> My feeling is that birth rate could be solved in properly authoritarian country. With policies that won't fit to most "western" schemes.
Nazi-Germany had a pretty illiberal and authoritarian family policy which basically reduced women to their role as housewives and mothers by banning married women from the job market and incentivizing having multiple children. They didn't achieve their goal of increasing the birth rate in any significant means. Their family policy also backfired hard during the war. Because women were not supposed to work and received financial support in the absence of their husbands, women refused to go to work during the hot phase of the war. Note that this was in a time where access to birth control was practically non-existent and access to abortion difficult.
> Problem: the Internet is dangerous now. What you put in "your space" might get you fired, deported, etc.
> Posting anything is a risk. What benefit do you get from it - does it outweigh the risk? In the past, both the actual risk and the perceived risk were lower.
Yes, because people post openly their hot takes to the whole world. Their internet personality is completely tied to their real-world personality. One of the best things of the internet was the anonymity you had. But at one point people started to think it was a good idea to throw this away.
Every new generation reinvents itself to fix what it sees wrong with the ones before it. But they can’t undo what already happened. The Internet is too deeply embedded in our lives now and too useful for that to change. And if bad actors insist on polluting the commons/letting AI run loose on it the only way to get any kind of accountability is for there to be identity mechanisms whenever you’re interacting with people beyond those you already know.
But regardless, it’s like a party that started out as a group of friends, then an entire subculture, then an entire personality type, then everybody else kinda watching through the windows, and now all those people are here but too shy to participate. I remember the end of the anonymity era, and looking back, it really did enable people to just be cruel and nasty in a way that scared away 90% of personality types.
Now a different kind of personality just sees the whole thing as a dump, strip mine, or a mark and the rest of us grew up. And I see an entire generation who truly internalized the cynicism of anonymous Reddit commenters who probably knew just as much about the world as they did, who are real people looking for any kind of authenticity or help they can find, and settling for that.
So, I think people are almost ready to start being truly sincere, forgiving, and graceful to each other on the Internet as long as they can expect to receive it back in kind. Partially because we have no choice, but it would be good anyway.
> The CLICK: "Critiques kill". You want a live internet? Don't critique. If you want a no javascript version make one. If you have a better solution do it. If you have insight into the problem share it.
Yes, and no. I think a problem is critique in the form of action. There are movements such as the indie web (e.g. Neocities, Nekoweb, Agoraroad) that long for the old web in their nostalgia and form a counter-movement to the current state of the web. The websites and communities that emerge from this are more or less an imitation of the websites of the late 90s and early 2000s. My problem with this is that the indie web primarily defines itself by simply being the opposite of the web 2.0. It exists primarily as a counterculture, in which “counter” is more important part than "culture". This movement is cynical in that a better future for the internet and the web no longer seems possible, and the only way out is to escape into a nostalgically romanticized past. For me, this is more of a confirmation of the Dead Internet Theory than of the Alive Internet Theory.
some of this is simply that it is a counter-culture, because it's in the minority (by a significant margin).
that doesn't mean it's defined by that decision, or even that it made that decision in the first place - the majority have decided it for them. and you're letting the majority define it for you, whether it's even remotely accurate or not.
indie web generally wants personal control and ownership. that isn't cynicism or "pre web-2.0" or counter-culture-as-self-identity, it's personal control and ownership. almost everyone wants that. the fact that the majority have given it up doesn't make them cynical, if anything it makes the mega-corps denying those things cynical.
I think Indiweb is more a cultural way of building tech and not only an opposition to current trends. As a dev I see indiweb in similar veins as "selfhosted vs cloud" or "Microservices vs Monolith"
And yet, what you are calling "the past" exists now in the present. It may be that some of those sites resemble "the past" simply because they value certain things, and those values just happen to have been prevalent then, and aren't now. Maybe to you those values look like the past because that's the last time we saw them. Or in other words, maybe they resemble the past coincidentally rather than intentionally. And maybe those values ARE the way forward. The future isn't always different from the past; in fact it seems history is usually cyclical. And it's not monolithic.
Think of a great jazz saxophonist in 2025. Practicing sax every day for years. Is he living in the past because jazz isn't popular like it once was? To some degree, sure, because his inspiration and source material is probably 60- and 80-year-old recordings. But is he cynical for appreciating craft, improvisation and organic individual expression over convenient digital production? And how should he advance his values? By trying to convert Taylor Swift into a jazz saxophonist? That's never going to happen. And it's not cynical to think so, it's just obvious. (Edit: To some degree it might even be wrong, because she would have to deny her inherent Taylorness.) No, the way he can advance those values is by living them himself. Which is the epitome of non-cynical, really. If there are enough of him out there, it'll be a movement, but popularity isn't necessary for it to be part of the present and future, especially his own present and future.
Mm; but do also ask yourself if the "seems" matches the reality, given how many of the organisations who tell us about the world have incentives to show us the failures and not the base rate.
It's fucking bonkers that people really claim that "lots of people" don't have World models. Can't say I'm surprised to hear this from rationalists like Alexander Scott who are too high on their own farts
You see this stuff everyday here in the form of AI hype. The whole ideology behind the powers that drive AI is that humans are dumb and inefficient and need to be replaced by artificial intelligence as the next stage in human evolution.
That's kind of the negative take. The positive take is that work should be automated whenever possible. The endgame is having everyone enjoy life and only working when we want the 120-inch instead of the 90-inch TV, or enjoy working.
It's not that simple due to power imbalances with automation and the eternal pursuit of better living standards, but that's kind of the goal. The world chooching away by itself like a Factorio map and people purely consuming.
