zlacker

This article is riveting. I’d never appreciated that there was such a history of society, in so many ways, teaching and training each other to be members of a society. The article argues that this rapidly fell alert after WW II as people tried to reconcile what happened.

I found myself nodding along to the section on politics - “ If you are asking politics to be the reigning source of meaning in your life, you are asking more of politics than it can bear.”

And yet the question is never answered “why now?” What has made this point in time so particularly bad? Yes, there were large changes starting in the 1950s to what we read and were taught, but what changed in 2008 (or 2016? See, I can’t even get away from politics to explain the way we treat each other!) that has made things feel so much worse?

>>memset+(OP)
> “why now?” What has made this point in time so particularly bad?

I can’t help but think that the pervasively available, ad-supported* nature of social media, enabled/amplified by smartphones, has had a more massive effect on the changes observed than the almost trivial-by-comparison elections in 2008 or 2016.

There’s a good chance that much of the non-tech content on HN is tapped out on smartphones (including this comment).

* Ad-supported is a higher-order problem. Ads are not inherently a problem, but optimization for ad revenue often leads to optimization for engagement, which drags along time-wasting and optimization for outrage engagement, dunking, like-farming, etc.

>>memset+(OP)
> This article is riveting. I’d never appreciated that there was such a history of society, in so many ways, teaching and training each other to be members of a society.

Are you familiar with the expression "It takes a village to raise a child."?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_takes_a_village

>>memset+(OP)
"Why now" is the steady increase of news in our lives. The timing tracks perfectly the shift from newspapers to TV to 24 hour news to the Internet. We're now more aware of politics as continuous, rather than as something that happens only during elections, plus brief updates that go one-way from authority figures to us.

It has turned politics from the way we make national decisions into a national game. We treat it with the same seriousness as sports -- which we treat as if we were making each decision ourselves, despite having even less effect on the game than the pompoms. Our opinions on both are loud, under-informed, and irrelevant, but we enjoy having them. Enjoyment has become the primary goal.