessarily a conspiracy. It's an artifact of a laughable public education system and political malice. One need only look at the hyperbolic reaction of liberals to Elon Musk buying Twitter and promising to allow "free speech", something Twitter certainly doesn't allow today. Or the "ministry of truth" established by Mayorkas. Or more broadly, the so-called "social credit" systems. The United States has been moving in a fascist direction for decades, interrupted only briefly by outsiders such as Trump. Many of the positions of today's Republican Party more closely resemble the Democrats of the 60s when I was growing up. The views of today's "progressive" Democrat Party more closely align with Marx and other communists. It's been trending for decades and I see little reason for optimism.

Everything is falling apart but we are falling slowly upwards in terms of things getting better.

I recommend this book for data that supports this if folks haven't read it already:

https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/

“ As I emphasized in Nonzero, the digital revolution—even before the internet age dawned, and certainly after that—did what the printing press did: It made promulgating information cheaper and easier.”

The author clearly underestimates how many orders of magnitude greater the Internet’s impact is over printed words.

EDIT: for clarity.

Supposedly it was Goethe who once observed,

“When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but, on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective.”

Like an entropic principle of social information exchange, with the potential for reorganization under a new paradigm.

It's not falling apart if you make a good income, but I would say it's getting harder and harder to get by as a middle/working class person in America. It's become much more of winner take all economy and I think that's destructive to a society in the long term.

Nothing lasts forever, and we have been on the downturn of the civilization for the last hundred years or so. This is merely the time when we started running out of the reserves that our ancestors had secured us, and thus problems started becoming apparent.

If the democracy is actually working and elections not fortified, why do so many US politicians predate the collapse of the Soviet Union. Things seem like they are falling apart because these people have been holding on to power for generations.

Hacker News is a positive counterexample. The people, the community, the platform.

Let's apply the methods that have made this work so well also elsewhere.

A few ideas. Professional moderation. Crowd moderation with downvoting and flagging. Guidelines. Culture of restraint.

It's not that things are falling apart, it's that things are not being put back together. Complex societies have systems and mechanisms in them that require people to do a.) do their job and b.) hold others accountable. We're a uniquely distracted and lethargic generation obsessed with titillation, fantasy, and procrastination. Yet a lot of things require sober, deliberate work, and enforcing the rules. With the level of corruption in the US government--the level of open shirking of duties and outright lies, coupled with the seeming inability of elected officials to accomplish overwhelmingly popular policy changes, coupled with prolonged strategic malinvestment and a obvious debt bubble, we're in some serious hot water.

Nimrod built the Tower of Babel to challenge God. It was hubris. It sounds like we have many Nimrod's running around lately (Bezos, Musk, Buffet).

Where do you get your happiness? Amazon or your tribe? You know that this partisanship we are experiences, sounds like people are talking another language sometimes, yes?

For completeness:

--- Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it were through his means they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his power. He also said he would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to reach. And that he would avenge himself on God for destroying their forefathers. Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod, and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work: and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very high, sooner than any one could expect; but the thickness of it was so great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was. It was built of burnt brick, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit water. When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion ...

That daily "the end is near" post. It would be interesting if we could find a way to curb the negative news bias at least here.

Possibly. History may remember our response to Covid as the last great and destructive folly of a dying civilisation.

America is at the end of the neoliberal political/economic cycle, so (somewhat obviously) neoliberal institutions are failing and being reformed by groups with power who want their preferred system to prevail for the next 40-50 years. Radicals want socialism, reactionaries want fascism, and the wealthy on both sides want to consolidate their oligarchy, Its less “falling apart” and more that those interested parties are all happy to pick away at the carcass of the current system in the meantime.

It is still my hope Elon will just dismantle Twitter and that is his first step in killing social media.

I concur with everything the author says here. If you want to visualize this for yourself, just take yourself back to the whole science/anti-vaxx debate we've had the past 2 years. That was a pretty accurate picture of the biblical tower of babel. Social media as a tool keeps sowing more division than ever because that's the growth incentive and we are too afraid to kill the golden goose. Once the metaverse becomes a thing, we will have better bricks to build the tower even higher.

China is soon going to overtake the US as the world hegemony. This disruption will have devastating effects. The accelerated move to the 4th Industrial Revolution will be even more disruptive, unlike anything we as humans have ever known. We keep on ignoring the global warming threat because we think our survival will be under threat if we go cold turkey on fossil energy and the creature comforts necessary to forestall the climate disaster. The covid pandemic gave us all a unique opportunity to recalibrate our collective lives. Today, we go about our daily lives as if the past 3 years was just a bad dream. I very much doubt we can make it through another global pandemic on a scale as or bigger than covid was in the near future.

