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Alienated, Alone and Angry: What the Digital Revolution Did? (buzzfeednews.com)
279 points by SirLJ on Dec 20, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 346 comments



One thing to note is that Robert Putnam wrote the original Bowling Alone essay in 1995. Well before most people in America even had Internet access.

The trend of declining participation in religious organizations, civic organizations (like the League of Women Voters), fraternal societies (like the Elks or Masons), volunteer associations, labor unions, and sports leagues has been happening since at least the 1970s. Surveys of Americans have found a consistent decline in the number of self-reported close friends since as far back as the 1980s. Same for those who reported being friends with their neighbors. Indicators of social capital like the percent of people who donate blood have been falling since the 1970s.

The point is increasing levels of isolation and misanthropy is a manifestation of a broader trend towards declining social capital. And that trend has been ongoing for probably 50 years. Social media may have accelerated it, but I don't think it would have anywhere near the same impact if Facebook was introduced to the American society of 1960.


I wonder if it's a side effect of prosperity. If you're poor, you depend on your broader family and community -- when you run out of money, when your car breaks down and your uncle can fix it, etc. etc. and if you have to sleep in the same room as your extended family, you're going to have "community."

However, dealing with people is difficult and inconvenient, so when you have money you decide to leave your family and isolate yourself from other people's problems as much as possible. You perhaps gain more peace, privacy and free time, but it's harder to notice what you're losing.

I'm not going to dredge up the numbers now, but in the 60s in America, I think it's probably safe to say a lot more siblings lived in the same room, a lot more people lived in small independent farms working alongside many family members, etc. etc. People were closer together because they had to be. People in cities didn't have to be quite so adjacent, but perhaps they were closer because it was normal in society to be closer.

Speculation on my part, but it probably wouldn't be hard to find those numbers and back up the argument...


From what I've seen living a privileged community in a not so privileged country, its that culture tends to impact in a much higher degree than money or privilege. Yes, money can buy you the privilege of skipping those awkward interactions that make us human, but it is up to the person to actually want to use money with that purpose.

I know very wealthy people that keep very closed ties to their families and friends. It's true that finding real friends gets harder, but the isolation tends to be caused by a deeper cultural norm.

E.g. in Latin America the family is given a much higher importance than in the States or Europe. It is not rare to see young adults living with their parents even if they can easily afford a place of their own. Even those that live on their own tend to meet their families in a regular basis.

In the end it's all about prioritizing what is important in your life and in every society there seems to be a common list shared by it's inhabitants, if you end up in a place that values more independence than relations, maybe its time to start swimming against the current in that regard.


Well, that's true, but my argument is that cultural norms spring from necessity. In places where a lot of people must live adjacent, that kind of living becomes the cultural norm and even if you're in a position to do your own thing, you are still influenced by it.

That is, cultural norms affect people, but basic necessity also affect cultural norms. Just like your values inform what you do, but what you do also changes your values.

You're right in that we must make greater efforts to swim against the current, but so many of us must in adulthood develop tools to foster community and connection. That's hard to do, especially when you're vulnerable, there's trial-and-error involved and you don't really have a good model for what you "should" be doing.


I have a hunch than in a couple decades this issue will be amplified. The biggest problem we are seeing from the disposal of more social interactions arises from not giving it its true importance.

It may be as you say that in the past interactions were fostered mainly as a side product of the necessity to cooperate and interact with others. However as we develop and become for independent thanks to prosperity and technology we must not get rid of interaction for they are an end in itself.

The issue or even taboo is the lack of importance that is given to the interactions with others just for its own sake. Maybe we will move on from this need and become more self reliant, however in the short term it seems that we are having a hard time adapting, especially with the increase of suicides and drug use in younger generations. -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21650584


>in Latin America the family is given a much higher importance than in the States or Europe

I'm brazilian. I have a sister who is married to an american, and they live in the U.S. He always jokes how my sister talks to our mother in Brazil 10x more than he talks to his, yet his mother lives 15 minutes away.


>> I wonder if it's a side effect of prosperity.

This is purely anecdotal evidence for your point but I'll mention it anyways.

When I was growing up, I lived on a dead end street, in a blue collar part of town. The houses were so close together, as a kid I could almost straddle between them and touch both houses. I knew every kid and their parents names, could recite every address on my block. The kids were constantly out playing sports games of all kinds, in every season. We made up games, went to the park and played baseball together. We had summer block parties and biked to the local pool to swim and chase girls. Everybody knew everybody else. We all helped each other out when things got tight. The few elderly people we had in our neighborhood got their driveways and sidewalks shoveled by us younger kids. We collected firewood for their fireplaces, we kept watch on their houses.My extended family all lived within a few blocks so I was always close with my cousins as well. I look back now and feel like it was pure Americana. When you think of the American Dream, this was the textbook definition of it.

Then in 1996, everything changed. My dad landed a new job, was suddenly making way more money than he used to. My sister went off to college and we moved to the other "wealthier" side of town. Bigger house, pool in the backyard, in a sea of larger homes. I was an only child, started high school and you know what? I didn't know anybody in my neighborhood. To this day, I couldn't tell you the names of the people who lived on either side of our house. No more sports in the streets, no more BMX racing down at the trails at the park by my house. No more hanging with the kids who would just congregate in their yards until we had enough kids to do something fun. After that first year, I struggled to make friends and for the first time in some 17 seventeen years, I actually felt alone and isolated. It lasted for at least another year when I was a junior in HS, I finally found some friends who like to skateboard, snowboard, mountain bike and play sports like I did and things got better.

But I agree, when we were living in a blue collar town? Everything felt close and you had a tight knit community. When we moved? I just felt alone and isolated. My neighbors treated us the same way. They stayed in their house and we stayed in ours. Doing better off financially was good, but I lost a lot on the way.


Struggles and hardship also breed empathy. If you are completely independent and self-sufficient it is hard to relate to people who need help. Breaking my leg with no family around, being broke and dropping out of college, working retail for 8 years, it all sucked, but there was no option but to commiserate with people around me. Now 5 years later I have a fancy tech job and keep to myself during my commutes.

Also a simpler example of your above point, Christmas gifts: they are helpful gestures of goodwill when you're broke and strapped for necessities, but sort of meaningless tokens of ritual when everyone has everything they need already.


A major factor is government usurping the traditional functions of community. You don't need help from your local church or a fraternal society if you are getting aid from the government. And people are less likely to participate in the community if they feel that the government is handling and taxing them to do so.


I haven't done the research at all but would it be fair to say people in at least a few European countries have a better sense of community and human interaction than US (maybe the Scandinavian countries) but a far higher tax rate? Haven't looked into it all though.


>> a few European countries have a better sense of community and human interaction than US

I would agree given a lot of the European communities are smaller in size (think "villages" instead of "cities") so there are in closer proximity and share more resources. They often share more bloodlines and have genealogical ties many generations deeper. My father came from Norway and his family is like 15 generations deep. Here in the US? His family ties are only three or four generations deep.


I have seen it commented the idea that churches are some great source of immense, direct charity. If one is in need, they should simply call upon "the church" for assistance. A bowl of soup, a blanket, and some petty cash right in hand.

Is that real? Even today instead of 150 years ago? What's the regional variation on that?


Absolutely, yes. Our church collects tithes and offerings. Tithes funnel to the head of the church and there is a council that sees to their disposition. Offerings are collected monthly and stay in the local congregation for the immediate relief of members of our Church and members of our community regardless of religious affiliation. If any offerings remain, they funnel up to regional administrators. The beauty of this system is that I can give charitably and not know who is getting the benefit. I don't have to judge whether or not my offerings is getting maximum benefit because that responsibility is on the local church leader. (who is using prayer and discernment to maximum effect)

Also, my church has food distribution channels and warehouses so nobody is going hungry.


To some extent yeah. I've had members of my church get hit with sudden costs from an accident/medical bill and someone will start up a collection to help them out. Church's might also run a food bank or similar service to the wider community.


What kind of church do you belong to?


Catholic.


There's also the push of inherently social occupations vs. individualistic occupations.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/344/6184/603.full


Which one is inherently social, growing rice or wheat?


Prosperity has arguably been falling like a rock during the exact same time periods.


The average household size (persons) has been declining and the average house size (Sq.ft) has been climbing. The average person has certainly much more square feet for themselves.


Prosperity is generally defined as the amount of work hours you have to do to make ends meet. That number has skyrocketed. In that era you could put yourself through college delivering pizzas. In 1950 you had to work 2 days per month at minimum wage to rent a house.


I think the size of one's house is one of the archetypal measures of "prosperity" and it's been exploding over the past 50 years. More generally, the problem with these little anecdotes is that they're not normalized to anything. Anecdotes along the lines of "you could afford X on Y hours of minimum wage work," for example, ignore the fact that almost nobody earns minimum wage today: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1M09. The percentage of workers earning minimum wage or less (some workers are exempt) dropped from 15% in 1980 to just 2% today.

These anecdotes also ignore numerous other parameters. For example, households are much smaller today than before. So looking at "median household income" understates increases in income for the middle. Without adjusting for decreased household size, inflation-adjusted household income went up 16% from 1970-2010. Adjusting for household size, it went up 34%.

