In most countries living in the woods on your own isn't allowed. You're forced to be connected if you want a job, social life, not be seen as a crazy person. You pretend like we're all living on some island where everything is merely decided by what you as an individual do.
In my home country several old people had to close their shop as they were forced to move to a digital accounting system, they didn't have a choice. My bank only allows me to go to their office without an appointment 1 day a week (maybe not even). My grandpa who doesn't have a phone (he never even got a landline), doesn't have internet and barely even drives, he has to depend on others to call and make appointments. If you want to apply for a job, you need internet connection. Many won't even hire you without owning a car (even if you could perfectly commute with a bicycle or public transport).
If you think we're at the end of this 'evolution', we're just getting started. My grandpa could perfectly do everything on his own until 2010, by 2018 it was getting almost impossible, 2026 he feels like a burden for not being into technology.
People are social beings. I could live a life which is (vastly) better than people in 1930 or 1960 by doing the most menial work. The problem is that if most of society wouldn't, I'd be seen as a paria. If I didn't have a partner it would be extremely difficult to find one, children would be bullied at their school.
I actually did very menial work in a food processing plant while still in education, I'm not better than the people working there but I'm different from them in interests and in upbringing (even though I didn't come from wealth, the people I studied with, shared hobbies with did). I wasn't able to discuss the things I read with these people and they weren't able to talk about their interests. I believe if I had to work there for years or decades it would lead to dysfunction.
The biggest problem with ads is that even if I were willing to pay any amount of money I would still get many of the problems brought by this 'ad run' world. There's enough things where you can't even avoid ads.
I'm not educated in painting but will just assume it's similar to music and someone like Mozart. I genuinely believe you wouldn't get as many as you'd imagine. There were few people making music at that time and only a small portion of the population ever had the chance to listen to it (.5-1% around 1750, 5-10% around 1850). We didn't get 10x the number of Mozarts. We got some people who were as talented as him for sure and pushed boundaries and some got famous for it We also got many talented people who wrote very great music which doesn't get played at all anymore, many of those didn't push the boundaries.
Even with people like Beethoven who're seen as disruptors and wildly popular by general audiences there were talented disruptors at the time who actually did things he's 'known' for and they don't get played at all. Bach himself had largely fallen into obscurity for +-100 years. There's probably only so many Michelangelos or Mozarts people can be taught about in middle school, high school, university.... I believe it's more about the institutions that basically allowed someone like mozart or michelangelo some kinda 'patronage oligopoly', something which barely exists these days. Free market didn't really exist here well into the 1800s, even then you still had gatekeepers. In the end history picked a few winners very loosely related to their 'musical worth'.
So you're saying codemonkeys are mad they don't get seen as the 'cool guys', we have to kill the jobs 'cool guys' have. The codemonkeys will never be cool, just accept it, there's no way to fix it. These cool guys will for the most part be 'cool' even if you take away their jobs right now.
On one hand you're right that people tend to dismiss complexities of the jobs they are unfamiliar with, including IT crowd.
On the other hand when countries feel the need to legislate a new law enforcing writing documents in the human understandable language, one doesn't need to be an expert to suspect there was a systemic rot in those industries. It is totally valid to cry foul when even a parliament is concerned about about reading texts they produce for 500$/h.
But america are the goodies, they should be able to meddle, spy ... in other countries. Tiktok is certainly a national security issue though, can't have those chinamen spying on americans.
Many of these activities have gotten extremely expensive or just died out in the majority of places. There's 2600 bowling alleys in the US compared to 4000 20 years ago. That's a decline of 35% without accounting for population. Last time I went to a bowling alley the price for a lane without drinks was 100 dollars for an hour and a half. This isn't even in a very high cost of living area. Besides a place like the gym can hardly be considered a place where people gather, most people just see it as something functional and would rather not be disturbed (I believe this has gotten 'worse').
I agree with the fact that it's exaggerated online but when you see these kinda numbers in the vast majority of activities which were affordable for most Americans not too long ago it's not solely to be blamed on individuals.
I believe in the majority of the country things will only get worse with how little value is placed on being involved in things for 'community'. People have gotten more anti-social because of social media (and just media in general).
Most tech workers won't be as impacted by this I assume, they can afford paying 200 dollars for bowling without thinking twice, same with many others of the upper middle class.
In my home country several old people had to close their shop as they were forced to move to a digital accounting system, they didn't have a choice. My bank only allows me to go to their office without an appointment 1 day a week (maybe not even). My grandpa who doesn't have a phone (he never even got a landline), doesn't have internet and barely even drives, he has to depend on others to call and make appointments. If you want to apply for a job, you need internet connection. Many won't even hire you without owning a car (even if you could perfectly commute with a bicycle or public transport).
If you think we're at the end of this 'evolution', we're just getting started. My grandpa could perfectly do everything on his own until 2010, by 2018 it was getting almost impossible, 2026 he feels like a burden for not being into technology.
reply