- Gender relations were a lot better
I have noticed this too and it's quite ironic that feminism has basically made women undesirable and uncompromising to the point of doing serious damage to gender relations, rather than getting the "muh equality" they like to whinge about constantly.
Ooo this is a biggie that gets overlooked. The fact we all carry what would have been state of the art A/V equipment at all times has shifted things in a worse way. A lot of what enables "Cancel Culture" and it's discontents is that anyone can whip out their phone and capture public meltdowns that would have just faded into the ether years ago.
Yes. People say that "everyone looking at their phones all the time in public" is the big problem (boomers especially like to make fun of this), but the reality is, people who do that are at least passive. They are only ruining their own lives. Much worse are the people who whip out their phone at the first sign of trouble because "you're going viral douchebag". Karens, feminists, race-baiters, they all basically jump at the chance to hurt someone else using their phones, and it's disgusting. It needs to stop.
This has been one of the stranger changes for me instead of just liking something people are now cultist fans of everything and I'm not sure why, gatekeeping is dead as fuck so I'm guessing it's because fandoms became so popular? I guess it's just apart of our nature to want to identify as something but I think people identifying with series and things has just gotten a lot more apparent.
Honestly, I think the reason is because the attitude around learning and growth has been eroded completely, largely by promises of products and companies of instant results, and making things so easy and basic that there's nothing of value to learn about them.
People use to believe that if they worked towards something great - art, shooting, some technology or humanitarian project, etc, then they would accomplish and do well over time. The community members would foster each other and lift each other up to do the best they can. People sought out an interest so they could learn and grow and become better at the interest. Now, we have convinced everyone that they can do literally anything and that they don't need to put any effort in (in fact, putting in effort is considered to be for dorks). Part of this is because people prefer to simply buy "instant success" products rather than learning anything.
The tech scene is a good example of this. Tech nerds used to mainly be programmers or other people who needed to use a computer for whatever reason. In most cases where were multiple choices, each with disadvantages. Computers were difficult to learn but very powerful once you learned them. People would thus form communities around specific technologies - UNIX, DOS, Apple II, Xerox etc, and would be happy to share tips and tricks with each other. The InfoSec community is still a bit like this, and is somewhat healthy as a result.
Because of the way technology has changed, it's now designed to be as simple, easy, and basic to use as possible. There's no more need for a technology community. There's nothing left to talk about. So people instead talk about current events - the latest iPhone, etc. Then the whole community degenerates down into brand loyalty and infighting about who has the coolest stuff.
It seems every other aspect of society has gone this way too. Movies are now so easy to digest by anyone that they say nothing (Marvel is a good example). It seems every aspect of our culture has been carved up and sold as a product, with so much mass appeal that it has become meaningless. Of course the fandoms around things are going to go the same way.
In addition, it's funny that while [current year] may on the surface seem to be more libertine, it isn't. People are more entrenched into dogma than ever. The 2000s were actually unironically a more libertine time. People were in general less judgmental and more open-minded. The fedora atheists have by and large founded a new religion to follow (the cult of woke)
I think the Atheism+ movement was the moment where the atheist movement went from an anti-religious reactionary movement to an alternate religion with it's own dogma.
I don't actually think the 90's and 00's were full of edgy >reddit
fedora atheists. Most atheists I met in these times were usually pretty genuine about it. The edgy atheist thing has largely cropped up in the last generation as they have rebelled against their parents and their "stupid sky daddy"
I like this view a lot it really puts into perspective how important religion is. I've been struggling with this my whole life because I have basically no parental influence and never was that into religion so for the most part I've just imprinted on the internet, and now I think this shit is lame so I just have to find out what I think is right and wrong myself.
Yes. Maybe it's worth a thread on it's own, but the way I see it, humans are naturally wired to need some sort of purpose, so they usually make one up if they can't find it (hence religion). Once you break that cycle, there's a very real feeling of emptiness that goes along with it, and if you've been taught from birth that morality comes from god, and you no longer believe in god, then it's imperative that you build a rational framework upon which to base your sense of morality.
Personally I don't think "god says it's evil therefore it's evil" is a particularly good moral system. It's completely arbitrary and prevents perfectly healthy, normal behaviour while promoting extreme injustice, but it's at least SOMETHING. When you leave that behind, your brain has to fill it in with something new. You usually have a choice, either hit the philosophy books and build a rational basis for morality (which in my opinion will give you a far stronger set of convictions than any religious faith will, because it's based on something tangible), or accept an arbitrary moral position usually based on politics (killing babies is okay because my political party says so, etc). I chose the former, unfortunately a lot of people who become atheists choose the latter. I feel they do so because they aren't really interested in religion and don't really have genuine reasons to not find it convincing, in many cases they are teenagers rebelling against their parents. So of course, there's no reason to flush out the dogma from their mind (anyone who is an atheist for genuine reasons should consider dogma in and of itself to be extremely undesirable), they just accept new dogma instead. Usually in the form of feminism or communism or some other form of ism (also autism).
This is a correct as fuck observation and more people should think this. Especially because I feel like it's so much harder to wrangle privacy than control. Though it might be just as hard of a sell because people could think "Well I've never seen Microsoft/Apple/etc. remove one of MY programs so I'll be fine".
I disagree. I feel like even normies are starting to wake up and realise how out of control they are when it comes to their technology. They may not have directly lost a book or whatever, but pretty much everyone I know has been banned from facebook for some period of time. This isn't just edgy conservatives "trolling the libs" either. I know plenty of liberals who posted a meme only to have it deleted and them banned for arbitrary "ToS violations". Youtubers are also complaining in droves that they are constantly being demonetized for things like 1 second of music appearing in their video, so it's being kept in the public consciousness.
Privacy, on the other hand, is still very much a niche issue. People like Rob Braxman will talk about it at length, but in general people don't care and see privacy advocates as weird pseudo-criminals who must have something evil to hide.
The nice thing about convincing people to take back control is that it gives them privacy for free. When you use a system you control, by it's very nature it's not backdoored or tied to any other company, which largely guarantees you privacy as long as you use it correctly.
I am constantly annoyed at activists like Edward Snowden (I do respect him quite a lot though) who keep wasting their time talking about privacy. It's the wrong argument to make. It's such a hard sell and I don't feel he is going to make much headway at all amongst the general population - the only people who seem to listen to him are already privacy advocates. Worse, he isn't some random conspiracy theorist like Braxman, he showed real tangible evidence of large-scale government spying programs - probably the best confirmation we will ever get of hugely anti-privacy initiatives by the government - and yet nobody cares. Had Snowden just spent one day talking about how Facebook can change your political opinions through propaganda, how Google can manipulate search results to make controversial sites disappear, how your smart kettle can disable itself after 2 years to force obsolescence, how smart home systems can lock themselves down and demand a subscription even after you paid full price for them, and how content on Netflix and other platform can be poofed out of existence for no reason, THEN maybe people would start to care. People made such a big stink over the Cambridge Analytica thing, much more so than the revelations that the US government is literally inspecting and cataloguing every packet on the entire internet.
just hit 10th prestige in cod