Likewise, people are more likely to be single parents, etc., today, which impacts economic prosperity. From 1971 to 2011, married people with a spouse present did well: https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2.... The percentage of such adults who are low income stayed flat at about 21-22%. But the percentage that qualify as upper income grew from 14% to 25%. For those who have never been married, the opposite happened. Low income rates went from 22% to 34%, and upper income rates stayed flat at 16-18%.


Are incomes inflation adjusted? The average income when I was a kid was $50k per year, about the same as it is now, except that $50k has 50% less purchasing power today. $50k today is the equivalent of $25k 30 years ago.


Yes they are. Nominal median income in 1990 was under $30,000: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N

Here's probably a more interesting statistic. Women's labor force participation rate hit current levels around 1990-1995, when I was a kid. Since then, the median inflation-adjusted income for a married couple with two people working has increased more than 20%, from under $90,000 to over $110,000: https://fee.org/media/30584/census3.png?width=600&height=409....


Close - it's gross inequality, not prosperity per se.

And thus studies find societies with less inequality are generally happier : ).


Putnam also did research on the causes of the breakdown of social trust. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9477.... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and...

> "... in the short term, other things being equal, more diversity in a community is associated with less trust both among and within ethnic groups. Putnam describes people of all races, sex, socioeconomic statuses, and ages as "hunkering down", avoiding engagement with their local community as diversity increases. Although limited to American data, his findings run counter the contact hypothesis which proposes that distrust declines as members of different ethnic groups interact, and conflict theory which suggests that while distrust among ethnic groups rises with diversity, distrust within ethnic groups should decrease. Putnam found that even when controlling for income inequality and crime rates, two factors which conflict theory states should be prime causal factors in declining inter-ethnic group trust, more diversity is still associated with less communal trust. Further, he found that low communal trust is associated with the same consequences as low social capital. Putnam says, however, that "in the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits."

It's no secret that the racial demographics in the US have seen significant change over the last generation. According to his research, this transformative time will lead to exactly what you're describing, but he conjectures that it will be worth it in the long run.

Not very appealing to the current zeitgeist, or to Putnam himself, but it's the continuation of the 'Bowling Alone' research you mentioned.


As a potential counterpoint to what someone might read from that quote:

> "Putnam denied allegations he was arguing against diversity in society and contended that his paper had been "twisted" to make a case against race-conscious admissions to universities. He asserted that his "extensive research and experience confirm the substantial benefits of diversity, including racial and ethnic diversity, to our society."


That's not a counterpoint. That's his opinion which is not supported by his research.


Rampant speculation on my part, but I've always suspected that the number of community leaders is small, delicate and disconnected from governments. I've observed that informal leadership in religious communities has an enormous effect on how communities behave - I lived in a town where the baptists organised an almost suspicious number of things for the general community.

I could imagine diversity of religion with no economic incentives to standardise (as would be caused by general poverty) would lead to an element of fracturing in the community. Even without migration, rising trends towards atheism might have the same effect over the long term. It isn't obvious what is symptom and cause in all this though.


Going to shoehorn my ideology into this. One thing that became normalized since the 70's was sprawl.


I am an Australian visiting Italy at the moment and I find the streets here are just... more vibrant and alive than the equivalent places at home. It is no data point, and shouldn't be seen as one. There are too many differences between Italian and Australian society to lay the blame anywhere in particular. But something is wrong in Australian culture that isn't as obvious in Italy.


Funny, I too am in Italy right now and I agree. I love that people walk so much here.


That's easy enough to check, compare rates in denser countries/states to more spread out ones or cities vs. suburbs. I have a hunch that the correlation won't be there but it should be interesting either way.

Edit: doing a quick look around, this article using the American Time Use Survey shows a small increase in socialization for people who live in cities, but only a couple of minutes a day. https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/10/american-time-use-surve...


It seems so obvious to me too. Plain and simple physical distance correlating to inter-personal distance.


That timeline interestingly lines up with the Cold War-era. Perhaps domestic propaganda and "cultural engineering" left some lasting damage...


Or just raw fear. That causes people to close up on its own.


Yes the friendly neighbour idea was last seen in home improvement, the TV show. There is too much fear of placing a foot wrong and ghosting as the norm for mistakes.


Yeah? Home Improvement, lead into by the TV series Family Matters? I think it's a stretch...



Why the downvotes? Some of Marx's least "problematic" writings is his early stuff on alienation.


Do we have any research prior to the 1970s?

Could there have been an upwards blip in civic participation caused by, say, the shared experience of WW2, with everything since then representing a reversion to ordinary behaviour?


I would really like to read the research backing that decline. It certainly feels right but I'm naturally skeptical of anything that smacks of "the good 'ol days."


What was driving this decline in the 70s and 80s?


I'm not anti immigration in general, and in fact my whole family came here from eastern Europe decades ago - though I grew up American-ish, I've always felt different from the members of my communities, partly because culture in my home was not quite American. This is one of the costs of a liberal immigration policy - families from different cultures are less likely to interact closely and form civic societies. The barrier comes in the form of subtle but different social customs, and different values - there's a reason large groups of immigrants tend to self segregate, and it isn't just the convenience of language. That doesn't mean people won't be kind and neighborly, but it limits the depth of the average inter-familial relationship.

The millennials in my cohort, I imagine across the country, were raised by their schooling to be race and culture blind, in a well meaning attempt to encourage cohesiveness. This education did not erase the actual differences that drive different cultures apart, it only made most of us blind to them, which I think makes it more difficult to overcome subtle cultural barriers because it takes time for, especially "suburban white kids", to be aware of and mitigate the soft social friction that comes from cultural clash.


To me, the most obvious cause is women’s increased participation in the workforce. With women no longer free to volunteer and socialize throughout the day, a lot of these community organizations would see a decline in membership.

Even the simple decline in people who identify their neighbour as a friend can be explained by a lack of women living and socializing in the neighbourhood during the daytime. The increased use of paid childcare would similarly reduce the amount of children living and playing in the neighbourhood during the day.

Overall, this would contribute to the feeling that the suburbs are ghost towns during the day, and families arriving home from school/work would rush inside to eat dinner before chauffeuring the kids to all of their extracurriculars.


I'm sure there's a number of factors, but the problem I've witnessed the most is the general break up of the home. Most often I've seen caused by a father being absent. There has been a measurable decline in the lives of men in our society.


> To me, the most obvious cause is women’s increased participation in the workforce

Maybe. But I'll counter with my own anecdote. I raised my daughter as a single working dad. No mother in the home at all. And yet, I got in plenty of volunteering and socializing anyway.


You did a heroic job then. I was raised by a single, working dad. I spent a lot of time at my grandparents place, uncles and aunts, and at a home day care run by a family friend.

My dad spent most of his time on the road, as a travelling salesman. I did spend more time with him as life went on, however. My dad never volunteered though, and all of his social connections were former high school friends that he saw once or twice a year.

My dad did a heroic job, too. I’ll always be grateful for him raising me. I still wish I had had a mom at home though, like most of my friends did.


Interesting thought. Wouldn't you think though that women would have gained social capital by being in a workplace with other people rather than being at home alone?


One way to think of it is that the connections you make in the workplace run in one direction. The connections you make throughout the community run orthogonal to that. Combined, the two build up the social "fabric".

However, when you shift the majority of connections to those made through the workplace, you end up with just a bunch of connections running roughly parallel to each other. Not so much a fabric as a pile of string.

Probably many flaws to this analogy, but that is basically the idea of "third places". That you need somewhere where people interact based on something different from what they do for a living or who their direct family members are.


My mother was active in my school, reading exercises, schooltrips and fairs and the like.

A lot of the mothers were. Actually we only had 6 teachers, for 6 classes/grades. No other personel ( one of the teachers was the 'head' ).


One thing that comes to mind is that women’s lives have changed so much from 1960s - 1990’s. Women having less children, getting married later and interring the workforce.

I’m not saying we need to move backwards. But we do need to find a new way forward. Perhaps the concept of full time work needs to change the most.


>Perhaps the concept of full time work needs to change the most.

This. We're at a point where many jobs could be done in 15-20 hours a week, but we require everyone to punch in and out like it's a factory.

I live in flyover country, and work in higher education. I have exempt staff. Some weeks they have 2 hours worth of work, some weeks they have 70. But, because the cultural norm is that you can't be productive unless you're filling seats from 8-5, they waste 38 hours some weeks, and don't meet the requirements of the extra 30 others.

It's just outrageous, and I don't understand it. This is 2020. It's the real future now. Let's grow up as a society.


The problem is everytime someone seems to discuss shorter work hours or work weeks, they also ship in a pay cut as well. If I can he equally as productive in 4 hours as I am in 8 hours as a salaried employee, why should I be paid less?


I agree with you, you shouldn't be paid less. The problem is in larger companies rarely are you paid according to the value you create. Mostly likely as a developer your "cost" is how much the hiring manager would need to pay for the next best equivalent worker.

