Neil Postman called this the “Peekaboo World”.<p>“What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.”<p><a href="https://www.nateliason.com/notes/amusing-death-neil-postman" rel="nofollow">https://www.nateliason.com/notes/amusing-death-neil-postman</a>
Postman wrote this in context of television, which is a broadcast channel with no means to interact with it. But in times of social media, your reaction to the news is something you can broadcast yourself, at the very least to your online followers (if we are talking about story feeds). Now, a lot of groups enforce their members to take political stances and show action as a sign of belonging. These might be anything from a writing circle to a raver collective. Everyone already shares the group opinions (sincerely or not), but then they need to perform token activism to maintain their image as a "safe" person to have in the group. Examples of such actions I've seen recently would be:<p>- A special edition of a writing workshop dedicated to writing poems which can be used by people protesting against the ICE in the US. We are thousands of kilometers away from the US, by the way.<p>- A street protest against whatever the most recent armed conflict is. The protest has a DJ, a great sound system and everyone is just dancing while singing the slogans.<p>- A charity party collecting donations for a very narrowly defined vulnerable population in a war-torn area, most often someone the participants can personally identify with.<p>Case in point is that the vast majority of the population has no power to drive any meaningful change, as Postman rightly noticed. But then, the new source of mental load comes from the fact that you have to be performatively concerned if you don't want to lose your status in a group.
> the “Peekaboo World”<p>What a great analogy. And IG/Tiktok reduce it into an even purer state - endless random videos, barely if at all connected, ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it.<p>I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis. I wonder what Postman would write today, were he still with us.
> inflation, crime and unemployment?<p>Here's a subject I want to explore; the statistical vs individual view of the world. Because those things do matter - to the individuals they happen to. People care about the price level every time they get paid or go grocery shopping. People care if a crime is committed against them - it can be a lifelong trauma. And so on.<p>They're also likely to care when things happen to their immediate social circle. What about their broader community? However that is defined?<p>On the other end of that, the ability to do something about things: isn't that ultimately why people value democracy, because it is actually possible to change things, even sometimes for the better?
Er... I got an electric car does that count? Based on $ keeping the old car is cheaper. Also divestment, purchase choices, charity donations, solar install.
Buying electric cars, installing solar, and switching to heat pumps are one of the few things you can materially do to screw the powers that be. The the other one is limiting your family size.
Limiting your family size is a lazy, short term solution.<p>Having a bigger family and teaching them the right values is a much stronger and long term approach.
In a world where the brightest minds are paid to intentionally develop tools to make people betray their values (advertising, propaganda, rolling news, etc), I'm not sure anyone should feel safe about what they teach their kids. Many industries, but especially tech, will do everything possible to make them do whatever makes a few dozen people richer.
The only thing you can do to hurt the powers that be is <i>not</i> buying.
Can be done too. I live in a rather big city, so I don't own a car, as I can perfectly go by using public transport.
I think producing and consuming like crazy could also work, considering how quickly Twitter turned Elon Musk from most important to least interesting figure on Earth. Wealth and sensory capacity don't appear to be positively correlated at all.
Depends on which powers for each specific choice.<p>Electric cars don't run on Saudi-Trump-Putin juice, so they're pretty good step in screwing those, for example.
No, it doesn't. Your contribution is statistically insignificant. It was purely a symbolic gesture.
Everyone's contribution is insignificant, and yet it all adds up.<p>This is rather like saying the average player in a football match scores 0 goals, therefore 0 goals were scored.
Even so, an electric car is not particularly good for the environment.<p>Bicycles and public transportation.
Bicycles and public transportation are better yes. If I were healthy enough I would consider a cargo bike and bring 20kg of shopping home on that (for real). It would be cool. Then buses for unladen journeys.
If the cargo bike is electric, the threshold for healthy enough lowers significantly.<p>My weekly shopping for a family of four is done on one like that, which I can park like 50cm away from the shop door and 50cm away from my home front door. That’s even more convenient than any car.
