A lot of people are hitting mid-life from the first western generation significantly less well-off than their parents. They grew up with expectations set by their environment which they’re now realizing isn’t realistic at all. It’s not really their fault for having those expectations, it was a reality they witnessed with their own eyes.
I think this fairly nebulous anxiety over the disconnect between expectation and reality is the root cause of a lot of various flavours of anti-social behavior. It’s just a roulette spin of who they end up blaming.
Andrew Tate misogyny, MAGA fascism, Xenophobia, Anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, full-on neo nazis etc etc, I think the surprising uptake of these otherwise fringe ideas are just people subconsciously grasping for explanation of why the world (and by extension their lives) “just isn’t right”.
So yah, layer than onto regular mid-life crises, it’s a powder keg.
And I think this is where so much MAGA support comes from. They heavily lean into acknowledgement that things AREN’T good. They’re BAD. You’re NOT CRAZY for thinking they’re FUCKED, and the urgency you feel is APPROPRIATE.
In the US at least, it’s the right offering radical change. It’s fucking idiotic change guaranteed to blow up in your face before the leopards come to chew it off… but goddamnit it’s radical. It at least matches the energy level of the angst. The Dems are offering piecemeal incremental bland realistic changes that while certainly for the better, they won’t rock the boat too hard.
We were told that if we went and got a college degree, we would have a well-paying, decent (which is to say, doesn’t treat us like crap) job out the door and that the degree would pay for itself within a few years.
We were told this over and over and over again, and that, if you went for any other path, you were a fuckup.
We were told this over and over and over again, and that, if you went for any other path, you were a fuckup.
What a scam it was.
Even worse, I’m not even sure what to counsel my son to do now that he’s out of high school. It was absolutely a lie, but yet I also go to a job every day where I’m surrounded by people (including myself) in jobs that list “4 year degree in blah blah blah” as the first requirement in their job description. Everyone I know has a job that says that. And yet I also know the loan debt problem is a real problem.
I’d also add that IMO, it’s also heavily caused by misalignment of social network personalization algorithms. It’s very probable that someone developed a ML algorithm during the early years of FB/YT/Google (not LLM, just some kind of feedbacky ML), that takes data they have about you as input, and selects what posts to show you next to maximize your time spent scrolling on the app.
You have unimaginable amount of data (with literally billions of active users), and it could’ve been running and getting better for the last decade.
The algorithm gets better and better at gluing you to the screen, at manipulating and changing people. My theory is that one of the best ways how to keep someone glued to a social network is radicalization and introduction into a conspiraci theory. It probably removes you from “normal” people around you IRL, because you’re now wierd, you feel smart because you’ve “figured out the truth”, you don’t spend time with people around you or read “traditional” media, because they are lying and don’t get you, and the only safe space you have is the echo chamber on the social network. That sounds like a pretty good recipe how to keep people interacting on the platform, and there’s not really a way how to prevent it, assuming it’s a ML algorithm driving it. No one knows how it works, and it only works with one goal - maximize app time at all costs.
Just take a look how good some ML models are at the task of “text -> image”. Now imagine it has billions of people and a decade to experiment, with a task “person -> next content to show”. It’s horrifying to think about what it would be able to manipulate you into, and it is even better at it that the image models, because it had exponentially more data and room to experiment in real time on real people.
Also - there’s no way how to fight back. Even if you know about it, there are tens of thousands people like you, who are also “immune” to this approach. But the ML algorithm gets to experiment on them, and if there is a way how to manipulate even them, it will figure it out. Because it knows what approach won’t work on people like you. The only way you can prevent this is by not using anything that has a personalized feed - no Google search, no FB wall, no YT recommendations, etc. This probably doesn’t lead to radicalization in this case, because the goal is to keep you in the app, not radicalize. For now, at least. Thankfully, people managing the biggest social networks are reasonable people who are just running a business, and they have no reason to change the goal of the algorithm into something else than screen time, right?
The Dems are offering piecemeal incremental bland realistic changes that while certainly for the better, they won’t rock the boat too hard.
Hell, the Dems aren’t really offering that, either. They are offering just enough to placate the masses, while still shoveling money into the pockets of billionaires.
ie, Dems are still offering bread and circuses, while the GOP is offering gladiator battles.
And I think this is where so much MAGA support comes from. They heavily lean into acknowledgement that things AREN’T good. They’re BAD. You’re NOT CRAZY for thinking they’re FUCKED, and the urgency you feel is APPROPRIATE.
I think you’re right that this is a big part of it. Most people seem to have some degree of understanding that they are fucked. But they don’t know how to express it or what to do about it. The Republicans play on that inner anxiety, but the Democrats try to steer away from it. I don’t want to say that the Democrats should be playing on people’s anxieties the way the Republicans do, but it clearly works politically.
I don’t want to say that the Democrats should be playing on people’s anxieties the way the Republicans do, but it clearly works politically.
The Dems most certainly should be shouting from the rooftops, that things are f’d, and the way to fix them is via radical, progressive, working class-focused policies.
What we get instead is “How about some more trickle down economics? We’ll call it Bidenomics, this time, though. And, we’ll toss in some lite genocide. Does that make you happy now?”
I think that’s always been “on the menu” for people who are deeply unhappy and can’t figure out who to blame. “Going postal” isn’t a new concept.
