I've been of the opinion that the web itself has already done this to a large degree. Web surfing (when is the last time you heard that phrase?) has never been a group activity.
It often was, in my childhood. There was only one computer.
Ah the days of A/S/L.
Guess you missed out on the S part.
So sorry that triggered another incel /s
Just thought your answer was funny, carry on without ego!
Age/Sex/Location?
Uh-Oh! A/S/L?
I’ve been wondering recently what impact banning social media would have on birth rates. I’m confident it would be positive but I’m not sure on what magnitude.
$10-12 beers and $15 cocktails gets expensive over a few weekends.
We've been educated for selfishness.
As someone who grew up under Socialism, this system we have here in the West is a paradise and hell in one.
Toxic individualism and an intolerance towards collective ownership is killing community. We should not blame humankind on a problem easily solvable by hiring a few people to clean and fix things. Somehow, this (the public bearing any cost whatsoever to have and maintain high quality public property) has become unacceptable to the public!
What becomes more and more unacceptable is the way those who already have a lot avoid to participate in this collective maintenance.
Besides that, there are things you can't solve with money. Sure you can sand "a few people" to clean up a place but the fact that people didn't use the trash bins (if the community was able to afford some) won't go away. It will create more and more costs while the collective money to patch over this will get less and less.
There will be a point when it snaps and some will be surprised it did because their bubble was kept clean all the time. They paid extra for it and your kids are not allowed on the loan.
The obsession with their birth rates is one of the creepy reasons why young people don't want to go out.
I'm a bit confused here, as someone who doesn't go out and never did. Do young people get accosted about generational birth rates if they go out?
But I do think this is overstated. I have a small number of children and the main reason that we don't have more is that its incredibly expensive over the course of a lifetime to raise a child who isn't going to be some wage slave somewhere or worse, end up in poverty and treated like shit by the world. If our society was genuinely dedicated to allowing a slower pace of life and ensuring the unconditional dignity of human beings, we'd probably have more kids, but having more now feels like pitching them into the meat grinder.
It's not really a 'vision' and more like the end of humanity.
Just need to re-evaluate things once we hit post-scarcity.
In the past, women who didn't really want children didn't have a great deal of choice, particularly if they wanted to follow any kind of socially acceptable life. It was considered a failure to many if they didn't get a husband and children.
Therefore there was no particular evolutionary pressure to select for women who actually had a strong biological urge to have children.
But there is now, so after a few generations you end up with mostly those women having children, that genetically passed on desire becomes more prominent, and birth rates increase again. Until overpopulation becomes a new version of the problem people thought it would be previously.
>Therefore there was no particular evolutionary pressure to select for women who actually had a strong biological urge to have children.
It is possible to that a biological disposition to have children sufficient to outweigh other factors do not emerge in a sufficient timespan.
Society has a lot of feedback systems in place which make a total collapse sort of unusual. A slow down of technological progress while society re-allocates labor towards other ends seems like a much more reasonable outcome.
For one, the question was merely whether we'd observe an increased birth rate, not whether that is a reason to pass such a law.
Secondly, you're the one who's bringing up coercion. You can both not be on social media and not have kids. It's still your decision.
The reason for it might not have been made explicit but we both understand what they were driving at and why they weren't "merely" asking the question of what effect a social media ban might have on chocolate sales or something equally arbitrary.
But the assertion was not that young people have a 'clear preference' not to have children, it was that they just have a clear preference to engage in a behaviour that, as a side-effect, lowers birth rates.
> we both understand
I'm assuming that you're not doing this intentionally, but by asserting that I "understand" the commenter is trying to 'coerce [me] into having a more positive "positive" birth rate', a notion that I still disagree with, you're suggesting that I'm being intentionally obtuse. Please don't do that.
No, and the comment indeed ignored the very visibly growing "child free" movement popular with the younger generations in a way that framed it as unintentional.
> it was that they just have a clear preference to engage in a behaviour that, as a side-effect, lowers birth rates.
I understood this as well but if we're going to be picky about what was actually said then your use of "just" is unfair here. They actually didn't go one way or the other in it being coincidental or intentional.