You don’t even need bicycles if you design a city correctly.
yeah, the real carbon footprint of especially non-wimpy EVs remains to be seen. EV recycling seem to be as real as gasoline from algae, the slides look beautiful but all mysteriously fail to take off.
> ? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployme<p>A proletarian revolution would be a good start, not sure what this ideologue writer was on about. History is far from having ended, change can still happen through the union of individual wills.
Practically, focusing on the things you can change (mostly small scale evils in your community) will have the highest degree of positive effect, rather than focusing on stuff you are bombarded with online that is out of your control (mostly large scale evils).<p>However, don't think you get vindicated from duty just because the task is impossible. You are as just as much responsible for yourself, your family, your friends, your community, as you are responsible for the person living on the other side of the globe. Whatever you decide to do with that information is up to you, but you will suffer with any of those who suffer, whether that be in life or death. Only the delusional think they can escape righteous judgment.
> You plan to do nothing about them.<p>Here's another example, let's say we got the news from Andromeda galaxy that Andromeda Hitler is killing lot of people? What do you expect me to do ? Since space and time are equal, similarly we don't lose sleep over bad events that happened in the past.
This is a weird quote. It reeks of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things. The media influenced how Americans voted in the US election, and they voted for a guy that predictably started a major new war in the Middle East. That is a real thing that happened and has impacted billions of people globally with second-order economic effects. Is anything short of each individual American taking up arms and marching to Iran "doing nothing"?
> People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things<p>People don't do that.<p>Politics in US(and democracies in general) have what I call the cable tv bundling problem.<p>Imagine you have only two bundle packages with your most preferred channels split evenly across two packages along with some unwanted channels. Regardless of which package you choose, you'll miss out on some of your favorite channel and still subscribe to unwanted ones.<p>You may enjoy watching a channel occassionally at your neighbors who subscribed to the other package but when it is time for renewal, you personally pick the package that gives you maximum bang for your money & preferences.<p>People will vote mainly based on one or two issues they strongly feel about.
The US is a statistical outlier in almost every single metric. Almost nothing about the US generalizes, not to the world as a whole, and not to other Western countries. Certainly not to functioning liberal democracies.
In this case, one of the packages is uninspiring and the other is fascism, so the choice is fairly clear.
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My take on it is that he's not blaming people for the "doing nothing" part, but rather the fretting part. Of course most Americans can't reasonably do anything beyond vote or throw some dollars or social media sentiment at the thing. One should just take into mind that that <i>is</i> the limit of most people's ability to effect change.
It’s not really.<p>The peekaboo world, elegantly described, gives you enough information or misinformation to make an uninformed decision.<p>You vote for who you were told to vote for.
People vote for such a government very rarely - in the US, about once every two years. I don't think anyone would object to you spending a week or even a month before the election learning a large amount about what's wrong in the world. But when you go into the voting booth on November 3 this year, do you expect your choices will be at all influenced by the details of the bad news you read on June 21?
Candidates don't pop up out of nowhere on election day, and building support for either candidates or policies takes time, public debate, raising awareness. All of that is a reason for more political engagement, not less. Given how much power we actually wield to significantly influence how issues are approached in a democracy, we should strive to make more constructive use of the news. There are real, deep-seated problems with both the current media and how people consume it, but we have a civic responsibility to do better rather than disengage, because quite literally the fate of millions of people are influenced by the sum of our actions.
It wasn’t predictable that he would start a war.<p>He presented himself as the anti-war candidate and then betrayed his electorate.
From outside the US, nothing about him has really been predictable, except that he consistently lies about everything.<p>The only predictable thing about this American presidency is the total chaos that has been inflicted on the world by millions of intellectually degenerate Americans. This is what the world sees. Almost nobody is making excuses for him, everybody is trying to move on without the US.<p>So yeah, in that sense another war is simultaneously an unpredictable outcome and an unsurprising outcome.