I don’t expect the biggest factor to be an increase of the likelihood that a mentally anguished person will decide to mass-murder-suicide-by-cop, I think that the pool of mentally anguished people has just grown so much.
My theory:
A lot of people are hitting mid-life from the first western generation significantly less well-off than their parents. They grew up with expectations set by their environment which they’re now realizing isn’t realistic at all. It’s not really their fault for having those expectations, it was a reality they witnessed with their own eyes.
I think this fairly nebulous anxiety over the disconnect between expectation and reality is the root cause of a lot of various flavours of anti-social behavior. It’s just a roulette spin of who they end up blaming.
Andrew Tate misogyny, MAGA fascism, Xenophobia, Anti-vaxxers, flat earthers, full-on neo nazis etc etc, I think the surprising uptake of these otherwise fringe ideas are just people subconsciously grasping for explanation of why the world (and by extension their lives) “just isn’t right”.
So yah, layer than onto regular mid-life crises, it’s a powder keg.
And I think this is where so much MAGA support comes from. They heavily lean into acknowledgement that things AREN’T good. They’re BAD. You’re NOT CRAZY for thinking they’re FUCKED, and the urgency you feel is APPROPRIATE.
In the US at least, it’s the right offering radical change. It’s fucking idiotic change guaranteed to blow up in your face before the leopards come to chew it off… but goddamnit it’s radical. It at least matches the energy level of the angst. The Dems are offering piecemeal incremental bland realistic changes that while certainly for the better, they won’t rock the boat too hard.
We were told that if we went and got a college degree, we would have a well-paying, decent (which is to say, doesn’t treat us like crap) job out the door and that the degree would pay for itself within a few years.
We were told this over and over and over again, and that, if you went for any other path, you were a fuckup.
What a scam it was.
Even worse, I’m not even sure what to counsel my son to do now that he’s out of high school. It was absolutely a lie, but yet I also go to a job every day where I’m surrounded by people (including myself) in jobs that list “4 year degree in blah blah blah” as the first requirement in their job description. Everyone I know has a job that says that. And yet I also know the loan debt problem is a real problem.
I’d also add that IMO, it’s also heavily caused by misalignment of social network personalization algorithms. It’s very probable that someone developed a ML algorithm during the early years of FB/YT/Google (not LLM, just some kind of feedbacky ML), that takes data they have about you as input, and selects what posts to show you next to maximize your time spent scrolling on the app.
You have unimaginable amount of data (with literally billions of active users), and it could’ve been running and getting better for the last decade.
The algorithm gets better and better at gluing you to the screen, at manipulating and changing people. My theory is that one of the best ways how to keep someone glued to a social network is radicalization and introduction into a conspiraci theory. It probably removes you from “normal” people around you IRL, because you’re now wierd, you feel smart because you’ve “figured out the truth”, you don’t spend time with people around you or read “traditional” media, because they are lying and don’t get you, and the only safe space you have is the echo chamber on the social network. That sounds like a pretty good recipe how to keep people interacting on the platform, and there’s not really a way how to prevent it, assuming it’s a ML algorithm driving it. No one knows how it works, and it only works with one goal - maximize app time at all costs.
Just take a look how good some ML models are at the task of “text -> image”. Now imagine it has billions of people and a decade to experiment, with a task “person -> next content to show”. It’s horrifying to think about what it would be able to manipulate you into, and it is even better at it that the image models, because it had exponentially more data and room to experiment in real time on real people.
Also - there’s no way how to fight back. Even if you know about it, there are tens of thousands people like you, who are also “immune” to this approach. But the ML algorithm gets to experiment on them, and if there is a way how to manipulate even them, it will figure it out. Because it knows what approach won’t work on people like you. The only way you can prevent this is by not using anything that has a personalized feed - no Google search, no FB wall, no YT recommendations, etc. This probably doesn’t lead to radicalization in this case, because the goal is to keep you in the app, not radicalize. For now, at least. Thankfully, people managing the biggest social networks are reasonable people who are just running a business, and they have no reason to change the goal of the algorithm into something else than screen time, right?
Hell, the Dems aren’t really offering that, either. They are offering just enough to placate the masses, while still shoveling money into the pockets of billionaires.
ie, Dems are still offering bread and circuses, while the GOP is offering gladiator battles.
God. Damn. That is well said. And more succinct than I ever said it.
I think you’re right that this is a big part of it. Most people seem to have some degree of understanding that they are fucked. But they don’t know how to express it or what to do about it. The Republicans play on that inner anxiety, but the Democrats try to steer away from it. I don’t want to say that the Democrats should be playing on people’s anxieties the way the Republicans do, but it clearly works politically.
The Dems most certainly should be shouting from the rooftops, that things are f’d, and the way to fix them is via radical, progressive, working class-focused policies.
What we get instead is “How about some more trickle down economics? We’ll call it Bidenomics, this time, though. And, we’ll toss in some lite genocide. Does that make you happy now?”
Well stated. But it still doesn’t explain why blowing up a bunch of strangers as you suicide out is the pick of the day.
Yeah I kinda glanced off that…
I think that’s always been “on the menu” for people who are deeply unhappy and can’t figure out who to blame. “Going postal” isn’t a new concept.
I don’t expect the biggest factor to be an increase of the likelihood that a mentally anguished person will decide to mass-murder-suicide-by-cop, I think that the pool of mentally anguished people has just grown so much.