Not to get doomer after a whole discussion of not being doomer, but to answer the question posed at the very beginning of the thread: I feel as though there is definitely some sort of economical collapse coming up (as mentioned later in the post I have mentioned but not nessicerily entirely exclusively related to gaming and technology and such, but the tech industry is definitely going to play a factor). It seems like the same thing is repeating like in the previous times before. The overspending, the innovation, the rampant consumerism, the hype around stupid frivilous things like crypto and AI without really understanding it, just because it's the cool shiny new thing; It is reminding me a bit too much of the Roaring 20s, coming right before the Great Depression. Whether it actually lines up timeline-wise is another thing but it has also gotten me thinking if mayhaps the Roaring 20s weren't as great as the ideal portrayed by others. Just another moment of rose-tinted glasses (especially within the context of the Great Depression). Annoying how it seems we haven't learned our lesson from that at all.
But on a brighter note, I do feel as though people will finally start to decentralize and move to different places rather than just the main few social medias. I have already seen this myself. A lot of the visual artist crowd for example have been creating different art websites after DeviantArt and Twitter went to shit and then splitting off to those, leaving behind those other sites progressively for one reason or another. Said alternatives are actually staying around longer than a year. More people are moving to the fediverse to say the things they can't say on Twitter anymore (for better and for worse). Discord is starting to take hits as people realize how authoritarian it can be, so people might eventually start to seek out the alternatives like Matrix like Twitter did with Mastodon. Even on the OS front, with all the stupid AI updates Windows is doing, more people are moving to Linux (that is the reason I moved for example. Absolutely no regrets.). While this could be a downside as people become more secular and locked into echo chambers, I feel its better than how it is now, where people are locked to the whims of the companies. People aren't going to become tech wizards and not be scared of the terminal unfortunantly, but it's a start.
If AI becomes more advanced (which it will) it will become a problem. Its shocking how everyone has treated AI as universal problem solver and perspective rather than as a tool.
I remember seeing a bunch of people on twitter get salty about chatGPTs perspective on Israel and Palestine. Like lmao its a fucking robot with no political power at all with no citiations or research other than just literal scanning on thousands and thousands of pages. This IS A TOOL!!
To help and assist. Not replace. Unfortunately as a species, we don't think about whether we should but if we could now.
EDIT:
ok im brain dead i might as well be proving the video's point ironically enough but I just don't understand AI bros and thinking AI is the end all be all. Its a terribly decent tool that gets over exaggerated by markets trying to sell shit. It will replace and will become a problem and thats the thing. Just you wait and see when quality declines and optimization goes to the dumpster more so than it already is
I believe personally it's because the people who are spending the money to invest in this goofy stuff don't know what it even is. They think that it's like the robots of fiction, where they can think and act for themselves. Talking supercomputers and all that. But as evidenced from LLMs, that is physically impossible to recreate. LLMs only parrot, string together patterns to form what seems to be a sentence, maybe with some rules to keep it from going out of line. It's incredibly stupid and costly at the end of the day. Impressive, insanely so, but stupid. Ask it a question with a quick, easy, easily reiterated, clear answer and it's pretty helpful. I used ChatGPT to help me learn C++ when I was first starting out, since I wasn't grasping concepts as they were explained by others in books and posts and such (some I still don't but I'm working on it). ChatGPT acted as a sort of teacher figure in a weird way, guiding me through basic concepts and then helping me when I got something wrong and helping me actually understand what I am writing by explaining the parts that make up the whole. But if you try to ask it things more complex, things about the world, it doesn't know shit because at the end of the day it is only trying to tell you what it thinks you want to hear. Thats why they can get caught in repeat loops, where they do the same thing over and over again or say the same/similar things over and over again. If they look back on the conversation, see some sort of pattern between the words, it's going to do it again because it thinks that is what is needed. That's its end goal. Its not true cognition, only mimmickry of cognition. But people who don't know anything about computers don't see that. Quite annoying to explain to people and they still don't really get it.
As an adendum, a little cherry on top, a lot of the companies that are getting into AI are also companies that formerly were all in on NFTs and crypto.
Salad and
Rabbit for example. AI bros are the same. The support is just the same "support" crypto have, just following a different wave. And companies only follow it because its trendy. Like crypto, augmented reality, 3d printers, 3d tvs, and the .com bubble, it will burst and most implimentations will disappear, leaving only the pretty good ones behind.
What is the effect of all this? It seems to me that people are slowly recovering from the decade-long Internet haze and are prioritizing people over stuff. This may cause a rapid collapse in the complexity of cultural output, as people care less about trying to stand out in a world full of bots and algorithms and less energy is put into ambitious pursuits that no longer have any reward.