Turn it on its head: “what lasts forever?”

Cleary it’s a matter of degrees and timespan considered.

Our society is in a big change phase so anything need to fall apart while the new emerge. So far we see the decline, still too early to see the new.

Beware a thing: while things changes, an old model disappear a new one is gestating human needs do not change that much in fundamental terms. Our eating, sleeping and sexual needs are still the same. So not "all" fall apart but something at a time, something will remain, something grow, something change, something disappear etc.

We have electrical lights since "much" time, but we still have stearic candles on sale. In the past they was a big industry, now is marginal, but it's still there. Civil construction techniques have changed much, but we still have the concept of construction companies. Dress have changed much, but not that much. We still have pants, skirts, jackets, hats in new shapes, different tissues but essentially the same since hundreds of years.

What's really falling apart is the present paradigm, the economy-centric society of neoliberal capitalism that it's about to overthought itself to remain in power.

Why no one says it is transparency which is increasing, not things falling apart

In start contrast to the general law of headlines - the answer is yes.

On a cosmic scale.

Ain't entropy grand?

Something unique has happened and I don't think anyone sees it for what it is. A new type of agent has taken control of human behavior--or at least has taken a major stake in influencing human thought. Call it the algorithm, call it AI, call it a simple recommender. It doesn't have morals, doesn't want to benefit we biological beings. It is mindless except in a very narrow sense. The greatest of idiot-savants. It doesn't care about human values in any way as it has shown over and over. It doesn't even come with common sense. Beware its influence.

But it does generate money and so it is given free reign to bait us into psychopathic behavior if needs be. It is encouraged to inject whatever it needs to into our communications in order to keep generating wealth without any recognizable constraint.

I hope a counter or limiting factor evolves before we start killing each other as its thralls.

I recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Look_Up - a more up to date version of Idiocracy.

This is an interesting response to the original article. My TL;DR for this is something like 'Yes, information tech has always resulted in social upheaval, so notwithstanding the scale and speed of the current iteration, this isn't new. Also, it can result in international social cohesion (aka Nazis of the world unite). The thing is, it feels like the author is telling us not to worry because all of this has happened before (with horrific consequences to those caught in the churn, to borrow my favorite phrase from The Expanse). That is a weak rationalization at best - 'same shit, different day, (albeit global scale, speed of light) so don't worry' isn't as reassuring as it should sound

You lost me at "we have been there before..."

Those aren't the big problems. These are the big problems the US faces:

* Putin wants to conquer Eastern Europe. It's been over 75 years since a major nation in Europe had comparable territorial ambitions, and that didn't end well. Nuclear war at some scale is a very real possibility, especially if Russia starts losing in a big way.

* Coronavirus. It's not over. 988,690 US deaths to date. Case rates are headed up again.

* Global warming. It's just getting started.

* Supply insecurity. Between troubles with Russia and China, and coronavirus, there are far more shortages.

America hasn't always been the 1950s. We'll survive a bit longer. There is polarization but it's not as much as the far left and far right would like you to think (that basically the world is burning down). Although Putin may burn it all down for us if he has a terminal illness like some people are proposing. That's the only significant threat I see to American and civilization itself. I mean it's a strange game. We can't cave to him but if we don't he may be the suicidal dictator with nukes that we were always worried about.

Yes

Comments TLDR: "Yes, and it's the other side's fault"

what is collapsing is the planetary ecosystem, thanks to industrial practice. Especially in North America suburban sprawl and industrial agriculture and waste have eaten into and degraded what was very recent a deep well of ecological wealth. I would call this a major impact on the American culture which built it's identity around that seemingly boundless wilderness, and as well our basic human psyche and culture for which (many argue) proximity to deep ecological process is a fundamental need.

The consumer culture and consequent wealth of things, especially images and meditated simulcra, really only echo the naive American soul in a wasteland of it's own making. All cultural realities are fundamentally ecological. We fill our lives with artificial realities so liberally because we are born into a culture that took massive wealth of natural resources and the experiences they provide for granted. As they vanish, we fill the gap with artificial things and experiences.

It's a dangerous game with potentially grave and unexpected consequences, and we have played it before many times on a much smaller scale: hunting food sources to extinction, turning rich farmland into desert, etc.

It seems that the collective human psyche it's unable to reflect accurately on the consequences of it's own actions with respect to our fundamental biogenic foundation.

Take for example the flooding of our nights with artificial blue spectrum light pollution. In evolutionary terms, this is a new event. For billions of years nights have been uniformly mostly dark with a regularly variating moon glow. Suddenly we change all that and dark nights are a thing of the past. Nevermind the massive affect on a whole ecosystems, nevermind studies that show a severe affect on the human psychological health, status quo says lighting up the night is normal, good, and safe.