I'm questioning if we're paid according to how productive we are. The more steps there are between you and revenue the less likely this seems to be true.

Because you aren't really paid based on hard results in large companies, the 8 hours becomes more about posturing than actually delivering the results.

I'm open to other ideas. I desperately want to work 20 hours a week instead of 40. I'm trying to better understand why we're stuck at 40.


One very great place to start fixing this would be all "benefits" being public.

Public healthcare (as a baseline for any luxury private care to beat).

Public vacation / family leave (pooling the liability, seniority, and policies in to a common system).

In this way the funding for these benefits becomes taxes and their distribution disconnected from the employment at any particular business, as well as from the business paying any particular employee.


Remote work forces companies to adapt to results-oriented work


On the other hand, you could argue that remote work makes you work more.


That's fustrating to hear about. What can we do to fix it?

I'm not affiliated but I'd love to see more postings here. https://30hourjobs.com/


I'm unsure if this would lead to an increase in socialization and not just a lot of people in their own houses playing video games and watching Netflix.


I think it would lead to an increase in socialization. I am unable to join service leagues or social organizations because the 4-5 hours between work and sleep at night are precious to me and my family. If I did not have that thought hanging over my head, I would volunteer more or just go do social things more in a formal setting.

I think others would echo that sentiment.


I think this is really up to the individual, when I "work from home", I frequently go to artsy cafes around my city to be surrounded with people who are doing different things to get some human interaction (and maybe feel a bit younger than I do sitting behind a desk).


Being in the proximity of other people is really no substitute for real human interaction.


I live in a pretty small city, going basically anywhere is a guarantee for running into friends. It’s not the same when I’m in other places


Refrigeration, department stores, radio.

That's food, sundries, and information, the 3 main things that humans go out of their home to get, and before those 3 inventions you had to get into your community to get them.

Refrigeration allowed the growth of larger, depersonalized grocery stores.

Department stores were the first iteration of buying sundries at a place run by people you don't know.

Radio was the first non-local information source available on demand.

For most of human history, people lived in communities and had to interact with each other to live their lives. In the last 100 years out of 10,000 we suddenly don't anymore, and we're still figuring it out. And that's before you consider the impact of the Internet.

This has been a long, slow burn, and I worry that humanity won't be able to grow up fast enough to figure it out before we do something really stupid.


Strong factors, but they all started in the early 20th century, not in the 1970s. Huge contributors to the failure of the business model of private mass transit (streetcars).


Also for people who were working to be part of a knowledge economy, casual commentary from even very well-educated folks can only take you so far; you need expert guidance or peerage to get to the next level. Strangely, even YouTube or Discord can be higher signal than a random friends group.


Get to the next level of what? Understanding of the alienated situation we find ourselves in? (genuine question)


I would argue its gross inequality more so than those technologies.

In other countries with less economic inequality I believe studies show more happiness and social cohesion.


Lower class has more connectivity due to need. Upper class not so much. I always thought it was more fun being poor due to this but rich was more comfortable.


Not surprising that suggesting social inequality might play a part gets you instantly downvoted. Despite being as plausible an explanation as other (more right wing) possibilities - 'diversity', 'women working' that proliferate in this thread. Its uncomfortable for highly paid tech workers to accept the reality that inequality damages social cohesion.

Nevertheless, If inequality is a major cause of this kind of alienation, it's a particular kind of inequality. Specifically people living in competition, and confronted by the impact of competition in close proximity. Some desperately unequal societies in South East Asia don't seem to have the same level of social dysfunction, while Japan which is relatively flat has enormous amounts of alienation, mental health issues, relationship decline, and of course suicide.


I don't believe the digital revolution "did this to us". I think it's simply a mirror and and amplifier what was already there.

On social media, for example, we get to see the projections of what people want to be and the underlying darker sides of their personality (narcissism, selfishness, etc). This was always there but latent or hidden... stuff that happened behind closed doors that only families knew about. Now it's public...

Meanwhile the alienation or isolation... as a European, what freaks me out every time I'm in the US is the dependence on cars for everything. That in many places it's not possible to walk to the grocery and get fresh air... That you're in a permanent state of semi-isolation, breathing air-conditioned oxygen with the only human contact being with people that are paid to smile. Contrast that with visiting a city like Kiev where, in the evening after work, the city parks are filled with families enjoying the sunset (when the weather is warm).

I've have the theory that Internet adoption has always been fastest in the US, compared the the rest of the world, because it's the only way to get any kind of "real" connection to other people. The driver - loneliness - was always there, the product of car dependence, television and an entrepreneurial culture that tends to want to monetize any kind of human interaction, even friends (Amway, pyramid marketing).

Ultimately I think it's a good thing, that this stuff is becoming visible and we're realising there is a problem. That's the first step to find the solution.


I am an American citizen, and I think you are spot on about isolation in this country. The dependence on cars is truly awesome and terrifying. It's something that is so dominant that I never considered it until I was diagnosed with epilepsy. I was disqualified from holding a driver's license, and so years ago I decided that I would try to live in the USA without a car. I did not consider that to be an absurd idea, but it has been very, very difficult, and sometimes not in the ways you would expect.

You'll see a lot of people disagreeing with your observation here, and they characterize it as an opinion, but it simply is not. The USA is insanely dependent on cars. If you live in the wrong place, it would be practically impossible for you to walk to a friend's house or to get groceries on foot. But I don't want to get bogged down in the obvious infrastructure issues; I think the more interesting disorder is the mental dependence that Americans have on cars.

Years ago I moved to a very temperate area. Low humidity, plenty of parks, lots of places within walking distance. I walked everywhere I needed, or, if it was out of the way, I'd take a bus. I would talk to people about my daily activities and found that everyone seemed to be repulsed by my stories of walking just a few kilometers. Friends offered rides non-stop and seemed very concerned that I would be walking for 20 minutes in 15C weather.

Live in your house, get in your car, drive to a strip mall, go into a business, come back out, get back in your car, repeat. These days, I can't help but view the typical car-bound American as a terrestrial astronaut who has to embark on Extra Vehicular Activities to survive. He manages, but every second outside of the conditioned environment of his ship, he is scared to death of the vacuum of nature.


Why is this downvoted? As an American (48 yrs) living the last 15 in Europe, I see it exactly the same as vlastjj here.


> I don't believe the digital revolution "did this to us". I think it's simply a mirror and and amplifier what was already there.

You saying the same thing and its exact contrary.

Of course it's always been there. That's not the point. The point is that the so-called revolution/empowerment is promoting the worst out of us collectively and individually, instead of taming the beast, and helping the best.

Taming the beast, the destructive human passions, for the common good, which is the very point of "civilisation".

Edit:

> and we're realising there is a problem

It's been thousands of years we've realised, we know there is a problem. People have discoursed/written about it so much in the past.


It's almost like saying, "Cars aren't responsible for polluting the environment. Our capacity for pollution has always been there."

Well, of course it has, but small nudges are responsible for a big part of the course of history.

But I completely agree with them on the isolation of car-based American culture.


Yea, but if we're going to follow the logic of the article, the Harris Poll’s Alienation Index had American alienation at 29% in 1966. Car culture and the general structure of most towns were already mature at that point. I think the reliant of blaming car culture in America is a red herring to point away from not just the digital revolution but also the 90s media blitz. Late 80s and especially the 90s saw a real rapid change in the way we consume just about anything and everything. The VHS tape really came into power in the 90s, meaning most people didn't have to go out and sit in a large room of strangers to see hollywood movies anymore.

While I do understand (and personally do like) places being close together so I can walk around. Don't pretend that city life is the perfect solution. There's the Rat Park experiment that showed utopian cities are not the answer and it plays out in the human psyche as well. People who live in cities are not necessarily happier than those in rural communities. There's a few NGOs that do happiness surveys across the globe. While living in a city may make you richer and maybe even technically healthier in some aspects, very few are happier than their rural counterparts.

Just saying, it's definitely more complicated than just "car culture".


This is a little aside from the topic at hand but do you have any links or literature to expound on the 90s media blitz you mention? I was born in 87 and so grew up with only a faint impression of the 80s through what was lingering into the 90s. From talking to people older than me and looking at various media I can't help feeling like society took a hard turn in the 80s and through-out the 90s to where we are today. I've largely thought that it was due to a combination of technology and corporations/consumerism but I've never read or heard anyone else make that link until your comment.


Well, I think it's probably that we live in an economy that has been exponentially expanding for centuries. Workers are producing more, information is flowing faster, and everything is just moving more quickly.

I think what we have is the result of trying to optimize for sales and profits. You must always sell more this quarter than last quarter. It's just picked up, year by year over the decades.

Besides, I've always heard that society took a hard turn after WWII. All those factories had to keep producing something, so they reconfigured to producing consumer goods.


Oh, sure, I mainly meant I felt how isolating car culture is, too.

I pretty much have to live somewhat near a reasonably busy running trail. Sometimes, I think I go running just to see other human faces even if we have no interaction. It was especially true when I had an 100% remote work job.