I politely disagree. If anything it seems people are prioritizing stuff over people. More grifts, more dropshipping, more mindless consumerism. Even if some of your friends have dropped TikTok (good for them) unfortunantly not all. A lot of people I know irl are still deep in the pit and buying stupid plastic junk they see advertised to them from there, Temu, and Shein. And yet as well, there are still many projects I know of created by indipendant artists, small and large, made for barely any money, just the passion. That does still exist. Maybe it won't in the future, as you predict, but if anything they seem to have gotten stronger after people learned new skills during the freetime of the pandemic. Not to sound like one of those autistic cartoon reviewers, but indie animation really has been booming. Not even of the main players everyone talks about, I've seen tons that are maybe just a group of friends, even one that's currently entirely being worked on by one person, made with just a copy of After Effects and fucking FireAlpaca. Technology brings the awful things, but it also gives regular people with no formal education the ability to make very beautiful things.
I believe that the main ones will be faux-spirituality, based on buying stuff to have a fake spiritual connection, alongside its siblings such as fandom culture and what not (see: Strange Rites, the book).
This is already a thing. See
Otherkin and
Reality shifters (combining fandom and religion into even more of one than usual). Otherkin in particular are especially prevalent in the web revival movement and visual art spaces.
I love glorification of mental illness. 
For example, I decided to watch some mainstream videos last night. The first one I picked was '
The Horrors of SpongeBob Memes'. At first, it was exactly what I expected (entertainment aimed at kids under 15), but around the 25-minute mark, I noticed a tone shift. The video shifted from pretending this is all scary and disturbing to discussing real perceived problems like climate change, war, and modern issues. Initially, I was okay with it, but this section just kept going, and the narrator instilled more and more drama over this issue, overly dramatizing what is a modern problem as if it was a horror story.
I know the exact video your talking about because I also watched it (Normally I wouldn't because I don't really even like Spongebob that much and it looked stupid, but it was one of those videos that YouTube wouldn't stop recommending me). I felt like shit afterwards and it ruined my day. Yes, I am a pussy and I try not to be this easily suggestable but it happened nonetheless. Maybe had something to do with me not having taken my meds that day as well, but hearing someone else basically say every single thing I hate about the current world and how it is progressively getting worse (the enviorment pollution especially is a sore topic for me personally, which was heavily emphasized), and for how long it went, it really "got me thinking" but in more of a "doom spiral" than anything productive (thoughts of how this is the end of civilization and all that goofy doomer stuff). The comments of all the other people under the video agreeing with it and falling for the same trap definitely didn't help. Ended up rambling to my mother that day about it, she was able to notice immidiately that I was off my rocker and reminded me to take my meds. While I appreciate her now for it, it did lead me down a completely different doom spiral about "using meds to run away from my problems" (
yes, because lying in my bed doing nothing but crying about how the world is ending is sooooo productive),
Now, looking back on it with hindsight and hearing it described by someone else, I can see how disgustingly manipulative that was to do. It really did have no point whatsoever to go for an entire half of the video talking about how the end is nigh and pollution all to explain some dumbass edgy Spongebob meme. Especially the part about pollution and how Stephen Hillenberg was our "father" and how sad he would be at what had happened to his property and the world.
To be fair, the part about Steven Hillenberg I thought was a bit weird even in my depressed state (looking back that is
super weird and parasocial as hell
). While maybe going into the context of the time the meme would have been made in makes sense to explain the lore of it and it's purpose/joke/satire; as you said, going on and on and on about it (about to the point that half the video was on it) is completely unneeded, I wish that hadn't worked as well as it did on me.
Stuff like that, stuff like doomer thoughts in general, they do sort of prey on the vulnerable like that. They know that it will get engagement and people agreeing, but in return it is a massive morale lowering act. To get those bonuses, you have to attack others mental health. Mayhaps the more level headed can see it for what it is (blatant manipulation) but then that's not who it's targeting, but the vulnerable and suggestible (like myself unfortunantly).
I want to point out that a lot of 'mindless media' is plagued with messages about the 'fucked-up state' of the world, society, and everything else.
What the heck is this, a self-replicating*
demoralization campaign[A]?
Where I am going with this is that your perception of 'how bad things are' will always depend on your perception of the world, and that everything out there is, for some reason, attempting to poison that perception.
There have always been good and bad times, and people just lived through both good and bad times, it has always been like this; The only way to live a happy life is to enjoy whatever peace you have now whilst also preparing for the bad times that will eventually come. Preparing is good, but what use is it to despair over the
bad times** that will eventually come?
Bad times are inevitable, just like death is inevitable. You can't live your whole life worrying about death, you can only try to prepare. And just like death, bad times come suddenly and unexpectedly.
