alt Hacker News>Stacked on top of each other across roughly a hundred days, these events are something a historian of computing security writing in 2050 will probably file as a turning point, regardless of what else happens between now and then.
And yet, the public conversation around them has been quiet to the point of being strange.
There's a lot current events that once would have been considered historical: trip around the Moon, war out of nowhere, unprecedented explosion of kleptocracy l, enormously scandals and so long. Noone of these are moving much of the needle among general public.
Why? I think such indifference or rather apathy/torpor is a result of people becoming tired of constant stream of crises (either imaginary or real) that we're being flooded by. The capacity to react with something more than a shrug is finite. And I think we are being drained.
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Yeah, it's not indifference or apathy. It is overwhelm. There are too many things that need attention and not enough attention.
I know for my part I am so tired of the constant crises. At this point I just want the inevitable collapse to hurry up and happen already so we can just focus on picking up the pieces and move the fuck on.
> people becoming tired of constant stream of crises
They aren't tired, they're distracted. X/TikTok/et. al. are all fire and motion mechanisms.
Agreed, call it future shock or the Singularity or just overall outrage fatigue, people just aren't reacting to these kinds of things at a level commensurate with their risk or danger.
> Why? I think such indifference or rather apathy/torpor is a result of people becoming tired of constant stream of crises (either imaginary or real) that we're being flooded by. The capacity to react with something more than a shrug is finite. And I think we are being drained.
I think it's more that the impact of all these constant string of "crises" ends up having very little impact on the average American's lifestyle. Groceries a bit more expensive, gas higher, rent continues to creep up. Some giant incomprehensible national debt number gets higher. Those all suck and people complain about them - but they are complaining about them in packed bars while they drink $7 beers and eat $30 burgers and fries.
You can only yell so many times that the world is ending before people tune it out since their day to day lives are largely unchanged. Just look at the focus on complaining about almost irrelevant things like the price of eggs or whatever totally irrelevant culture war topic of the day. It's societal bike shedding.
I am firmly of the belief (and have been for quite some time) that the "average" middle class American is going to need severe pain - as in widespread great depression level pain - before anything really changes at all at the ground level. Americans have simply become so used to living the lifestyle being part of an insulated hegemonic superpower empire that they have taken that for granted as how things generally will always be no matter what happens. There is zero consideration for the amount of sheer effort, will, and constant vigilance it took to build and maintain such a state of being.
Or put another way: Inertia is a hell of a drug.
One word, Hypernormalization.
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The precipitous drop in fertility even in low income countries. The rise in populism and fear.
It's the phones, humans are being DDoSd. We need government intervention against many aspects of modern technology.
The profit motive works when it comes to reducing manufacturing costs and passing some of that on to consumers through the beauty of competition. It doesn't work so great when it's X training a transformer model to maximize the amount of time you spend doom scrolling so they can feed you gambling advertisements.
The idiocy out of the Whitehouse is an intentional strategy to flood the zone with crap that sucks all the air out of the room. They have intentionally broken the ability of the public to become informed through a number of means: attention atrophy, lowest-common-denominator mudslinging, and massive, manufactured, stupid global crises. People have become deaf and desensitized.
The fact that humanity sent people back to the moon barely even registered. Crazy times.