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You grew up in the age of elevators and have undoubtedly been completely immersed in them more or less your entire life. Do you think you know more or less about elevators than somebody who lived through the initial transition towards them?

It's a fun example because of how wrong Hollywood (and intuition) gets this one. You're on an elevator and an evil terrorist cuts the cables! Oh no! What happens next!? Not much, besides you being annoyed at probably being stuck somewhere in between floors. People had to be persuaded that the technology was safe and so Elisha Otis' [1] regular demonstrations of his safety stopping invention is a big part of the reason of why elevators were able to take off. It's practically impossible to make an elevator fall down a shaft.

Now us growing up with them simply take everything for granted to the point we have absolutely no clue at all about what we're using, but always have used it, so just assume it must be okay as is.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisha_Otis#Lasting_success

Because before the Eternal September, it was HARD to participate. So, virtually nobody did it, and those that did tended to all resemble each other. Post Eternal September, it's so easy little children are doing it before they can do basic math. So now the 'great unwashed masses' come in and, like any other commons, 'ruin it'.

> Because before the Eternal September, it was HARD to participate. So, virtually nobody did it

This is an important point, I think. There's a generational aspect to this. Those of us who came of age prior to the internet (and especially social media) being ubiquitous don't really have an expectation that we're owed a forum where we can just say anything that's on our mind. As one of those olds, whenever I hear people complaining about "censorship" on whatever social media platform it kind of sounds entitled to my ears. We didn't expect to have a platform prior to about 2005 or so. We didn't have 'followers'. We discussed politics with a few friends in a bar over drinks. But now so many people seem to expect these private companies to provide them with a platform where they should be able to say whatever they want. Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee you a platform for that speech.

Prior to social media, it was basically impossible for any random person to get a platform for their speech, so nobody really thought about it.

Now, like electricity and water, it's become so fundamentally entwined with modern living that folks see it (maybe rightfully) as a common right.

edit: I'm not sure it's generational as much - the folks complaining about it the loudest seem to be older, non-technical folks.

> Now, like electricity and water, it's become so fundamentally entwined with modern living that folks see it (maybe rightfully) as a common right.

It doesn't feel like it's fundamentally entwined like electricity or water - It would be tough to live without electricity or water. But I live just fine without social media - in fact, I think my quality of life has gone up after deleting my twitter account back in May. And to a large degree, I think we're worse off as a society than we were prior to the emergence of social media.

I feel you are exactly missing the point of what Eternal September means.

Yes, there is some knowledge for some internet savvy types who grew up with the internet, but a lot of people are casual users. Many people still feel anonymity gives them carte blanche to be a jerk, or worse.

The amount of effort to be online is zero, but the amount of effort of people to behave is sometimes also zero (or low), of course depending on context. HN is a lot more civilized, but if it stopped being moderated it would in time be a nasty place as well.

> Many people still feel anonymity gives them carte blanche to be a jerk,

I don't think it's even anonymity, for some, indirect communication is enough: I once had a roommate who would leave unpleasant messages on the answering machine, but would be perfectly nice in person (on the same topic, even).

This is why I left facebook a few years ago: people who, in person, were reasonnable and nice friends spewing hatred online. I decided I'd rather not hear from those people very often and keep good memories of them (and the occasional contact) than just turn my back on them.

That's all true, but it's not because of some "Eternal September"[0] effect.

It's because there are assholes everywhere. They are small in number, but they are pretty evenly spread throughout the population. Regardless of ethnicity, socio-economic status, age or any other demographic detail, they are everywhere.

And they always have been, and likely always will be.

I suppose that social media dynamic allows them to disproportionately visit their douchebaggery on the rest of us, but that's not "Eternal September." That's just humanity.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Yes and no.

There has been a general coarsening of the culture which has gotten worse since the 2010s, Donald Trump was certainly a part of it.

I was talking about it with my wife this morning and she thinks that people have been getting more concerned about the homeless colony in a nearby city because the people who live there have been getting angrier and nastier. Other people down our road have put up signs that say "SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!"

There are the nihilistic forms of protest such as the people who are attacking paintings in museums to protest climate change. (Why don't they blow up a gas station?)

And of course there are the people on the right and left who believe they can "create their own reality" whether it is about the 2020 election or vaccines or about gender.

> There are the nihilistic forms of protest such as the people who are attacking paintings in museums to protest climate change.

So as somebody who noticed this bit of drama, and looked into it, I can explain. It's actually all very simple. Here goes:

It's a stunt!

Yup, they say that much. They tried protesting, they tried blocking roads, but were making page 10 of the newspaper. So they came out with some dramatic, outrageous plan that they knew wouldn't do harm (they planned this well in advance, and glued themselves to glass, not to the actual painting) but would be weird enough for people to talk about it. Plus there's a degree of symbolism in it.

> (Why don't they blow up a gas station?)

Because you can't protest oil infrastructure in any effective way. Blow up something? That's terrorism. Glue yourself to a gas pump? You'll get insulted and probably dragged off, plus gas stations are kind of meaningless and replaceable and often not anywhere very interesting. Protest at oil infrastructure? It's typically remotely located, and secured. You won't be noticed before you're removed. Block Shell's HQ? Good luck blocking a huge building with multiple entrances and security.