I like to live near cool hangouts in the city where people regularly walk by, not because I leave the house that often, but because as a classic introvert I feed on other people's happy vibes.


Yea, I'm not picking on you about the car culture thing (sorry if it seemed so). I'm just getting irked by it because I've been seeing that comment so often the past year as "America bad because America likes cars, car culture bad". There's just way many to these issues than just cars.

And, I agree, maybe too much reliance of cars in this country. I can totally agree we should focus on increasing the walk-ability of many communities. But, you can't deny having the ability to say at any moment, "I feel like going 30 miles somewhere, at my choosing and route" is a bad thing. I've been through 3 different public transit systems, (Portland, Seattle and Denver). Portland was the best out of the three. But knowing you are wasting 15 minutes waiting for public transit, then another 10-15 minutes of time to get there due to stops and general traffic (25-30 min) for essentially a 10 minute car ride... yea... It's great in plenty of situations, but is annoying as hell in just as many. The fact that my mobility is not dictated by someone else, yes, to me, is worth the extra monthly cost in comparison of daily use public transit tickets.


Yeah, it's a backlash from all us millenials who felt trapped growing up in the suburbs and moved to the city at the first chance we got. It's important to have nuanced views on things, though.


I get that, I'm 32, a millenial as well. I tried the urban lifestyle because... well, I guess I was supposed to. It was fun at first, and then I hated it. Three different cities and, just not for me. I like having a backyard (I like to garden) but I also don't like having to pay two to three times the price for living.

I don't need to hit downtown everyday. I'd rather invite friends over to grill/drink. While owning a car might be "more expensive" than using just public transit, the general lifestyle of not living urban is far cheaper. That and if we all pass out on the floor, it's not frowned upon when at someone's house. It is when you're at a bar. It's sort of like when people in some of the big Cali cities complain it's impossible to own a home or save enough money. No, where you live is terrible. There was an NPR story a year or so ago about a couple selling their home in san fran, then buying a bigger home in cash in Michigan (I think), paying off some debt and still had a savings left over, which they never could do before. They took "pay cuts" compared to their old jobs, but they were living far easier, with a savings in comparison to cost of living.

Personally, it took me way too long to realize salaries are not created equal depending on location. 60k in a place like San Fran or Seattle, does not equal 60k in let's say Tampa, FL. You can live far better in Tampa on 60k than you ever could in Seattle. That's something I think a lot of people aren't quite picking up on. There's a cost/benefit to location. You want to live urban? There are things you have to sacrifice (like a savings account unless you work finance or make a shit ton of cash). Don't want to sacrifice that? Then you can't live there. Simple as that. There are other places to live... with trees. I like trees.

Also, it's quiet away from the city. I get far better sleep these days.


Houston is pretty nice because inside the loop, there's lots of suburban style housing but also the variety/culture of urban life and it's cheap.


This has nothing to do with “millennials”. See, e.g., the Rush song “Subdivisions”, which describes exactly that dynamic, and was recorded before any millennials were even born yet.


Are we talking about the same Rat Park? The rats in the utopian cities gave up using drugs.


Common good and individual freedoms are often opposed, as it's very unlikely for us to succeed in taming just the destructive sides of human passions, without taking away a bit of creative and positive passions and freedoms too. Societies always oscillate between the two, and unfortunately it seems that we're now past the first half and in the phase where people get scared into giving away individual freedoms in exchange for more safety and sense of control.


I get what you are saying but this is a very narrow and uninformed view American life. Americans don't spend all their time in cars for god's sake. The digital age aside, there is and has been plenty of socialization at home, in neighborhoods, at church, and at the grocery store.


There is little socialization at home - when's the last time (outside Christmas and Turkey Day) most families hosted a large gathering?

Hypermobility in the service of jobs has broken a lot of that cohesion. You usually don't live next door to your parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts any more. This gets worse the more urban the area is - rural areas still have some of that cohesion.

Neighborhood socialization? Not in any apartment complex I've ever seen. Walk down the floor, eyes straight, avoid even basic salutations. It's slightly better in suburbia, but not much.

In the grocery store? Have you been to a large grocery store? It's not socialization just because there's a lot of people. What meaningful interactions are there in a grocery store?

This leaves church. And as it turns out, that's not everybody's cup of tea.

American's may not spend all their time in the car. They do spend exorbitant amounts of time in their care. They do have much less opportunity to socially engage than most Europeans experience. What social experience there is often needs large quantities of alcohol - and while I haven't seen any studies on the subject, I'm still holding the belief that at least a good chunk of that is due to needing to deal with the anxiety of an extremely uncommon situation.

As I said above, many of these factors are somewhat lesser in more rural communities, but they experience a large flight of the younger demographic towards cities, curtailing cross-generational interaction.

And that's not just an "uninformed view". I've spent several decades inside and outside the US, and seen a few cultures in the process - and that view holds. But let's dismiss that as anecdote, too, and look at actual data, time spent visiting friends per day[1]. The US is way down that list.

It's very likely car culture is far from the only reason for that, but the US is a country that seems fairly isolating.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/522039/time-spent-visiti...


> when's the last time (outside Christmas and Turkey Day) most families hosted a large gathering?

Very very often. Maybe every month? And large neighborhood get togethers at least every week. Perhaps you are overly generalizing from your experiences. Large families/neighborhoods that meet regularly are not a foreign concept in the US. Although HN probably caters to the sort of people who do not go to these things.


Please note that I added data as well. It isn't just based on personal experiences.

There may be regional differences, there may be urban/rural differences, but overall, the US socializes significantly less.

Same goes for leisure time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_time_devo...

Dropping amount of social time in the US: https://qz.com/1320344/americans-are-socializing-less-and-pl...

Also, it's likely income/wealth dependent: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/194855061664147... (Given that the US is what, #3 in terms of median wealth, I'd consider this mild corroboration)

(Edit: Formatting. I swear, the lack of lists in HN...)


They specifically said “most families”, not “your family”


> There is little socialization at home - when's the last time (outside Christmas and Turkey Day) most families hosted a large gathering?

Can you support this assertion as a blanket statement? I don't see much evidence of this in my own personal experience. I grant that it may be the case in certain areas and groups, but across the board? I'm not seeing it.


"Neighborhood socialization? Not in any apartment complex I've ever seen. Walk down the floor, eyes straight, avoid even basic salutations."

I recently moved into an apartment in manhattan, and I know my neighbours, and smile to them and they smile to me. One even let me borrow their toolbox.


That's because people in Manhattan aren't dependent on their cars.


No, it’s probably just a result of local variation. Some buildings or low-density neighbourhoods are super friendly, some buildings or low-density neighbourhoods are unfriendly. There’s a lot of reasons going on, it’s dependent on individuals.

In super-friendly neighbourhoods I’ve found it’s often one person who’s doing all the work to keep everyone connected.


> to socially engage than most Europeans experience.

Whoa. ‘Europeans’ are pretty diverse. Southerners get easily alienated in the north. I d say Americans are pretty friendly, fake friendly but still


Not OP, it was a bit of caricature I believe. But there are stark differences he also mentioned - many times in US I couldn't walk to a store, unless walking on the road and risking getting hit / stopped by police. Some shops I wanted to visit simply didn't have pedestrian access at all. Or stuff like the need to walk 45 minutes in a big U shape to store that is 1km away. Replace store with any other destination.

This reflects a bit different reality in US. You might not even see it anymore, but for many Europeans its a bit shocking when first encountered.


It's disorienting when I visit family back in Texas each year after living in Germany for the past 15, and especially now that I've given up our second car because I realize I wasn't driving enough for it to make sense, it really irritates me that I have to have a rental car the whole time I'm visiting.

Since I'm a respectable-looking, middle-aged white lady, I just get stopped and politely asked if I need a ride or to borrow their phone when I'm walking between shopping centers. It's not as universally pleasant for people who do not look like me. My sister-in-law thinks I'm nuts for wanting to walk a couple hundred yards to the other side of a large shopping center rather than get back in the car and drive there.


What you are describing has only been my experience in suburbia. Major cities are a lot more walkable as far as getting to a grocery store or convenience shop or whatever. I'm currently in Chicago and the entire city has a grid layout, no weird U shaped routes anywhere and every street has a sidewalk for pedestrians.


> What you are describing has only been my experience in suburbia. Major cities are a lot more walkable as far as getting to a grocery store or convenience shop or whatever.

The problem of course, is that almost all American cities outside of a small handful are effectively a tiny downtown core surrounded by what amounts to suburbs. Only a few cities such as NYC, Boston, Chicago, etc. really qualify as "city living" in the sense you write above - being able to quickly and easily take care of your day to day needs within the neighborhood and thus resulting in a wildly different lifestyle/culture than the suburbs.

I've lived in a number of places, Chicago is where I currently call home. The lifestyle of living 2 miles from downtown Chicago vs. the Chicago suburbs is a night and day difference. Living 2 miles from downtown in Minneapolis is effectively no different than living 30 miles out in the exurbs, even with sidewalks and grid layouts.

As I get older I see "suburbs" to be a lifestyle more than a description of urban density. While not perfect, my quick rule of thumb is that if the average person requires a car to effectively participate in society - it's a suburb, not a city.

