Here's my take: the bigger picture is one of "lessening humanity" - and it's death by a million paper cuts. Social media is one of the bigger cuts, but it's an awful lot of other things as well.
Being on screens all the time - especially when out and about (and whether it's social media or maps, it doesn't really matter) - means less casual conversation, less "hello, how you doing", less banter, less touch points with real people. It means toddlers look up out of their prams and can't meet their parents' eyes, it means you don't smile at strangers, or exchange a common glance about something trivial. It means kids don't get to sit in pubs with their parents and have to "do adult conversation". It means if you're in a situation as a teen and you're uncomfortable, you just reach for your phone instead of reaching out to the next awkward teen, who might just end up being your lifetime friend.
And then beyond that there are infinitely many takes-away-the-humanity cuts. Even something like this: once upon in our country you could buy a parking ticket for a space in a car park, then what typically happened when you got back to your car with time to spare is you then pulled up next to someone and offered them your ticket for free. This shit doesn't happen now - spaces are tied to number plates (because: profit), and so another little touchpoint with other humans is eroded.
Getting hold of many of the companies you use is becoming harder, through profit motives / AI chat / whatever - high street banks disappear, and immediately there's a whole source of contact that disappears.
We got a deal on our post-wedding train journey 25 years ago because we did it face to face with a guy in the station, and when we got chatting about the occasion and he discovered it was our wedding, he upped our ticket to 1st class. No such luck now, when you order all your tickets online, and the customer support is outsourced to somewhere a thousand miles away.
Real people are for the most part lovely people, and their motives are 95% aligned with each other - love your family, help people, be generous, be kind - but the more time we spend slipping behind digital facades, being taken away from human contact through these many papercuts, the worse things are likely to get. IMO.
That social networks became social media indicates a clear shift in incentives toward social atomization and shallow substitutes for human connection/affection/bonding/sexual satisfaction/etc.
It is likely possible to disambiguate these concepts and build prosocial networks, if we want such a thing or believe it can work.
What strikes me here is the extreme noise. I mean, I’m 50+ so you know, but even so, this shit doesn’t make sense. To be living a life where you’re checking messaging groups for 100+ messages a day, needing some kind of bot to manage your (obviously extremely traffic’d) texts incoming, to be watching tens of prices of stocks, products, meeting, what, tens of people a day (as an introvert…)…
Holy shit, fuck that. Slow the bejesus down and live a little. Go look at the sky.
Paid user and early adopter here - same, I think. I'm delighted with Kagi, but the thought of it riddled with ads makes me sad. My understanding is same as yours - this is an attempt at an entirely different business model - moving to ads would be totally contrary to what they're trying (or at least - to date - have been trying) to build.
I read the article and was disappointed that the full "word" got cut off, but I know that somewhere, there's a German out there who will post something even longer.
I’m German and think the idea to compound words into one should not really count as the longest / a long word. I mean yes it is but also it isn’t. Like: “ Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung” In the end it’s just slapping words together and count it as one.
We visited Florence over the summer. It was a total shitshow. I’ve never seen anything like it: hoards and hoards of people just looking at their phones / taking selfies / not engaging at all with the actual art or majesty around them. The queue for the Duomo was maybe 4 hours. Everyone in the queue was on their phone. We didn’t wait. The Uffizi was appalling - rammed busy, everyone running into a room to snap a pic of Venus or do some utterly bizarre selfie thing which required weird poses, those involved totally unaware at the disruption they were causing. No moments of engaging with the art, no reading the labels or soaking it up, just a completely bizarre “check the box, I was there” thing going on with - I presume - Insta or whatever the equivalent is. Outside the centre things were a little better but not much. We escaped to Bologna as soon as we could and that was a whole world apart.
My point: I’m not sure “travel” as I understand it (educational, beautiful, soaking up of local culture, taking time to stand and understand as much as possible) is the same as the “travel” that others understand it.
reply