Let's see if this comment is still too real for the current beliefs.
It's ok people. Mandatory romantic love is a few decades old social convention. Before that it still existed and it was optional, and it was understood that people appraise one another more on ego level, and materially first. You could have marriage and children with or without romantic love. It was an extra some people had the luck to have.
We still do these things automatically, but unfortunately in secret. Before that it was done openly.
> Mandatory romantic love is a few decades old social convention. [...] You could have marriage and children with or without romantic love. It was an extra some people had the luck to have.
I'd even say that the „mandatory romantic love” might do more harm than good for quite a few people. Women fall in love with abuse/violent men and stay together with them because they let their feelings decide. Loverboy ploys. Catfishing and other scams. Losing a fortune in a divorce after a rushed marriage.
If falling in love was seen seen as an optional bonus for an already healthy relationship instead of the current „all you need is love”/ Disney - ideal, a lot of harm would be prevented. After all, it's just a biochemical reaction to ensure that genes are passed on. Romeo and Juliet was supposed to be a book about the perils of romantic love, not about idealising it.
You're literate, you can form complete sentences, most of you have a post secondary education. It's not news, you've had your whole life to figure this out. The debate was over a long time ago. The party is over, the balloons are all either popped or up in the ceiling. Time to put away your gazoo, and wash the make-up off. This is no time to be a clown.
No, that’s a scientifically accurate take. The actual science of climate change should not cause someone in America “existential fear” (not unless you already sit up worrying about floods in Bangladesh anyway).
The HN hive mind figured out how they wanted to the world to be when they were 13 and they haven't updated it since.
Climate Change. Renewable energy vs nuclear power. No we aren't all going to travel to other planets. You will never be a heroic figure. Women have their own opinions of things. Pandemic upends the daily routine. Car culture sucks and isn't sustainable.
None of those was part of The Plan and so the hive mind hates it.
Ahh, who cares, we're just drumming up another existential crisis narrative again. Governments must spend trillions now to fix the ice problem, otherwise we're all going to die terrible deaths being flooded by water in our homes while night browsing on our smartphones instead of sleeping..... Rather ask "how much should each person give to fix this terrible problem."
That's just mostly viral hype thinking, maintained sometimes by key people in the industry through the press, because it drives money to them and willingness to work for less in certain cases.
The decades around 1900 were more innovative than what we've been experiencing the last decades.
And yes you can find people thinking the same thing way back in history, with the difference is that now it's been psychotically amplified by mass media, and it is actually annoying.
In popular press, and when people have things to sell, they do not include historical facts, because then they cannot drive the hype to new degrees, if they the include historical facts.
You may think that they have done their homework when they say "never before in history" but they have either never checked or deliberately ignored history.
I've had people I know, and the press swearing up and down that 'this time it's different' since the 90s when it comes to 'A.I' for instance. I'm sure older guys can go back even earlier and remember 'the impending A.I revolution'. Sweet money in that hyped narrative.
If you think that "this time it will be different" - congrats they got into your brain, and they do not care that they have done it just 10 years prior.
With enough repetition of the same information, and the way the human memory works - it doesn't really matter.
You will help them every time by reliably assuming that someone else cared enough to check history before saying that something is "historical", "first time", "never before in millions of years of human civilization". They haven't, and it doesn't matter for their goals.
One of these times something will eventually happen. Until then PR money, clickbaits, VC money, startups.. the whole classical techno-utopian centrifuge.
Democracy + Capitalism was supposed to bring freedom to the world.. instead it bought domination, and realization, that it all comes down to who holds the power. The typical classical reality fundamentals.
Techno-utopianism was supposed to bring freedom to the world... instead it bought domination by the Big Tech, and realization that
it all comes down to who holds the power. The classical reality fundamentals.
There are a few more cases.. it's Faust all over again, that turns into kind of a half-scam along the way to attract VC money or your money, then culminates into a power grab.
"The next revolution in X"!, blah, blah.. blahblah.. blah.
"We're no better than believing in or living in a Harry Potter novel sometimes" is more like his message - but it's a fact that societies like to look at the least of all facts. After all, that might prevent the next high-yield psychotic mass scam from occurring.
I don't know - I'm not a westerner, so perhaps it's "normal" for high IQ individuals to create or mis-use abstract mini-ideologies, mini-religions really, dress them as a New world, a Revolution really, to exploit individuals like workhorses over the span of many decades, until they realize that this was an illusion.
Btw we can't spin it like "Ooh, but if it wasn't for this silliness, we wouldn't have computers or the internet now". I disagree. You can't know that. Perhaps the ideology wasn't needed at all for technological development. Maybe it made for inspiration here and there, but that's it.
So.. I don't think that "try again" is his message at all. Watch more of his documentaries and it will become clear.
I see a lot of complaints about the dominance of big tech etc., but can you honestly say you’re less free in 2021 than in 2001? I’d say there’s a few things that could be done better but technology has really elevated all our lives. I think the biggest problem is the people that are left behind or don’t know how to use it all properly rather than the technology itself ... and at root these are sociopolitical ... and we’ve always had those problems but at least now we have many many good (as well as bad) platforms to discuss this stuff and promote change. And yes I do realise that some of this “discussion” is counterproductive at least recently but I think it’s important that these things get aired rather than fester, and the decision to dismiss these people from popular discussion is also a sociopolitical failure. Hopefully we are seeing the beginnings of a more unified approach in the last few weeks.
Techno utopianism can't really work under capitalism, because the machines will always be owned by a fraction of people who use them to enrich themselves.
>Democracy + Capitalism was supposed to bring freedom to the world.. instead it bought domination
I would say
Democracy + Capitalism was supposed to bring freedom to the world.. instead it was used to bring domination.
I don't think it had to happen that way because of some endemic property of Democracy and Capitalism. The same goes for other ideologies as well. And who is to say they were used to bring more domination than any other timeline which used other ideological frameworks?
The funny thing is that as long as you render any kind of services on any level, they are inevitably to society, you're already benefitting it. Society has exploited your skill, and you have benefitted its members with your services, and for that you get paid.
Nobody owes "society" past that point, but it's extremely profitable in the West, specifically, to double tax people with guilt trips into having artificial indebtedness to "society".