The more time I spend living in European cities really drives this point home to me. Sprawl has totally, completely, and irreversibly changed American culture for better or worse in very deep and subtle ways.


I was fortunate to grow up during the last-gasp era of print media where tabloids had their place and were distinguished from the reputable periodicals and the blossoming online world by the topics and perspectives they portrayed.

Tabloid reporting is now the standard low quality information diet they choose to feed the masses (MSM) and it is only in small groups (isolated, segmented, segregated, seperated) do many find and share the best of humanities intangibles in an environment where data integrity is accountable and desirable (amongst other things).

It takes a special something to misalign desperation with motivation as a social experiment, but its just as perverse as it sounds. Its funny how that all worked out for the 20th century.

You are 100% right that the analog world is a cesspool of good intentions, but instead of the uneducated having access to the world of the educated on the Internet (ie. information super highway), the reality/irony is that the educated are getting bombarded and inundated (force fed) an uneducated narritive 24/7 (ala super capacity public sewage pipe).

We should all take a moment of pause and laugh about that. This bodes well for the comedy that is AI that is yet to happen.


I disagree.

I think the medium shapes the message and we now have a lot of mediums that people use that incentivize trite, shallow, negative, outrageous, and even simply false information over other information.

Twitter is a good example of that.


If we were not on an anonymous website, we would probably not start the conversation with “I disagree.”.

Most probably you would start with, “Yes, but...” or “I agree, but ...” or “That's true to some extent, but in addition to that ...”.


I've been in plenty of conversations where someone has said literally "I disagree" to an idea or opinion being forwarded. It's not done rudely and it seems perfectly normal to say you disagree with something someone said as long as you have the consideration to explain why and be open to them responding to your opinion. I would find it more weaselly, disingenuous, or even offensive if someone didn't agree with something but pretended they did and then began underhandedly attacking the position.


99% of social interactions are like that though. The straight-talker take no bullshit straight to the point type belongs more to a B-movie.


You can do it in class when you have been given a chance to reply to a direct question. It's less often that people know what they want to say straight off, there is a time and a place for it though.


>If we were not on an anonymous website, we would probably not start the conversation with “I disagree.”.

This reminds me of an Abraham Lincoln story (I think I read it in How to Win Friends and Influence People)...anyway Lincoln used to pen anonymous writings attacking people, and in one instance he was found out and challenged to a duel. The men squared off with long swords but called a truce prior to the start...Lincoln never penned a negative thing about a person again.


I guess the pen was not mightier than the sword in this case.


It’s only mightier when they compete, not in an open confrontation.


Seems kinda like a side topic but honestly I don't think of "I disagree" as that different from any of those other statements.


Not necessarily, and that is the interesting thing about culture. Almost everything is offensive or extremely offensive somewhere in the world. Americans learn this when certain free-speech activities prompt riots in the Middle East.


> If we were not on an anonymous website, we would probably not start the conversation with “I disagree.”.

I do that in in-person conversations all the time. Although I'm probably more blunt than most.


I feel that the readers interpretation of what you say change it more on the net, even if you write those things (and more), it's often the case that people will misread or misrepresent what you say. Especially if the gist of what you say is against somekind of group think e.g. cars pollute, public health care is robbery, fascims is good.

Further I believe you get the "I disagree" on platforms where you know one another.


"I disagree" is actually a very polite and distinguished way to start off a response argument. You don't really see it on sites/forums other than where users have some degree of commonality and mutual respect, sort of like Usenet of old.

Alternatives:

1) Yes, but from the perspective of the user.... (beating about the bush)

2) You are retarded and probably shouldn't breed (we know what forums harbour this communication style)

Gentlewomen and men can disagree and still keep talking gently!


> If we were not on an anonymous website, we would probably not start the conversation with “I disagree.”.

What leads you to think that? This has been a common way to respond in substantive real-world discussions for my entire life, even predating the internet.

"I disagree" is not, after all, some sort of attack or insult.


I start a replies with "I disagree" in person quite a bit. When people routinely use the phrases you listed I assume they are being deceptive or manipulative.


At least for me I feel like it sets an expectation.

I disagree.

Here is why.

Rather than someone just rambling on about something that might be just talking outloud and you miss what they think actually the difference is or that there is one.


You could say that it was “already there” when reality tv started in the 90s. The normalisation of attention whoring was quiet but universal ever since and Sociopathic behavior became an aspiration. Social erosion is a natural outcome of empowering the individual. social media identities do replace the old collective identities — there is only a finite amount of attention that they both share. This is not some temporary crisis either, its the new human condition , and friction occurs because our political systems have not adapted to the new realities.


> You could say that it was “already there” when reality tv started in the 90s.

And those reality tv stars were aping the behavior of the pop stars that came before them. The whole 20th century was focused on moving towards individual gratification.


> Contrast that with visiting a city like Kiev where, in the evening after work, the city parks are filled with families enjoying the sunset (when the weather is warm)

Or any large American city with residential urban neighborhoods? I don't think it's fair to compare a European capital with nameless American suburbs. Thinking back to one of my favorite apartments I lived in Chicago, I had: an independent grocery store 2 blocks away, numerous small locally owned shops, bakeries, and restaurants on the main commercial thoroughfare, and large park (~1/2 sq mi.) less than a mile away, filled with families on summer evenings.


There is a stark difference between the lifestyle in American and, say, European cities. There are less public places or specific establishments for people to hang out. Sidewalks are small and restaurants rarely offer seating outside where you can just people-watch. Few pedestrian zones, and if there are, they are frequently tourism hell-holes full of chains. I cannot speak for rural life, which is likely extremely different, but in cities in the US everything is designed to extract money out of you and every public place is heavily regulated (for example, the concept of a public park or beach "closing" at dusk is a baffling concept for me).

This is merely an impression by me though, so take it with a grain of salt.


I'm sure there is a lifestyle difference, but I don't think it's as great as everyone seems to think it is. Granted, I've never lived in a European city but I grew up in the third largest American city and my experience doesn't match the preconceptions of American living I keep hearing about. In fact, in my experience, those preconceptions are a far more accurate portrayal of American suburban living.


Internet adoption was fastest in the US because we had the disposable income to afford it, and because future leaders attending elite colleges were given free access to it.


The same conditions existed in Europe hence Tim Berners Lee / Cern / WWW. But the adoption wasn't at the same speed


Adoption in the Nordics certainly was very comparable.


It wasn't actually. There were always countries that were faster in Internet adoption. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/09/Share-of-internet...


Marginally. North America was definitely among the leading countries.


North America is not a country.


Yeah, but’s what it’s the source so...?!?


Some tools are better for some things than others. Our digital tools included.

An extreme example is the Simpsons episode where Homer buys a gun, and then when Lisa asks him to get her basketball down from the garage roof, he shoots it. It falls to the ground, deflated, and she says, with a sad irony, "thanks".


I have spent significant time being car dependent and not owning a car at all, and I don't think it had any effect on my levels of isolation. Walking around strangers didn't make me feel less isolated than driving around them.

Also since when did the US not have city parks filled with people?


Thank you for this. It's something I try to explain to my younger brother (who can't understand why I prefer life in Europe to the Northeast US).

Interestingly, here's a photo I took of a park at sunset, in Kiev, with people outside enjoying each other's company and said sunset.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BxnIIPAnDpQ/


> Contrast that with visiting a city like Kiev

Ironically, though, I find people in the US to be friendlier than Kyiv.


Gotta love those Stepford smiles, right?


Just chatting up people in the streets. Or accidentally bumping into someone at a busy place. Or greeting a stranger who's walking by...


This may surprise you but you can talk to people that aren't smiling.

To me the smiles are noise. Just people putting a frown, because of fake it till you make it attitude.

Or even worse Business Mandated Happiness.


Well, I did say 'friendly', not 'smiling'. And having lived in both countries, I had a lot of chances to compare the experiences.


Munich is the same (as Kiev).

I quit social media after divorce, recognizing that no one could have had any idea we were struggling as a couple. I found our projected persona to be sharp-edged and inhuman. Such tools create more isolation that they appear to alleviate.


Sharp edged is the right phrase! I used to think appearance could get you somewhere until all the preening and signalling behaviour went online. Now it is too sharpened to be useful except for selling stuff. There's some at the tip of the blade making hay while the sun shines, with a lot of people getting cut on the way down.


Yes. All that aggressively postured success creates feelings of alienation, not only from your friends but the whole society. The people doing it don't understand how it looks on the outside. To rediscover the joy of people, I had to leave those places they built.


> I don't believe the digital revolution "did this to us". I think it's simply a mirror and and amplifier what was already there.

I believe the tools accompagning the digital revolution enabled alienation and isolation.

The more I think about your point the less it makes sense.

According to your rationale: Because we loved reading books, with the advent of TV it was foreseeable that we will spend a sizeable portion of our time watching dead dump TV shows?