> by asserting that I "understand" the commenter is trying to 'coerce [me] ...
I haven't implied this. I asserted that you understood that singling out the effect on birth rates over the effect on chocolate sales wasn't done arbitrarily. Did you understand that? Framing it as "just asking questions" obscures the obvious socio-political undertones and feels dishonest.
Not really. There are still young people who don't intentionally choose not to have children. Their birth rates might or might not increase without social media.
> your use of "just" is unfair here.
Fair enough, I'll concede that.
> I asserted that you understood that singling out the effect on birth rates over the effect on chocolate sales wasn't done arbitrarily.
Because birth rates are much more relevant to the topic at hand than chocolate sales, no? More loneliness almost necessarily translates into lower birth rates while you can eat chocolate alone or with others.
As a mid 30s millennial, it sure did feel weird back in my early 20s when older people from my rural hometown asked why I hadn’t found someone to marry and started a family yet. I had yet to even figure out who I was and how to be responsible, upstanding adult but somehow I’m supposed to take on a partner and N children too?! How does that make any sense? The chances of it ending in disaster of one sort or another are just too high, and that was obvious to me even in the midst of the naivety of a freshly minted adult.
Flash forward to today, and yes I’d like to do those things but I’m now in so much better of a position to do so that it’s difficult to even express. I’m glad I didn’t succumb to the pressure.
I’m sure that there are individuals who have all that sorted before their mid-20s, but that’s anything but a rule and nobody should feel pressured to make the leap at that age.
Contrarian take (not saying I believe this) but what if AI companions actually engage the mind more? Is there some positive path available here?
And yet if I’m inquiring into a subject matter I have scant knowledge about, and want to learn more about, I voraciously read the output and plan my next prompt thoughtfully throughout.
The dividing line is intellectual curiosity. AI can stimulate the mind in ways people may not have thought possible, like explaining subjects they never grasped previously, but the user has to want to go down that path to achieve it.
Social media doomscrolling, by contrast, is designed to anesthetize, so the result should not surprise.
I am not trying to use it as a companion though. Not only do I have human ones but it feels super weird and creepy to try. I couldn’t suspend disbelief since I know how these things work.
To me AI feels like the final nail in the web's coffin
There is nothing remotely charming about it like the early web had
> I’ve been wondering recently what impact banning social media would have on birth rates. I’m confident it would be positive but I’m not sure on what magnitude.
People can and do use anticonception. They do not have kids just randomly out of bored stranger encounter anymore.
Sex is decoupled from birth rates, due to access to 100% effective birth control (IUD/morning after pill/abortion). Hence there is no reason to think it would have any positive effect. I would be surprised if even a single person I know had had an unplanned kid.
This doesn't really track. People still get pregnant accidentally all the time. And people also still decide to have babies on purpose if they meet someone they like. Social media may be screwing up the latter process somewhat and getting rid of it could improve birth rates.
Birth Control isn't the whole problem. I would argue its not part of the problem at all - if people are choosing to not have kids, you don't have a birth control problem, you have a society problem. Unless you just think more human agency is bad? Seems like a weird take to me.
But that didn’t occur to me, since as far as I know, pretty much all relationships don’t happen like that anymore, and are usually planned prior to going out using dating apps or other personal networks. In which case, it’s not just instagram reels that would have to be gotten rid of, but also matchmaking services.
In 2022, the US overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Abortion is now outlawed in 17 US states, restricted in 8.
Politicians in some of these states are also trying to ban IUDs and the morning after pill.
I genuinely don't know what to do in my smaller suburb where the verbs aren't "look" "eat" or "drink". I wanna do. Museums are mostly boring to me, there's little interaction. I don't meet people at the library or gym. The volunteer things ive done had a weird gap where younger people and older people have more free time than middle aged workers and parents so I had few peers at those too.
I'm open to any and all ideas. Feels like things never truly changed back after covid as far as community events and social opportunities.
You must have missed the 90s chat rooms we visited while in school, or even the more recent chat roulette in 2010.
Heck, even geocaching is a web surfing group activity.