During his first term, his continuous threats to north Korea were enough to force congress to restrict presidential powers (the whole fire and fury stuff), and that's not counting Venezuela, Syria and others.
It was evident to anyone aware and paying attention.
The real question is should you have trusted his manifesto after the last time?
You'd have trouble finding a candidate who wouldn't predictably start a major war in the middle East. Biden and Trump 1 were kind of exceptions. Kamala certainly seemed pro-war-in-the-middle-East with her support for Israel, so she's out. Who did you vote for instead?
On the other hand - you may not choose a whether a president will start a war in the middle east, but Trump's cost was abnormally low compared to his predecessors in one very important area - soldier's coffins coming home. His adventurism may have had substantial financial costs, but is better than Bush or Obama on deaths while in combat.<p>Trump is unhinged enough to not care about sunk cost fallacy. The deal is still terrible though.
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This is close to correct. We should be aware of current events but not become too emotionally involved with them. They are mostly outside of our control, and we need to reserve most of our focus and emotional energy on what is front of us and our loved ones. However, we should still act on behalf of greater causes with the means at our disposal. Some examples...<p>world in crisis - I donate to World Central Kitchen<p>the war in Ukraine - I donate to Come Back Alive<p>fascism in America - I vote for and donate to the campaigns of candidates opposed to fascism
"We should be aware of current events" - should we? Why? There is an avalanche of current events, I've stopped paying attention and I still find out - its impossible to avoid, I see absolutely no value in paying attention to things that I'm just not interested in. War in Iran - yep, battle of the stupids - it just doesn't matter, there is nothing I can do about it, best to ignore it all. I have friends obsessed with the news, wake up in the morning and watch the news during breakfast - they discuss it endlessly, get a lot of angst from it, its all just noise to my mind.
Doing what you feel necessary or useful at a local scale is still empowering. Understanding that the effects will be mostly local as well is a good thing, but choosing your battles is perfectly healthy.
Cause people unaware of those events vote to cause those events.
Large groups of people all contributing small amounts towards a goal none of them could accomplish on their own is the only way any of those things ever get done.
Thank you for your donations. World Central Kitchen is a really unique organization. In addition to feeding people in Ukraine, Gaza, and pretty much anywhere in the world where disaster strikes, they have a very unique model in which they employ locals and feed cash into in local businesses, generating economic impact to jumpstart the shattered economies in disaster zones. Your donations actually make a bigger difference than you might realize.
I was recently massively downvoted on Reddit because I mentioned I didn’t really care about candidates stances either way on Israel/Palestine as it regards to a city-level election. I certainly have opinions and understand why folks have principles either way, but we can’t make every issue the issue we spend our energy on, and this doesn’t meet the bar for me for a city official.<p>Sometimes online and election media discourse can feel like we’re supposed to be single issue voters on 1000 issues at once.
Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to either Israel or Palestine, and a group which I considerably doubt represent a single soldier on either side.
That’s a feature, not a bug.<p>Historically that tactic is used by ‘revolutionary’ and ‘liberation’ and reactionary groups to overwhelm and exclude honest debate. It’s a destabilization technique, aimed at gathering critical mass for revolt with no clear second phase. Occupy, overthrow, liberate, replace…<p>Taken at face value, honest protest, it’s a hate crime against the victims and participants in the actual situation: these chaos agitators steal the cause for noise and invest in perpetual purity and polemic campaigns, it only hurts the victims, but enables eternal grievance politics for the agitators.<p>Spray painting Nazi slogans on American universities isn’t helping diplomacy half the world away. Flotillas without aide aren’t aide.<p>The propagandists involved are not dumb, they are funding very tactically. The point is not convincing or helping anyone, it’s establishing political dominance and orthodoxy. Mob rule.
We have the same problem in the UK. Local councils went all in on the Palestine thing when their job is basically collecting trash, roadworks, planning and education.<p>I can’t realistically vote a candidate in who doesn’t talk about trash collection but does talk about Middle Eastern politics.
