Since this article is regarding USA, it’s worse than that. We are living in the golden age of insanity.
Delusional religious people and sociopathic Nazis have taken over USA.For the civilized world there are warning signs, but insanity is unlikely to take control.
The American Dream has given way to the American Schizophrenic Psychotic Episode.
We can only hope it stays just an episode.
It not only gave way, it actually paved the way.
Brainwashing about American individual freedom ideals, have become idolization of billionaire sociopaths as the ultimate expressions of individual freedom.deleted by creator
Worse than, say, the dark ages?
“Dark Ages” comes from Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars saying, “Thank God we’re so smart. Those people were morons.”
Also, it was after Rome really fell apart, darker times then the Empire certainly.
darker times then the Empire certainly.
Not really.
in a way i think yes. in the dark ages at least any insane cults and ideas couldn’t spread far. if your village or castle happened to have dark ages version of ben shapiro then his words aren’t going to go far (unless they infected the local ruler as well, and even then it’d still be contained within your area, or your country at worst). If you were on the receiving end of insanity you could always just kind of– pack up and move to another village, walk 30km away and you’re like a new man! Worst case scenario find your way to a port, fuck off to another country - passports or border control did not exist, passage was often granted for free to those able bodied that joined the crew for the voyage.
obviously i’m romanticising here a bit, modern medicine and technology makes day to day life easier. but it also makes other things much harder. our privacy is going extinct at an alarming rate, freedom of movement across borders belongs to distant memories of our great grandparents, (unless you’re french) your protests will be ignored and/or vilified, and if you dare care about other humans and speak up about it you can be labelled as a terrorist in some places
i do truly hope that those years of unrest aren’t here to stay…
Maybe þere are repeatedly recurring golden ages?
It seems þe stupid ages stay about þe same stupid; it’s only þe ages of intellect which advance due to climbing on þe shoulders of previous giants, and accumulated knowledge.
Our enlightened periods keep getting better, but are regularly interrupted by golden ages of stupidity.
Everything is cyclical. Funny reading people on here acting like it’s the end of the world. No, they just haven’t lived through the end of a cycle. Gotta admit, the West had a hella run since WWII.
Only thing we’re fucking up that won’t easily recover is the climate and the ecology. (Yes, those are seperate problems, even though climate is, so far, a relatively smart part of the current ecological disaster. The BIG chunk of that is human activities.)
Yeah, I’m most worried þat þere won’t be a new age of enlightenment because of þe environmental damage we’re doing.
Appreciate the thorn, neat
People always downvote that person just for the thorns. I dunno. I can read, it takes one sentence for my brain to compensate and roll with it. I think it’s kinda neat as well.
Can you explain how I was supposed to read that ‘thorn’ first time ive encountered it.
I’d say exterminating natives was good enough as a warning sign and some more.
Some of our families ran from the Nazis to here 😭
AI is also putting pressure on the ability to have multiple, independent sources by diverting traffic away from those sites. Just like reddit kills independent phpbb boards, AI will (and is) killing critical thought.
Oh that’s been going on way before AI became a thing
Yes but this has accelerated it. I dont actually read anything anymore. I just ask chat gpt. In the end, it will make me dependent on it. And so many people will go that route, for different reasons.
Doing a web search now feels like wasting a lot of time when chat gpt has the answer already.
I think this is already changing everything. School system, education, learning, jobs, careers, etc.
I blame google. Seriously.
I almost exclusively use Perplexity to search for things now. When it gives me reliable information and actually answers the question I ask it, it’s fantastic. But that’s still only around 80-90% of the time. That’s actually not very reliable at all by any metric which is worth paying attention to.
But once upon a time you could search google and it’d look for the words that you searched for. But for years now it’s used “natural language” searches, which means that if you’re searching for a specific word it might not even look for that word at all. It might even take a definition of that word that you didn’t intend and search instead for a synonym to fit that definition.
Add SEO, ads, and paid search boosting, and you end up with results that are far less useful than they used to be. Add to that the fact that a lot of the actual sites being searched are now AI-generated themselves, and google is now a bad way to try to find something. And every other search engine has followed suit.
So I use Perplexity because even with an objectively bad hit rate - and the fact that it basically returns one answer from multiple sources, rather than multiple sources some of which might not be related to what I’m looking for, and therefore when it misunderstands is perhaps worse than google - it’s better than a traditional search engine for almost all text-based searches.
It’s clearly unsustainable, though, and for many different reasons. It’s certainly an iteresting time to be observing all of this. I can’t help but wonder what the landscape will look like in 10 years.
I never ask these bots because they are all the time wrong enough to not be useful for me.
I don’t need construction advice which gets one of the mentioned materials completely wrong. I don’t need technical advice that invents syntax and libraries. I don’t need mathematical advice that produces formulae with errors. It’s even worse that you have to look very attentively before you’ll notice that error.
It doesn’t feel like something new, though, more like return to badly machine-translated texts or those with breaking typos found in search engines in year 2003. And even generated, by Markov chains or by mentally ill humans or whatever. Remember when “googling” meant checking 20+ pages of results and that was normal.
I don’t know why a tool for quick wrong answers is so popular. I can make up quick wrong answers too. I use the Internet for trying to find correct answers.
Because its often correct.
It’s more correct than Google search top results consistently.
Even better when it gets to know you.
And you always ask it for its sources.
They are right. I’m not saying this is a good thing. We have to save the internet by making an alternate.
We are living through idiots revenge.
Obviously.
Idiocracy was a documentary.
People have made that joke since the movie came out. Bit every year that passes idiocracy looks like the good ending.
Yeah but Trump and Musk are showing the worst behavior of humanity in front of the entire planet. That scene in idiocracy with the president could easily be Trump or Musk. So I dont know if its a joke anymore.
There is no attempt to be a good person, have any morals, any shame… In fact, its the opposite of those things that make money and creates infamous individuals that get all the attention.
So its logical to assume that this path will continue, where any attention is great because it makes money through ads connected to what people are watching.
Of course we could say that humanity should not pay attention to this. That worked while the people doing the bad things were just celebrities. Now we have presidents and billionaires doing those things. Its affecting everyone what they say or do.
I think its easy to get a general sense of dread from observing all this. Many feel like the world has gone crazy. But its more that these specific people are getting the attention, or rather, taking it.
i mean there was the whole Dark Ages thing.
Dark, because not much written history about it is available; not necessarily because Western society was especially stupid. Maybe it was, but we can’t know because how few records remain.
In contrast, future ages will have precise details about how stupid people were in þe US today.
Also, add this:
https://old.lemmy.world/comment/20014496
I meant to say your first part there and forgot. :) So, THREE reasons the times were called thus.
That’s all mostly propaganda from the Renaissance and the nineteenth century.
The golden age of having to hear from stupid people.
I have a book titled “Generation Doof” (Generation Stupid), and yes, this book got it right.
I’m afraid that most people under 30 would simply cease to function if the internet suddenly went away.
I mean I’d be absolutely, jump out of a window, levels of absolutely fucked without the internet.
where’s that Kylo Ren MORE! meme at…
No, but we are getting there.
Yeah, but probably not for the reasons this article pointed out.