And there are shootings at schools and terrible crime and massive loss of insect life and songbirds dying off and these quite extraordinary changes to the continuity of our bio systems and our lifestyles, and yet we don't see the connection. We blame the media or Donald Trump or the 1%. We don't see the problem as something we have direct control over. We blame our institutions or leaders or gods or what have you, anything but ourselves, and anything to avoid changing our lifestyles and behaviors.

So imo things really are falling apart, just not the things we think.

No

Modern America is thoroughly a product of capitalism -- the belief that economic growth is a) the solution to all problems and b) easy to achieve (just deregulate and let the market figure things out!)

Neither of those are true anymore. So yeah, things are falling apart because their foundation is rotten.

The disconnect is so large. What the author calls mere tribalism is freighted and begs the question in regard to his example of US coastal and european elites having more in common with each other than their fellow "working stiff" citizens. What I think he misses is that these elites aren't elite, and the popular/ist reaction to them is to being made subjects of technocrats who always seem to be working for the good of someone else far away but mostly self-dealing to their own benefit.

The reason these elites are not in fact elite is their (our?) advantage is mediated by technology, and so it doesn't matter whether it's social media or muskets, without legitimacy, there is no elite, just a crumbling power vaccum sustained by the control of tech. The hatred we expereince is from the impostor syndrome that comes from the precariousness of this percieved elite status.

People who percieve themselves as having been elevated from ignorance and poverty have unlimited cruelty for others who "held them back," and who they "left behind," and I would argue that's the crux, as there's almost no way to convince them they have been seduced and decieved as a means to unleash and harness that very cruelty for political ends. If you feel justified in being cruel to the ignorant and that they are deserving of humiliation, I am sorry to have to be the one to say, you are the mark.

The author chalks up the social tension Haidt identifies as the effect of neutral and inevitable change, but to me that belief is a kind of affectation. The attitude of, "this is change, learn to cope or be left behind," is the newly bourgois version of "let them eat cake," and Haidt I think identifies that the consequences are looking similar.

In general we can bet that all people will align to whatever they percieve to be power. The notion of change is presented as inevitable, and so aligning to it seems like aligning to the power of the universe and the prevailing forces of history. The notion of history as progress iterates the logic of that idea. But what undermines the legitimacy of the people who percieve each other as an elite, installed and annointed by the inevitable forces of historical progress, is that they exist over a substrate of stability, built for them, and provided to them by people who have invested themselves and their identities in it.

There is an appealing argument to be made that the working stiffs whose parents invested lives to build homes, communities, and institutions so that their children could thrive, have a more persuasively legitimate claim to the fruits of that culture and society than those who identify as a new elite and use tech to deconstruct and redistribute them to the arbitrary and placeless coalitions they assemble to support themselves. The counter to this is that there is only one humanity, which even seems compassionate, until it clicks that a single humanity and shared interdependent planet reduces to a zero-sum power struggle to prevail in the flow of progressive history, with no truth or rules, and in whose pursuit all things are justified.

The explanation for why things are so irreconcilable is not that one side is basically stupid, but this author seems to have fallen for that.

In my experience the young tend to exaggerate highs and lows because they tend to have lived through one and not the other. This is particularly true because many people today have no memory of actual recession. Far fewer have any memory of war (in the West in general and the US in particular).

The last few years have really exposed just how profoundly irrational and profoundly selfish a significant percentage of the population is.

So take climate change. Yes, it's a big issue but my view is now fatalistic. Humanity won't even minorly inconvenience itself to do anything about it. So we'd better hope there is an economic solution, specifically an eenrgy source without greenhouse gas emissions that's cheaper, because nothing else will change behaviour. And I actually expect that will happen. Many people will be displaced and die in the meantime, which is obviously awful, but people collectively are completely fun with letting other people die and that's just the truth.

So for many things I just don't think it's as dire as many think.

But one area where I think we're in real trouble is the the resurgence of literal Nazism. This isn't a perjorative. We've come so far that the former Prime Minister of israel engages in Holocaust revisionism to blame it on Palestinians [1]:

> Mr. Netanyahu said in a speech to the Zionist Congress on Tuesday night that “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews.” The prime minister said that the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had protested to Hitler that “they’ll all come here,” referring to Palestine.

> “ ‘So what should I do with them?’ ” Mr. Netanyahu quoted Hitler as asking Mr. Husseini. “He said, ‘Burn them.’ ”

We have the highest-ratest host on the #1 cable "news" network openly pushing Nazi propaganda [2]. Republicans are in love with autocrats and the examples are legion (eg Trump's praise of Jinping, Kim John-Un and Putin, GOP praise of Victor Orbon of Hungary).

