I'd say the opposite: the individuality in alienation is faux individuality. The individual today is "individual" by their clothing choices, consumption patterns, etc, where everything is if not mass produced, still mediated by money in a market ("underground" and "alternative" consumption is still consumption, not some original expression of self).
Add to that the widespread lack of social safety nets, non-support from community, friends, and even family, and individuals become obedient cogs to get their next meal.
It's in the non-alienated societies where the individual can be truly non-conformant and more unique, because the uniqueness there can be an actual personal expression (e.g. the old eccentrics), and because community support means the individual is stronger against the state, market forces, etc.
There are concessions to be made to get that community support, but few as heavy as the modern state/society/market/boss imposes on the individual (and they are based on historical prejudices which could be overcome within the same community - e.g against being gay - not in the inherent way the system functions - by making people consume as much as they can, nickel and dime them, treat them as redundant if they don't have money, etc- as are the modern concessions).
That said, some self-sufficiency is required too. Someone that has to yield to all kinds of powers to survive because they're not self-sufficient, can't ascertain their individuality either.
Perhaps we should hope for the emergence of "be self-sufficient" as a separately motivating idea from "be an individual"?
Then maybe the instincts driving unhappy individualism would subside a bit.
Because the instinct towards sufficiency is presumably a strong one, underlying much of life, whether conscious or not. So I imagine that when the two concepts are blurred together, the instinct towards sufficiency causes people to be driven to differentiate themselves as individuals. For example, by leaving the places where they were raised, in the hope of becoming "different" from the people they grew up with.
In developed societies markets have replaced the social dependency on each other through legislation, gunpower, and policies that closed down communal ways of living and forced people to seek (much worse) work in towns and factories -- often against much protest from the people subjected to that. Further laws made small scale production impossible or near, and mass production mandatory. And much later (around the '30s or so) followed advertising and other means to expand this even more through constant low-intensity brainwashing.
In the process people became less individualistic -- often confined for hours on end to the same cubicle, to come back home exhausted from some meaningless commute, in a meaningless job.
This confuses individualistic with isolated.
By self-sufficiency, I mean capable of doing well within the context of modern developed societies and their systems. Not ruggedly off-grid sufficient.
The markets don't work too well, even for individualism, when people cannot get what they need from those markets. People are often forced to conform to get what they need.
You're not saying the opposite; atomization is good for business, and yes, it's totally fake. There's a dipshit on the same flight as me wearing a dragon tail. He probably thinks he's bold and original, but he's a weeb who participates in an infantile marketing subculture. I'm sure he'll keep people in the pharmaceutical industry employed for decades to come.
People not "growing their own food" buy into all kind of food trends, not to mention a whole nation sticking to 30-50 nationwide chains (restaurants, food brands, etc) for the huge majority of their food.
Compared to an American of 70-80 years ago, or a modern French or Italian person this is huge conformism and sheep like consumption. And food is one of the most essential things in our life (not to mention the health implications).
Although this is not about "growing own's own food". You can still buy your own food without modern consumerism, as societies have done since forever in farmers markets, etc (and people still do in other parts of the world), where the food is not mass produced and branded by 10 major chains, nor the restaurant choices are 20-30 nation wide chains.
Disagree. For the innovators out there, please keep fiddling.
Funny how I can interact with strangers in the real-world and sometimes walk away refreshed but I am not sure there's a single time I have ever read a stream of tweets from strangers and felt anything but anger and nausea?
Reading unrefined emotive sentences has the damning effect of "this is a proclamation, this must be true!"
Where-as if you had the conversation with a stranger, you would realize there are dramatic pauses, "umms" where they aren't so certain of their statement, trailing inflections in their voice where they're actually asking a question instead of making a statement.
Most people are not sophisticated enough to write in a way that accurately conveys their emotions.
So the tweets all read as grand proclamations.
And it sucks. Participating in these "social" sites cause stress.
Keep iterating. How can we experience online, the emotion of in-person chats? Video chats are from perfect and come off stale and more akin to the experience of a CB Radio.
Async video group chat - all participants record video clips/responses? Along with fairly accurate transcriptions of the video, so that the content can be searched?
This hasn't been my experience, I regularly see interesting and refreshing stuff linked from Twitter. The Outer Worlds bug thread was only a few days ago[0]. Here's another story about deaf astronauts if you want something recent that's more general than programming.[1]
I do think there are things we can do better, and I don't think everything is fine, and on average I even advise people to stay away from sites like Twitter -- I don't think they're super-healthy right now. But overall even the toxic parts of the Internet I frequent (like Twitter) are not nearly as toxic as people make them out to be.
There's been this kind of push in the media lately that maybe all of this was a mistake, and that's just laughable to me. Of course the Internet has been a net good for society. There are a lot of problems, and a lot of stuff I hate, but I am overall trending towards optimistic, not pessimistic -- especially when I look at efforts like Mastodon, PeerTube, and Matrix. I think the Internet is rough, but not fundamentally flawed. So please keep iterating, but also stop being so pessimistic. The Internet is honestly kind of good. We did a good job building it.
I was thinking the other day -- I need to start indexing some of the things I see online that make me happy, so when I see comments like this I can just more quickly list them out.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21779583
[1]: https://twitter.com/TheSpaceGal/status/1205258285412020225
Meaning, if you wanted to tweet/response at me, you should be required to see my emotional response to it in real-time, and you must be open to me asking any follow up questions to your response.
And if you're not open to that, you don't get to respond to me.
The real world "say it to my face" really means "say it somewhere I can fight you if you're rude enough".
