The utility tech who turned my tiny gas leak into a larger gas leak and left.
The buildings around me that take the better part of a decade to build (really? A parking garage takes six years?)
Cops who have decided it's their job to do as little as possible.
Where I live, it seems like half the streets don't have street signs (this isn't a backwater where you'd expect this, it's Boston).
I made acquaintance to a city worker who, to her non-professional friends, is very proud that she takes home a salary for about two hours of work per day following up with contractors, then heading to the gym and making social plans.
There's a culture of indifference, an embrace of mediocrity. I don't think it's new, but I do think perhaps AI has given the lazy and prideless an even lower energy route to... I'm not sure. What is the goal?
1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society
2. People a rejecting the directions they were told to prioritize (education, family, religion etc…) because none have predictable outcomes
As function of both, there’s no consistent or coherent philosophical for people to align to.
In the past, the percentage of the population that was forced to align with a local philosophy was basically 100%. Most people had no options to defect from the ritual and social structure they were born into, so they adapted and adopted them even if they didn’t want to.
Now, humans have infinite mobility - which means anyone can defect. That also means you have to either find a new affinity group that fits your vectors or make your own.
That’s new in the last 500 years for humanity.
“God is dead” was meant as a lament, because it epistemologically fractured society - and even if that epistemically was “more correct” or “less wrong” it shows how all ritual and culture is built on effectively nothing but non-testable hallucinated stories.
So how do you align society to coherent action when the core epistemology is constantly changing and being overrun?
You don’t.