Using your analogy you cock the ox behind the plow


I'm not sure which parts of America you visited. Down south, I regularly interact with strangers in public, and occasionally make new friends that way. On the other hand, in Europe, it's always seemed that others don't appreciate being bothered. I'll admit that here, the rise of air pods et al. have increased the isolation in normal public places, but people still seem more outgoing.


The south is very friendly. I think it's because people have time...somehow not hooked up entirely to the cult of productivity.


>Meanwhile the alienation or isolation... as a European, what freaks me out every time I'm in the US is the dependence on cars for everything. That in many places it's not possible to walk to the grocery and get fresh air... That you're in a permanent state of semi-isolation, breathing air-conditioned oxygen with the only human contact being with people that are paid to smile. Contrast that with visiting a city like Kiev where, in the evening after work, the city parks are filled with families enjoying the sunset (when the weather is warm).

You realize that it's possible to drive or take a bus to a park, right?

I live in a bit more of the country where yeah everyone is dependent on cars.. and in the summer people are out enjoying the beaches, hiking, swimming, boating.

However this is indeed the internet, where it's a requirement to bash the US at every opportunity, so carry on.


Not a hint of attribution to new-media clickbait farms, the head of which is Buzzfeed, who've eviscerated attention spans, long-form journalism and its funding, and pumped the internet full of low-effort, divisive content merely created to generate outrage for ad-clicks.

>What you think doesn’t count very much anymore. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Most people with power try to take advantage of people like yourself. The people running the country don’t really care what happens to you. You’re left out of things going on around you.

All of the above will increase with more exposure to what is going on in the world, which is provided by the internet, and all of which will further inclined to be agreed with by journalists reporting on it in a biased manner done for the purpose of generating ad-revenue from outrage driven clicks.

You can argue that the new digital era has alienated people simply by existing, but the new media is the ultimate culprit after having spent the last decade stoking tension in atomizing society based on uncontrollable, biologically determined factors and creating a sense of victimhood and entitlement amongst each of their subdivisions.


If the new media is an inevitable byproduct of the digital era simply existing, which is how things look to me, it still makes sense to follow things back to the root cause. How many examples are there of successful media organizations that don't at some level run the same way as the one you're lambasting? Being owned and funded by a government or a multibillionaire to serve as their propaganda outlet are viable but have their own problems that might or might not be worse.


people simply spend a lot more time online, reading stuff. the papers feed this newfound addiction. i don't think it's fair to always accuse only the media for giving people what they asked for. after all it is people that turned their backs on their physical surroundings, first with books, then with TV , now with the internet, and in the future possibly with VR


> who've eviscerated attention spans, long-form journalism and its funding, and pumped the internet full of low-effort, divisive content merely created to generate outrage for ad-clicks.

I don't think some newspapers were much better, seeing how they filled with barely true news snippet between ads for local business.


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


I think you are confusing individualism with self-sufficiency


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

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


That's an interesting idea.

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

This confuses individualistic with isolated.


Maybe we mean different things by self-sufficiency.

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

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


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

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


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


And yet, statistically it does.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

So the tweets all read as grand proclamations.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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


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


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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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


Short: 'Censoring Digital and Social Fake'?

REM: 'Tyrannys have concentrated views.'


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


But it isn't a game.

A made up example to illustrate:

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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

It can make you more effective at caring.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

Isn't that Snapchat?

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

Don't read those people then?

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


>Isn't that Snapchat?

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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


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


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


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


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

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


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

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

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


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


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


>the war on immigration requires exponentially increasing violence to maintain

This claim is flat out wrong.


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


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

I guess they usually don't die...


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

I want it to stay that way.


Most migrants are not running from lawless nations. Fact.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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


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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

Comparable to what?

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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


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

Another example is Yugoslavia. Or USSR

The common ingredient in all of them: Unfree

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


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


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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


Going to leave this here:

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

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

E.M. Forster wrote this in 1909


> from widespread fear of crime

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


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

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


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

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


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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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


Well, I mean, the poster did mention:

>poisonous oligarch funded divisive politics

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


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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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


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


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

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


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

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


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

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


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

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


> Many people, perhaps, but not all.

Yes.

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

Anecdote.


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

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

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


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

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


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


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

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


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


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


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

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

No thanks.


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

Are you sure about that? Australia has similar issues.


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


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


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

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


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


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


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

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


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

What exactly do you mean by that?


> The Americans who marked this decade most visibly with their anger and impotence are, of course, young white men.

Not that young anymore, another "lost generation"? Lost in clicks, taps, swipes, likes, and upvotes. The only truly innovative invention of social networks is the psychological one, yet not done by the pschylogical professionals - how to mercilessly monetize and exploit the dopamine injection cycle of a human. Shall we invent a way to block on demand the dopamine inflow, the same way we block ads and shut down the lights in a room?

> It seizes some of the best, noblest human instincts — to share, to know, to connect, to belong — and harnesses them to a degrading system of profit.

This just screams "Tinder" (for a male) with their premium plans, "boosters", and whatnot. Yet here I am - contributing my time and intellectual ability on a website from a country where I will never live or work, which on my entry attempt will assume I'm an intruder, ie. I'm trowing both into a black hole. Please upvote.

Internet with social networks enabled something new. Massive global crowd for whom English is the lingua franca. The creativity of this crowd is consumed by American corporations sucking them into their outsourcing centers (or even better more recently - free labour with a promise of becoming an influencer), and the spreading of language is choked by the copyright lobbies. Don't take as granted having your language as a lingua franca, Anglosphere, be timid - 30 years ago we would speak French and you'd be out of this conversation.


In 1999 we'd be having this conversation in French? Really?

Honestly if you think social networks are just for people who speak english you gotta take a look at the world a bit more.


German was the language of science prior to WW1.

Don't worry, the US is trying it's hardest to torpedo it's outsize influence on culture, language, and finance.


> German was the language of science prior to WW1.

I would say well into the WWII even. Especially in the Central Europe, regions under influence of Austro-Hungary, and half of Balkans. Then Germans with Austrians... well... fucked everything up definitely and irrevocably.


heheh I have seen the strangest comments in this place. English is the world lingua-franca since the end of WW2 at the very least.


In 1989, yes. Guess in what languages were translated the fields in passports of many countries from the Communist block? French, German, and Russian.

> Honestly if you think social networks are just for people who speak english you gotta take a look at the world a bit more.

Depends on how you see yourself. Passive viewer, poster? You're right. Contributor, creator of platforms and systems, advanced content creator? Try doing these without knowing English. Yeah, I mean more generally "the internet" and "the web" rather than social networks only.


> This just screams "Tinder" (for a male) with their premium plans, "boosters", and whatnot. Yet here I am - contributing my time and intellectual ability on a website from a country where I will never live or work, which on my entry attempt will assume I'm an intruder, ie. I'm trowing both into a black hole. Please upvote.

Here's your upvote. You know exactly how to thank me!


Jonathan Haidt has an excellent article that changed my mind on this topic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/social-...

I think the problem with social media is that the loud crazy voices that are usually confined to the corner streets in cities can now shout all the way around the world.

A simple fix would be to limit the distance a ‘voice’ could travel to geographic boundaries that are a function of population density.


Sounds like what Yik Yak tried to do.

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


"Harris Poll’s Alienation Index... asks whether respondents agree with these five statements:

What you think doesn’t count very much anymore. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Most people with power try to take advantage of people like yourself. The people running the country don’t really care what happens to you. You’re left out of things going on around you.

Harris then averages the rates of agreement to reach an index... In 1998 ... the score was 56%. In 2008 ... 58%. [2018], it was 69%"

The rest of the article is trying to unpack why answers to those questions changed


The Alienation Index comes from a telephone survey. The results changed very dramatically from 29 & 36 in 1966 and 1968 to 55 and 59 in '73, '74. Since then, it has varied with a small positive trend between 50 and 70.

The initial jump in the first 7 years looks like impacts of methodological changes. Since then, the portion of the population that is willing to pick up the phone and answer questions has plummeted, so that a phone survey sample is an unusual slice of the American Population and getting more and more unusual all the time

Most helpful source: https://theharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Harris-...


Majority no longer pick up because "Strangers on the phone are just trying to take advantage of us". The people that do pick up are probably the least alienated.


Or the people lonely enough to jump at any possibility of human contact. It’s unclear.


My question is this.

In one scenario the world doesn't change, only my perception of it which then means I am/ I feel alienated.

But in the other scenario, my perception of the world is clear, its just the world has changed which has then shaped my perception of it. This means that the world became worse place.

Both scenarios result in an increased alienation index.

And there are an infinite number of in-between scenarios.

How do we know for sure which scenario we are in?


I’d honestly interested to hear the perspective of who disagree with these statements. Barring the last one, this seems like a pretty rational perspective on all of US history and politics, post the 1970s.


I wouldn't say just post 1970s, but this is why we have a political system based on two sides locked in contention instead of a monarchy or a single ruling party.

The only point I would attack is "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer". The lowest poverty rate in the US was 1989, but it's still tremendously low. Likewise, the lifestyle between your favorite rich celebrity and a middle class family is not as dramatic as it was in like 1850.