As much as age has given me perspective to realize most alarm is overstated, I can't help but think this is going to end very, very badly.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/22/world/middleeast/netanyah...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGb748VOcYU

Answer: Maybe.

What we are experiencing is acceleration. Left-wing accelerationists want to bring on capitalism's end-stage calamities in order to foster a revolution that will overthrow the bourgeoisie. Right-wing accelerationists think that worsening economic conditions will trigger some sort of white-nationalist boogaloo garbage. I'm not an accelerationist, for my part, but it's pretty clear to me that acceleration is happening. Capitalism has been in objective decline for decades, but now the decline is happening faster than most of us ever imagined.

There's an inevitable sequence to this sort of thing. Capitalism becomes corporate capitalism ("Stage 2") due to business consolidation. This requires the proliferation of middle management positions, both to curtail inefficiency and to prop up a middle class (preventing overthrow) while small businesses die, so what you get is an evolution into managerial capitalism. ("Stage 3") At this point, bureaucratic diversions make it hard to know what is happening, and few people--least of all the overpaid boneheads on top, who can't tell when they're being lied to--know if their managers (or consultants) are any good, so this leads to reputation capitalism ("Stage 4") in which there is no such thing as truth--there is only what people say, and power resides in the ability to control what others say. (In other words, might makes right.) This leads to widespread, deliberate misinformation that proliferates; the system begins to shake, but the nature of post-truth capitalism ("Stage 5") allows it to preserve its own stability, for a little while longer, if it can convince a large number of people that they're either already winning (bourgeois false consciousness) or destined to win (fascist fuckery). This isn't hard at all, in a world where nothing means anything, and in which the convincing telling of lies is the surest path to prestigious jobs and high incomes.

We now live in a world where having a national reputation is necessary just to get an average job--hence the pathological obsession of the young with fame and "influencers"-- and in which admission to the most prestigious universities is as competitive as it has ever been but the product is the worst it's ever been. We have the right wing using fascism to win; we have the left wing diverted into callout-culture identity politics and virtue signaling instead of actual change. The dysfunction of capitalism can no longer be contained. We have stagflation now and will see worldwide food riots in a year or two. Read up on the Russian 1990s if you want to know what the capitalistic world (which is now the entire world) is in for.

Is everything falling apart? It's hard to say. It'll get a lot worse in the short term, but humans and human civilization are resilient.

Yesterday I made the comment "everything is collapsing underneath" though there's context etc. I think the better way to say it. "Is everything falling apart for the USA?" Yes indeed. Most other countries have problems.

Sure Sri Lanka has the same problems. Sure the middle east just went through the same problems and some states are still enduring civil war. Though from what I can tell it's mostly the USA in this 'falling apart' situation. Canada is certainly not far behind.

>“The story of Babel,” Haidt writes, “is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”

Damn that's a good analogy!

Elon tweeted this yesterday: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144

The political polarization starting pre-existed social media. This started late 90s or for sure early 2000s with GWBush. Bush knew something from his father's reign. He could play identity as a victim. So he would pretend to be a yokel and when the elites would make fun... it told every yokel that Bush was the only option. Obviously he never passed laws or tried to 'fix' something for yokels. It was shallow identity politics but identity politics breeds more identity politics.

The democrats then needed identity politics of obama. It's an inevitable scenario, 'first black president' will eventually happen in history and inevitably it would be toxic with identity politics. The rest is history, Trump is a symptom. Biden is a symptom.

>By “here” I mean a time when a big change in information technology has implications for social structure too dramatic to play out without turbulence. In Nonzero I discussed a number of such thresholds, including the invention of writing and the invention of the printing press.

Blaming social media is not legitimate in my opinion; social media will be what fixes this. The fix to the USA falling apart is free and open discussions between the camps. This is what Elon is planning to do with twitter.

He's a billionaire and will be the world's first trillionaire, ONLY if the USA doesn't fall apart. He has a vested incentive/interest to help make this not happen.

>One grievance that drove support for Donald Trump in 2016 was that American coastal elites felt more connected to elites in other countries than to their fellow Americans in the heartland.

Which is for sure true. The reality is that they are still the same team. You can enjoy F1 over Nascar. You have to still realize you're on the same team. When the left-wing attacks the right-wing. You can't take actions that harms your own team. Eventually that team breaks and here we are.

Daily reminder: the comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.

I don't understand why people who clearly are traitors to the USA are able to get by with it. In the 1950's they would have been immediately arrested and tried for supporting facist countries. Now they are beloved.