This exactly. A modern example: the 2020 pandemic. Nobody knew that was coming. Even if you knew about the mysterious coronavirus overseas, everyone intially thought it was stupid. I remember back then the based take was to say "Lmao its fake its only killing old people anyways xD". I bet all those YT videos from back then saying as such from the same sorts of people who would morally grandstand about wearing a mask are long gone by now. But then when it came, it definitely hit harder than most people were thinking, in the midst of a completely different war (which, on an unrelated note, is still going to this day). It would be about 2 years before we would get back to normalcy. In the midst of that, it felt as though we would never return to what was the previous normal, at least to me as someone who had never experienced anything like this in my lifetime. But here we are. Of course, not all events are nesscerily exactly like that. Not to make a huge jump but WW2 for example was built up over a good while of events that could have been forseen but were brushed off as nothing and then look at how that turned out in the end. But most of them, generally, come when you least expect it.
Another example of the demoralization campaign, Palestine vs Israel and Twitter. Back when I used to use Twitter and this first started up, I muted every word and hastag related to it because my feed was absolutely innundated with corpses, gore, and talk of the horrors of war (not a single trigger warning, content block, or spoiler in sght). Most accurately could be described as the old internet rite of passage of posting gore/liveleak footage, but done by the people who would normally cry and whine if it was done to them, now done anyways because it was somehow morally justifiable. I knew
children who were seeing this stuff because unfortunantly these days kids have social media and yet are still too dumb to learn how to filter/block. It took me ages to convince one friend to mute the words relating to the war. Why? Because they thought, even though they hated seeing dead babies on their timeline daily, that it was important anyways for them to see stuff related to the very thing that was causing them strife. That they would somehow be a bad person for blocking that stuff. I pointed out to them that that is exactly what the people posting this want. They want to exert control, because they are sadists, because logically who would ever, EVER post dead babies being thrown about, completely uncensored, for any good reason? Finally they did it and they were much better off afterwards. I forget how but I stumbled across a post from one of the people who were posting the gore and their logic behind it, in response to the question "Would you like it if someone posted footage of your family getting murdered onto the internet for everyone to see?", was "Well, if someone is saying that my family never died and they were completely fine, I WOULD want someone to post the footage." which I feel doesn't justify anything. I feel it is one thing to post gore for shits and giggles (I personally feel that is kinda gross but I get that a lot of people here are old internet and that is a lot more commonplace/normal), its another to post gore as some sort of... strange moral cause. And that anyone who sees the gore NEEDS to then look at it and then spread the gore further. At least normally you would just block the person doing it rather than just.... sitting there and letting them send you more, and then purposefully sending it to everyone else in your contacts because the person who sent you the gore says you NEED to send it to other people or else you're somehow an awful person, then just furthering this cycle.
I think in these times with these, as you called them, demorilzation campaigns, moderation is important. Being surrounded on all sides with people trying to tear you down (even if not personal) for their own gain is draining. Not just with silly YouTube videos, but other things as well. While we shouldn't look away from issues nessicerily, we need to not engage or look at things if we know they start to cause issues with our own mental health, purposefully. Which is easier said than done ofc. Sometimes you don't recognize it is even happening, like in the case with the Spongebob video where for some reason I thought it was absolutely nessicery that they went into that much detail about something so meaningless at the end of the day. What I've found helps sometimes is looking at WHY someone would be telling you these sorts of things. Do they have something to gain from it? Here for example, nothing to gain from bringing it up as nobody here is some celebrity. But say, a youtuber like the Spongebob example. Well, comments of people talking about it. Comments boost it in the algorythm, people following to hear more, likes of people agreeing with the point of the doomerism. Also boosts the video more. Spreads it to more people. The cycle continues. Or say a twitter post with some war footage/gore. More money to their chosen gofundme's (whether those are real or not is a whole other question), people retweeting it because it's "important", more people retweeting it from that for the same reason as the former, people following them from there.
Another example (the last one, I promise) I hate the ocean. I am absolutely terrified of it. I hate the things that live in it, I hate the water and the destruction it causes, I hate it's infinite depths, I hate everything about it. More pussy behavior ik. So what I don't do is engage with ocean related things. I don't go swimming in the ocean, I don't look at stuff about ocean life unless it is FAR away from me, and I don't think about it for the most part. If it does somehow come up, I leave. I can go a very long time without thinking of anything related to the ocean. If I do, it is lesso screaming and moreso thinking too much about it. So much so I need to sleep to reset my brain to not think about it (usually sleep is the solution to a lot of my problems). Luckily it is not as detrimental for me as doomer mentality (just either makes me feel disgust, sad, or spooked, vs "I need to kill myself or I'll live to see the end of the world" like doomer mentality does for me), but the point stands nonetheless.
Moral of saying all of this, self care is very important. Take care of yourself. Of course you shouldn't run away from your problems all the time but as Noxy was saying, when it gets to the point that you're thinking about things you can't control so much so you're paralysed/suffering everyday, it's best to avoid the things that cause you to think of those things to begin with. Look for the joy of being alive in these times (music for example is that for me). If the end does come, at least you'll know that you lived all those good times beforehand to the fullest rather than wasting away those good times worried about the future you're in currently.