1850 is an interesting benchmark. Especially considering you said that the poverty rate is increasing


It's actually declined the last four years, but it's increased slightly in general since 1989 (we might eventually get lower than that, signs look good as far as I can tell).

But we're talking +/- maybe a max of 2%. Very small changes.


The one fact-checkable statement there is false. The rich do get richer, but the poor also get richer.


I would love some help clearing up something I never quite understand: does that depend on whether it's corrected for purchasing power? How does this relate to e.g. the idea that you have to work more hours on a minimum wage job to buy a house? So is it fair to e.g. express the price of a house in "burger flipping hours" instead of dollars, and see the price go up, implying that the poor do get poorer?

Or is that already incorporated in the concept of "purchasing power", and are you now double correcting for something?


Purchasing power and inflation adjustment are usually accounted for properly. When people say “the poor get richer” they’re talking about the global poor, like folks who live on $2 per day. That number had drastically decreased. But in the western world the “poor” working for minimum wage and middle classes have seen almost no gains while the rich have seen massive increases in both income and wealth.


The most important thing to understand is that these time-series comparisons are much harder to analyze than they seem, because multiple variables are changing simultaneously. Consider, for example, the idea that you have to work more hours at minimum wage to afford to buy a house. Whether that's true or not, you also need to account for the fact that "minimum wage workers" make up a much smaller percentage of the population today than they did 30 years ago: https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2014/images/ted_20140403a.png

In 1980, 15% of workers (and 20% of women) had earnings at-or-below the federal minimum wage. Today, it's about 5% for both men and women. So "minimum wage worker" identifies a much narrower, and likely less skilled, group of workers than it did in 1980.

Also, who are those workers? Today, many are first generation immigrants. I think most people would agree that even in a fair economy, you would expect there to be some time lag during which new immigrants' incomes catch up to those of people with established roots in the U.S. (Even among immigrants who are college educated, for example, U.S. employers often don't give as much weight to degrees from unknown foreign schools.) In 1980, 6.2% of the population was immigrants: https://cis.org/sites/default/files/2018-09/camarota-imm-pop.... Today, about 14%. If you add economically-challenged people mostly to the bottom of the income distribution, obviously your median is going to go down. But when we think about these time series comparisons, we are usually thinking about the incomes of similarly situated people. If the percentage of the population that is immigrants is going up, you can have a situation where income seems to be going down, even though the incomes of people in each group (native born, immigrants) are both going up.

Changes in financing and interest rates also change the equation. To a great extent, rising home prices have been offset by declining interest rates (in part thanks to things like mortgage-backed securities). From the perspective of the home buyer, what matters is the mortgage payment, not the precise division between purchase price and interest. Mortgage payments as a percentage of income are actually down significantly since the 1980s: https://cdnassets.hw.net/dims4/GG/a9ec223/2147483647/resize/.... Rents, meanwhile, are up, but not as much as you'd expect.


There's also value there in calculating the rate of change for each.


Social media is a straight jacket. You can say anything you want but no one cares what someone in a straight jacket has to say because you can't actually do anything.


A software engineering position at Uber in SF seems to be something of value to most people on HN. I know someone who quit that position to focus on her Instagram career. She was not a mode or anything, one day she just announced she's turned vegan and voila, she was an influencer. Now she owns a house in West Hollywood. All within 8-10 months.


Is she pretty? I'm not trying to be sexist, and I don't even use IG, but my gf does and a while ago I worked in a product targeted at IG 'influencers'.

When researching, basically your success as an influencer had to do pretty much solely on your looks (or your photoshop skills) rather than your message. (for both men and women). You can be a 'vegan' influencer or a 'I eat meat still dripping in blood' influencer, and the most important 'variable' on your success was how attractive you were.

(outliers existed, but mostly they were 'connected/endorsed' by some big brand or celebrity already)


You already know the answer to that question. It's just how it is.

Tangentially, I've always been fascinated by anti-consumerist lifestyle design, and a little envious of people who have that natural earthy style to them, who appear cool without a lot of effort.

Then I read an article about Instagram influencers in some surfing town in Australia and saw how much their "anti-consumerist" lifestyle cost: long story short, looking poor is extremely expensive and it turns out they were married to corporate VPs who were able to work remotely and fund that kind of lifestyle.

It actually made me feel much better about my life. Now I'm convinced that actual anti-consumerism is frumpy, and I'm happy with that.


Commodetized anti-consumers are exactly what you describe. Vapid shells of a 'message' who tend to be funded by wealthy external donors of some kind, be they spouse or the internet or whatever.

If you want to meet real anti-consumerists, they're not on the internet extolling their lifestyle. (yes, I know, no-true-scotsman and what-not).

They're busy surviving. Because they tend to be subsistence farming or very near to that. They may sell art at local fairs, or goods at local produce stands. But mostly they spend their time just trying to get by.

It's just like the 'homesteading' and 'van-living' movements. The people who are actually living those lives, and who aren't just doing it for validation on the internet aren't posting updates daily about their cute new milk goats or whatever, because they're super busy not dying and just trying to get by.

Source; the throw-back hippy communes near where I live.


Well, you're discussing basically a subset of the rural poor, who maybe are more okay with/intentional about that lifestyle than we give them credit for.

However, there's the class of bloggers who advocate for being middle-class frugal, saving up as much money as you want, and doing whatever you want with the rest of your life. Maybe some of them are full of crap but I believe many of them actually are practicing what they preach.

And there have been countless middle class professionals who've done basically the same thing without writing blogs about it -- they've just quietly lived their lives.

That lifestyle appeals to me. It just seems so much simpler and more efficient.


So... You want to believe...?


You can be anti-consumerism and be on the internet (I would call myself one, that except food, I haven't really bought anything for myself in this last year but still online ;)), but you are right, you will find them in different media than twitters/igs/facebooks. I focused on IG (but I guess twitter/facebook are the same) 99% of popular content you see is fake, produced to attract a certain audience. van-living, or surfing around the globe is as said before, mostly paid for by external sources that they don't disclose. I used to do a lot of surfing and met a lot of surf bums. They aren't usually in social media except maybe to share things about surf etc, and in most posts, are about the waves/new surf board, etc and you rarely see their faces. When you see 'whatever audience target' person in IG and it is a pretty face (usually loads of make up or youc an see the hair took 3 hours to prepare), these people have teams/donors behind them to sell you something.


yeah she's pretty, also ethnic (like, born and raised in the middle east)


There is nothing wrong with being sexist. Reality is sexist. She is only successful because she's an attractive female. And there's nothing wrong with that. Not everybody is equal.


There's something wrong with posting flamebait comments to HN. Please don't.


most of these influencers think they're famous for their unique talents, that's why it might be sexist to suggest they are famous for their looks only


The film “Ingrid Goes West” captures the inverse, dark reality of this phenomenon very well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrid_Goes_West


yeah I watched that when it came out in 2017, I thought in the end the influencer was depicted as a good person who's earned her status, no?


I would not call her a good person. Almost nobody in that film is a good person.

In the end, the influencer is depicted (accurately) as a victim of the protagonist's mental instability and manipulation, but it's her vapidity and inability to genuinely relate to anyone that made that victimization possible. She's as damaged as Ingrid is, just in a more subtle, socially acceptable way.


There’s a subtle through line that the influencer couple were just boring, born rich people using the whole Instagram influencer thing as a means to launder themselves into something more hip and bohemian (and thus marketable in contemporary culture). Ingrid, being a lower class person, is drawn into this deception and they ultimately come out in more or less the same places they started. If I remember correctly, one of the influencer couple at the end is moving on to take a corporate art job (without any real merit or qualifications) at Levi’s or something.


Yeah, it's Levi's.

I didn't read class in the film quite the same way, but that's an interesting lens. I should watch it again.


I wonder how the future will play out for these people. For the savvy it'll be fine, but for those who aren't I'm sure their appeal will fade in a decade or two. Hopefully they have a plan for then.


I think she's gonna be fine. Most of them are. Attractive people generally do well, attractive people with money almost always do.


No one cares what you say eh? Try posting something controversial and see how that works out for you.


:set expandtab


i m sorry that's just hate speech


I look back on a time when the world Was so young A beautiful ecology A flowing river and a bright beautiful Sun was enough Now I don't really know anymore Satisfied with only the land and the trees Instead we mass-produce machines I really wonder if there can ever be a Place for a little A little bit of Romance '83

I thought that love and kindness were The things we all need A bit of sensitivity Just living life simple was the thing to Believe in I don't really know really know anymore Sharing all the human feelings deep inside Instead we hide behind machines I really wonder if there can ever be a Place for a little A little bit of Romance '83


This was a strange decade for tech.