Point being there's nothing oil related I can think of where you could cause some sort of disturbance, quickly get attention, have the press get to you before you got forcefully removed from there, and have the story be interesting enough to have a prominent place in the news.

> Because you can't protest oil infrastructure in any effective way. Blow up something? That's terrorism.

So is trying to destroy cultural heritage. I see no qualitative difference between trying to deface a Vermeer and blowing up the Afghan Stone Buddhas.

You've not been reading then. I repeat: they glued themselves to a chunk of glass, not the actual painting. Nothing has been defaced or damaged.

They also threw food on some of the paintings - whether or not they were aware of a protective glass pane beforehand is unknown - and at least in one case glued themselves to a 16th century picture frame, itself a priceless cultural artefact.

> They also threw food on some of the paintings - whether or not they were aware of a protective glass pane beforehand is unknown

Probably were, since as far as I can tell it's a stunt with no real intent to destroy anything.

> and at least in one case glued themselves to a 16th century picture frame, itself a priceless cultural artefact.

That's definitely not good.

And it makes the news and... so what.

The people who think the Jan 6 attack was a good idea will add it to the list of other things leftists do that they think justify the Jan 6 attack.

For that matter I'd say that a lot of what "Black Lives Matter" does is also nihilistic. That is, there is not a lot of expectation that things will change because their ideology doesn't believe that things can change and because it won't look at the variables that could be changed to make a difference. What I do know is that some investigator will come around in 20 years and ask "why is this neighborhood a food desert?" but the odds are worse than 50% that they'll conclude that "it used to have a supermarket but it got burned down in a riot" is part of the answer. In the meantime conservatives will deny that the concept of a "food desert" is meaningful at all and also say that Jan 6 was OK because leftists are always burning down their neighborhoods and getting away with it -- except you (almost) never get away with burning down your neighborhood in terms of the lasting damage it does to your community unless your community is in the gentrification fast track, see

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

(It might be the sample I see, but I know a few right-wingers who admit that there is a lot of craziness on their side but it is justified by what the other side does whereas I never hear from leftists that it's justifiable to say that "A trans woman is indistinguishable from a natural woman" because of something stupid a conservative did.)

> And it makes the news and... so what.

What do you mean? They got what they wanted, more or less. They're a group of people organized around an idea, figured they weren't getting attention, so they went to look for a way to get some. That's all there is to it.

I think you're expecting some sort of special significance here. No, it's not complicated or even special.

Getting attention doesn't save the planet. Giving up saving the planet for the goal of getting attention is fundamentally nihilistic.

> Getting attention doesn't save the planet

On its own it doesn't. If you need to recruit people to your cause though you need people to know you exist and there's somewhere they can join.

> Giving up saving the planet for the goal of getting attention is fundamentally nihilistic.

Er, how are they giving up?

What they're doing is regularly shouting "Save the planet!" at people. Only this time they picked a weirder way to do it, because nobody was paying attention to the more normal ways they had to say it.

"Propaganda of the deed" is as likely to make people think climate change protestors are crazy and just make them close their earflaps as it is to motivate more people to take desperate nihilistic actions. This spectacle at best convinces people to tune out.

It's got to me more like this.

You have to tell the ESG people that what matters about Exxon Mobil is (1) they have to stop fact investing in producing oil that other people burn, (2) it wouldn't matter if they became a "net zero" company by pumping CO₂ from their oil refineries in the ground and using synthetic fuels in their trucks, (3) it doesn't matter how many women they get on the board.

People who are concerned about climate change in the US should be concerned about institutional reform in the Democratic party. Namely, we shouldn't be in situations like

https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/senate-debate-pen...

where a lunatic that could be beaten by a ham sandwich could win because the Democrats don't think that Pennsylvania deserves a senator who can verbally communicate effectively. (e.g. out of everybody in the state Philadelphia could get somebody in the top 1% of verbal communication skills as a Senator, why do they have to get somebody who is disabled?)

I haven't the faintest idea of what you're talking about.

Again, I think you're under the impression that this particular event was supposed to be in some way Meaningful. Part of some grand strategy or a big movement or something. I'm telling you it's not.

As far as I can tell, https://juststopoil.org came into existence around February this year. They're just a small, new group formed around opposition to Big Oil that's trying to make some noise. This paintings thing is attempt #25, and it just happens to be weird enough to make the news, but not fundamentally different to the 24 that came before it.

In fact they tried previously gluing themselves to microphone at a news agency:

https://juststopoil.org/2022/04/03/just-stop-oil-supporter-g...

I see no indication that this is part of some grand strategy from the Democrats or something. No, it's just a small group doing a weird thing and getting news coverage because weird thing is weird.

Edit: And in fact, Just Stop Oil is UK based, so they have nothing to do with the US Democrats or Pennsylvania.

> (Why don't they blow up a gas station?)

If it's helpful, this organization has in fact actively sabotaged oil infrastructure in the past to protest and no one gave a single shit. They had a whole week where they decommissioned several pumps back in August. I think its helpful instead of asking "why don't they <obvious>" to assume someone has already tried it.