> something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later.
It's not that the dudes don't care, it's that the dudes have 15 other things expected of them, which weren't expected 15 years ago and caring capacity feels like a biological limit. There isn't the required amount of caring available in the average human any more, and caring is needed for standards to be maintained.
15 years ago, the world was in awe that stuxnet, a cyber attack, had impacted the real world. I was in cyber at the time, and the idea that day to day lives of normal people would be impacted in the real world was like Hollywood fiction: unthinkable.
A few weeks ago, I didn't even notice the reason my local big brand store shelves were empty was because of a cyberattack. It was a week later I saw the article explaining it on BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg4zrpk5p7o
I feel like a cynical old man, but I'm sure most here will relate - the age of tech we are living in now is not the one any of us thought we were working to create.
It's been normalized to offload things to the recipients, because it reduces cost. Be it self-checkout, be it governments and large corporate entities doing the absolute minimum and asking you to jump through endless hoops to achieve something.
We're shaving off costs everywhere, without eliminating the need to do that work. And so it travels down to the leaf nodes, to individuals. Who cares, quarterly results are up, OpEx is down, good times.
Tech has enabled some of these things, but ultimately it's the fetishization of Taylorism that got us here. If you can't measure it, it's not worth doing, and not doing it saves money, which you can measure.
This has now spread all the ways to individuals. The commons, always a resource in a precarious position, is now the place for everybody to proudly defecate on. Throwing away litter, listening to music without headphones, rudely shouldering people away - all of it is accepted, because heaven forbid the individual sacrifices for the group. It is, after all, not a thing that has positive impact for themselves.
I don't know what will break us out of it, but yes, caring is missing because we've eliminated non-egocentric things from the rewards function we think we should apply.