Seems like a lot has changed, but at the same time the companies we were talking about in 2010 are the same companies we're talking about today e.g. FB, Twitter, Apple, Google, Netflix, even Uber all existed in 2010 and are just a more polished version of their 2010 selves.


i dont know about strange, stagnant, yes. when things stagnate they rot


This reminds me of a book I read about the history of extemporaneous poetry (pretty much freestyling) in Latin America and Europe, and its decline:

> The verse improvisations of Cantabria are at best dormant. Women and men skilled at creating them are still alive, but the context that produced them is virtually extinct. That context was a world in which the lives of one’s neighbors were the chief, virtually the only, entertainment; a world in which personalities and eccentricities were savored. To some of their neighbors in adjacent valleys the attacks on differences in appearance, births out of wedlock, poverty, and impotence seemed uncouth and brutal. But running through the recollections of the older men and women I talked to were phrases like, ‘nobody was offended’, ‘they took it in good humor’, ‘it was part of the fun’, or ‘we all looked forward to it’. In 1942 Cossio wrote that the people of Polaciones knew no moral laws. One could also say that they had been able to maintain their own laws, different measures for what could be said and done and what was considered an offense.

Attribute it to the internet, car culture, personalized media, whatever, but I don’t think it’s ever been easier to decide you dislike the people around you and find another community, perhaps virtually.

In turn this easy access to frictionless interaction makes people less and less tolerant of what would have been everyday interaction in the past.

I don’t remember where, but I once read something that said the great appeal of fame is not just being adored, but being adored and not having to reciprocate. We seem to be moving in that direction.


The internet offers superficial social interactions.

It gives reasons to ignore the people in our surroundings. And them, us. We physically socialise with fewer people.

Our social skills decline.

We can choose to completely ignore those of different opinions. We were once forced to socialise with them. No longer in our digital bubble.

This fractures social cohesion.

Loneliness and then anger results. This anger can and will be directed by those willing and able.


If anyone wants to be more aware of this issue, I recommend the book Amusing Ourselves to Death, and also Technopoly, both by Neil Postman.


It may have done it to some of us, to those who were doing great perhaps even dominating and shaping local groups but to the rest it was a huge relief finding likely minded unavailable in the immediate geographical vicinity, allowed those alienated locally finding community elsewhere.

I believe the article is seriously biased and criminally incomplete, shortly incorrect.


Well yes, it's buzzfeed. Just flag it when you see the domain, you don't need to take the bait.


I think that we consume a lot more content through computer recommendations algorithms. These filter bubbles makes us more alienated towards different opinion and views than our own preferred way of viewing things. Thus the more we consume media through filter bubbles the more alienated we become.

Plus technology is replacing human interactions. For example: Bookstore vs online bookstore Renting movies at a video store vs online Movie streaming Spontaneous interactions at cashiers being replaced by software.

Not one of these one interaction may make us more alienated but summed together they make something bigger. A question to ask is what technology replaces?

Also people are a little bit less religious nowadays and religion serves as a gathering point for local community where people come together and meet.


Predictive algorithms exist to re-feed us the past. Nostalgia is comfortable, safe, familiar, and easy. Not only do "people who like also like" type suggestions trap us in what we already know and like, but content producers themselves use data of what is liked to make more of the same. Artists have been replaced by marketing data science.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...


try setting your twitter to chronological, see if it makes a difference (hint: it doesnt)

you re totally right about people not finding excuses to interact. this is a real need , and cities have not been adapted for that. many people make deliberate effort to meet people, but these are mostly extroverts. the "old way" used to force such interactions on everyone indiscriminately


The more information you have, the more you have to worry about and anger about.

Quoting the great Cypher, "After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss".


“ And yet, the journalist Jon Katz argued, the country was on the verge of something even greater than prosperity and progress — something that would change the course of world history.“

From the infamous Jon Katz of Slashdot fame. Oh the memories.


I'm sure that all the people who have this feeling have an external locus of control. Listen, social skills are just skills. If you're feeling alienated, go fix it.

I'm not. Pretty happy. And I use lots of social media.


The criteria for alienation are listed as:

> What you think doesn’t count very much anymore.

> The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

> Most people with power try to take advantage of people like yourself.

> The people running the country don’t really care what happens to you.

> You’re left out of things going on around you.

2, 3, and 4 have been true since the beginning of America and probably since the beginning of every country that has ever existed. Two has been objectively verifiable in the last 50 years in America and can even be graphed out. Three is also objectively verifiable to some extent on a case by case basis. This isn't a matter of opinion. These are terrible criteria to judge alienation with. Any person who is aware of his society and culture would be aware of these things and would agree with at least 3-4 of them in America.


I agree broadly but I think the real cause is overlooked.

When I was young, everyone in our town read the <Town Name> Times. They may have passionately disagreed with it, they may have thought it was too right or left, but they all read it and could at least have discussions from a common starting point.

Now that is gone. Right-wing boomers read only news sources aimed at right-wing boomers. Left-wing millennials read only news sources aimed at left-wing millennials. Of course they are hopelessly alienated from each other. One side reads that unemployment is at an all time low, one side reads that income inequality is at an all time high, and both are convinced that the other side is fundamentally incapable of reason.

So they all sit in their echo chamber and get angrier and angrier at anyone outside of it, fed day after day by a media whose only real interest is more clicks, more ads, more money.

I don't know how we come back from it. I'm not sure we do. It scares me frankly.


>When I was young, everyone in our town read the <Town Name> Times.

Speedway Town Press, delivered free to every house in town. Me and several friends started delivering it around 12 for 3 cents a paper and every kid would always read it because they wanted to see the honor roll announcements, school event photos etc.

Our principal retired when we were in 2nd or 3rd grade then in 6th grade we read about it in the town press, some of us wrote a letter to the editor that was then in the next addition and got us all letters from his widow.

We knew our neighbors by name (adults knew each other by first name, kids knew adults by Mr surname/Mrs surname). If you were going out of town for vacation you told the neighbor and they'd take your mail in, with they key they already had, and even feed/water your dog for you.

Neighbors would drop by to visit each other, often being invited in if it wasn't nice out.

I don't even know what my neighbors look like now. If you lined 5 people up I couldn't tell you if any of them were my neighbors or just random people.

My neighbor across the hall leaves their keys in their deadbolt at least once a week (Seriously, at least once a week. Twice just this week I've come home to see their keys in the deadbolt. Flat out will not answer the door because "oh my god a stranger"). Car key, apartment key etc. They've been doing this since they moved in in July. I have no idea what they look like despite the fact that I've stood there knocking on their door more than a dozen different days for multiple minutes each time trying to tell them they've left their key in the deadbolt. The first time I actually walked around to their windows and knocked on the window in a room that was lit "hey you left your keys in the door", nothing. Knocked on the door some more, nothing.

I truly miss a time when we were more interested in the people around us than strangers online.


"Instead we got Baby Yoda" I don't see this as a bad thing.

If this is an age of weaponized communication, perhaps it's not bad to learn how to moderate it's intake?


I don't agree even if the article tries to be optimistic.

Could it be that the "Harris Poll’s Alienation Index" is now being answered by people who is more aware about what is going on in the world? The source of information is not the mass-media anymore.

After 20 years of mass-internet, is still a matter of SNR. I didn't care about the life of Britney Spears in 1998, I don't care now about pewdipie.

It will pass when the next generation will develop a natural filter for bullshit. That will be the plateau.


A pretty good consolation for the alienation and rage Buzzfeed is telling me about is being able to go to Buzzfeed and find out which Friends character I'm most like.


Poppycock and fiddle-faddle. We allowed these things and did it to ourselves.


Why it's BuzzFeed news on hackernews?!?!


This gets close but misses the obvious reason for any recent spike:

“ It’s easy to speculate about the reasons for this increase: a financial crisis that awakened Americans to the widening gaps between rich and poor; an opioid epidemic caused by corporate greed; entrenched racism and sexism; bitterly divided partisan politics; and, of course, technological change”

It’s not “partisan politics,” we feel alienated because we are witnessing the attempted dismantling of modern democracy by a transnational network of would-be fascists. We feel alienated because a man who admitted on tape to being a serial rapist was subsequently elect4d president. We feel alienated because the police are murdering innocent civilizations with shocking regularity, as are Private individuals with guns. Non of this is “partisan”... the government and its allies around the world are openly hostile to the interests of the public. That is, well, alienating,


Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. This is going the wrong way down a one way street.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


So funny to return to this after reading through the fact-free chaos of the ‘socialist website” Assange disinformation and the attending praise of Wikileaks.

Hopefully one day we can go through a collective process of settling on what’s true and what isn’t, and prioritizing true stuff! I heard this happened at a grand scale, the enlightenment, I think it was called?


Digital my ass. So it's all Zuckerberg's fault now?

How about the fall of Soviet Union and communist block? Which events (although being good for people) were abused by certain groups to:

- end the public debate on whether capitalism is the right way to run the society,

- enable unprecedented power concentration in a single country,

- and make money and greed govern practically all aspects of human life?

Lots of clever thoughts in the comments, but I'm really surprised no one brings this one up.


I'll add that it's really fucking sad, that one of the greatest achievements of human society (Internet is basically a huge collective effort), is demonized for somehow unleashing lowly human nature and similar nonsense. It's just a medium and, in some cases, a mirror.


This article is bs. We were all that in disguise. Do some bout it. Bye.


It's really important that we blame the internet companies. Otherwise we might have to take responsibility for ourselves. Better to be victims.</snark>




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