In my ideal world, explaining this stance would be a part of democracy.<p>It’s an uphill battle vs a tribal mentality, though.
It has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine really. That’s because many Jewish people in the US have had it hammered into their heads, usually through political messaging delivered adjacent to religious practice, that this type of activity is essential to the survival of Israel and of themselves.<p>It’s the same playbook successfully used with evangelical Christian groups and now even some Catholics. Latinos literally vote for people whose stated aim is to round them up. The technique is fear endorsed by a trusted leader or in a sacred place.<p>If the political person says the thing they are supposed to say, they’re safe. Otherwise, they want to destroy your way of life.
>We should be aware of current events<p>I have come to the conclusion that there is no way a layman understand the truth about current events. So it is best to not at all be aware of any current events as reported by the media or popular opinion.<p>For example you say "fascism in America", and I wonder is this guy for real? Fascism? If this was true how are all the people who insult Trump on social media still alive or not locked up?<p>So imagine if you were running a new outlet. All of your readers will unquestioningly accept your flawed narrative! And imagine there are multiple of such flawed/biased news outlets.<p>There is no way to know the truth. This is painfully clear when you read stuff in the news that you have first hand knowledge about...There is some name to the fallacy of why people still believe in news despite that...
> Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.<p>We're having too much of these look back to hunter-gatherer state of affairs to explain modern phenomenons. It feels like they didn't really bother looking for an actual relevant argument.<p>On one side, did hunters who analyzed the situation before moving actually not survive ? How would someone even prove such a claim ?<p>On the other side our brains have excelent plasticity and we're constantly surprised at how it can adapt to extremely impacting life events. Is our cognitive stuck to where it was hundred of centuries ago and couldn't adapt to the printing press or the internet ?<p>We might have social issues and huge problems to solve to better handle our current technical landscape, but going back to Neanderthals to find an explanation is a waste of time and good will IMHO.<p>There must be better science out there and people actually trying to tackle these kind of issues. What would be the Hank Green like people of these fields to who we should pay more attention?
I only read local news. It’s pretty nice I don’t feel stressed at all. Turns out random shit far away has no significant effect on my life. And even if it did it’s not like I can do anything about it
What's your last local news source? I'm jealous of you that you have one. The place where I live had their local newspaper bought out and (in effect) shut down by Alden Global Capital (google them) nearly a decade ago. There's <i>nowhere</i> to go to learn about what goes on in city council or school board meetings, short of attending or logging into their streams - which, at least it's good we have those, but is hardly practical for most residents.
Interestingly, I read more foreign news than local news.
The closing of Hormuz caused fuel prices to go up around the globe. Voting differently in the US could have prevented it.<p>So yeah, random shit far away can have significant effects, and sometimes you can do things about it.<p>That said, focusing on local news does sounds like a great approach, but international news still needs some attention.
I used to read local news until they made an article "Top Ten dangerous places in our city" where they just listed a bunch of places that someone considered scary based on vibes.
I agree with the sentiment generally, but there have been lots of times in history when recognizing that you should leave a place turned out to be life or death. The start of WW2 was random shit far away for a lot of people until it wasn’t.
I don't know, I am a naturally anxious person even before I started reading the news daily, and I'm fine. Seeing the brutal chaos of the world definitely makes me appreciate the peace at home more. It's a grounding experience to be aware of the good and bad things that happen in the world.
The other option is to be more realistic - people often have wildly unrealistic expectations of how the world should work and seem to get a bit stressed when they are confronted with reality.<p>The more pressing problem is the voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent. If policies were made after a bit of experimentation, maybe trying a few things in parallel [0] and with prescribed objectives they were to be evaluated against the legislative process would get better results.<p>[0] The results of experiments like Shenzhen are significant. The US used to be a lot better at letting people act independently too.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Back in 2010 I gave a TEDx talk about how the internet can be an extension of your mind.<p>Nowadays I feel like it is contributing noise. The internet has become X, Reddit, AI, doomscrolling and group messaging.<p>Very little room for positive messaging. I don’t mean to harp about the theft of attention: the message itself is just not even contributing anything.
Out of interest what is the path to talking at a TEDx?
On reddit i have seen multiple threads that are positive through and through with topics like, "What are you up to today?", "I just finished school and starting to work", "I am lonely and feel dreadful". I read the comments and was met with level-headed and honest comments/interactions.<p>As in reality it's important to have walled gardens where people can utter opinions and voice their distress or just say that they are happy. Without getting lynched. These global silos of social media is nothing but deserts where the only way of getting through the noice with any means neccessary.
One of the many effects of AI generated content is the even increased ubiquity of bad news. I wouldn't be suprised if more people develop problematic news consumption when the clickbait battle between AI generated text with the intent to grab human attention for ads or any kind of manipulation gets more and more extreme. Btw this article is 56% AI generated according to pangram, but I don't know how reliable those results really are (<a href="https://www.pangram.com/history/825843ae-35fc-4543-a41f-df499153c20e?ucc=GDi2EvHYRB8" rel="nofollow">https://www.pangram.com/history/825843ae-35fc-4543-a41f-df49...</a>). But my instinct tells me that it is not completey human, it sounds like telling an AI to be very concise, factual and eliminate wordiness, which a human who writes for a science online mag would do as well, but it reads "wrong", there is a lack of the natural rhythm human brains have when connecting sentences.
Brain wasn't designed for watching TV series too.
Also applies to reading comments and replying to them. You don’t know these people.
gives me the idea, rank news items according to geographic distance, and "blast radius"<p>closer to you gives higher rank in the feed, tighter blast radius lower rank.<p>example, events in your present location rank higher, events 100miles away rank lower. police stopping someone for a seatbelt and issuing a ticket, likely ranks lower, vs evacuation order for city ranks higher.<p>a cheap way of assessing relevance score.
> Looking away is not the fix …<p>> The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources. …<p>> Containing news consumption to defined windows of time …<p>> Choosing depth over volume<p>Golden.<p>TBH, we must concentrate on what matters to us. When people cross that boundary, they not only hurt themselves, but end up hurting someone close by for issues from far far away.
Also our brains can't keep up with the Joneses at a worldwide scale.
> Humans evolved to pay close attention to danger, but today that instinct is being overwhelmed by an endless supply of bad news from around the world<p>This insinuates that the human brain can not cope with overflow of bad news. That's wrong. For instance, I stopped consuming horrible news media for the most part. So I get fewer bad news in. I also don't watch everything on youtube either; rather than watching a video where person xyz lost family members abc in some crash, I watch and study surstromming reaction videos (these are fascinating to me, because of group behaviour and also individual's showing varied results here). I can select what I do and watch; the whole article feels as if someone had a need to publish a paper rather than make an objective observation. Publish or perish days...
One thing that really helped me was to start viewing my news media in black and white.
Without the colored dressing, a lot of (especially partisan political) articles have much less emotional impact on me.
Note: this worked particularly well for written media and less well for vocal media
As for new habits: I stopped algorithmically curated news for myself. I use RSS and Leash as a browser:<p><a href="https://leash.ax" rel="nofollow">https://leash.ax</a>
That fretting might be the key to human intelligence and evolution.<p>Relentless overthinking, all that blood flow to the developing brain. Nutrition and oxygen to those cells at incredible rates.<p>My focus is insane when adrenaline hits.<p>I’ve been known to argue with takeout cashiers over portion sizing for a full day hit before tournaments.
"There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about. Well, we have to end apartheid, for one, slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people."<p>- Patrick Bateman (as adapted by Mary Heron)
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I was under the impression that science did not believe that the brain was intelligently designed in the first place though.
A wonderful comment. But, "not designed for" encompasses badly designed, and also not designed and inadequately designed.<p>I think we can say the process (designed or otherwise) was .. organic?
Dude, reweight your attention vectors. That's not supposed to be the take away from this article, I think.