There is in fact an orthogonal effect where people will fear expression in the face of violence. Is "civilized" expression dominated by the strong better than the rudeness of online communication, where there are different power dynamics? I don't know, but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.
Perahps at least a portion of the "uncivilized" speech you see online is the outcry of those who are not allowed to express their opinions elsewhere.
Obviously extending this to online, two people could be far from each other. But it still would require one person to see the emotional response from the other, which may or may not be pleasant.
As an adult your emotional responses to communication are entirely your own affair.
Really? I find the opposite. There are few people I can talk to for hours, most face to face communication even with people I like is exhausting after just a few minutes. But I can spend all day online and feel refreshed.
Granted I stay away from cesspools like Twitter. Really I go out of my way to not spend time online in places that don't add some sort of value to my life.
I think it's a difference in communication preferences that gets magnified by your environment growing up.
REM: 'Tyrannys have concentrated views.'
A made up example to illustrate:
Say 100,000 people from your locale +1 the tweet "she probably deserved to get raped [euphemism for gang-raped and murdered brutally while guys are laughing, recording it on their phones and sharing it with their mates], women need to be reminded of their place, those guys should be let off", and 1,000 people reply with about half of them approving, that's a serious, non-game signal about the real world in your locale.
A signal that tells you something life-threateningly important about the people around you, how they think when they see you, what you should be looking to protect yourself from, and how.
If it was just a game, you could safely ignore the words.
But it isn't just personal safety: Those balance of opinions end up determining how the local police think. Do they investigate, or do they brush it under the carpet? How the local government officials think. What they prioritise, what they even care about. Whether anyone even gets prosecuted, what the law ends up being. Even who ends up in government.
Now, although that's a strong example with details made up (but not unrealistic, sadly), there are countless examples on social media where it is clear that the tweets, likes, comments and other things have a large, profound, physical effect on many people's lives if you trace the effect of the influence of words.
If someone tweets that all left handed users of hacker news who use custom CSS should be banned from the internet, no one gets mad because that tweet doesn't represent some widespread group of humans. It is so outside expectations people will assume it is sarcastic, but even if they were convinced it was real, unless it came from someone in power or showed traction, it would be ignored and none would be mad.
When someone tweets that you doing something you see as natural should result in you being imprisoned under threat of death, and there are entirely communities backing that view and perhaps even a history of people being imprisoned for the same, it gets far more personal.
Arguably, I shouldn't feel stress for things so far beyond my control, but at the same time I have a vested interest in my community and its future (and if so many people feel this way, it certainly _feels_ like a credible threat).
Training is in many ways a body thing as well as mind. E.g. learning to modulate fear and disgust reactions, heart rate, breathe so as to let the adrenalin spike pass (if you want), change muscle posture, etc.
And you should anyway on intellectual grounds, because words' intepretion is often different, at least in degree and shades and layers of meaning, than the intent of their author. For example "$X apologism" is often a misinterpretation of words someone was using to try to reduce the amount of $X in the world (due to the world and people being complicated). Many issues are "no matter what you say, or where you are coming from, someone will think you mean almost the opposite, and sometimes they have a vested interest in thinking that".
But reducing stress doesn't have to mean stop caring.
It can make you more effective at caring.
For anyone with an interest in their community and its future, I'd advocate for deciding which reactions to keep, maybe even develop (e.g. various ways to channel anger constructively, such as politics, community organising, creating new institutions), and training yourself to reduce stress and other intense reactions that you decide are not so helpful (e.g. anxiety from watching the news).
My main point is to encourage people to think of stress and anger as being a mix of constructive and destructive types.
My approach these days is to first try to overcome my anger and despair at knowing how many people seem to think what they do, and when I (eventually!) calm down, ask myself how can I affect the world to change this. I must admit, it is challenging these days because I've come to think of large numbers of my fellow humans as jerks who are happiest when damaging others!
Even if people weren't actually more angry online, and even if communications in text didn't come across as more antagonistic, the BAP tends to amplify the negative in any large group.
Closely related is the way that it only takes a Tiny Number Of Assholes to ruin things for a large group. That happens in verbal discourse, face to face social groups, and community organisations too.
The effects on targetted individuals can be devastatingly traumatic, and sometimes take years to recover from, especially when they interact with other difficult things happening in people's lives. It's hardly surprising, if some people's lives are turned upside down completely, that for a larger circle of people in the vicinity there's an instinct towards unhappiness and anger in general, just from proximity, without necessarily having a clear, fixed target.
If we can ever figure out how to create a Bullshit and Asshole Damage dampening field, that would be great.
Isn't that Snapchat?
> I am not sure there's a single time I have ever read a stream of tweets from strangers and felt anything but anger and nausea?
Don't read those people then?
It is a bit of an art to find a Twitter community who are nice, but fandoms are generally a better place to start than politics.
No. Video isn't required. Texting is allowed and used liberally with Snap.
Snap's consumption of video tends to be one way - from the followee to the follower. Or two friends, one sends video, the other sends a text response.
With my idea, the required video response clips would force participants to reveal themselves. Their mannerisms, their current emotional state.
This is just a collection of sky-is-falling narratives promoted in the media. Stop letting the endless cycle of negative political and media fads drag you around mentally and emotionally, and instead focus on improving your personal health and the lives of those around you in actual reality.
> In the short run, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. In ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9477....
>In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross‐cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.
If you look at other parts of the world, the development of more encompassing identities is anything but guaranteed. From the Bosniaks, Uyghurs, or Roma, groups can live side by side for centuries, without developing joint identities, or developing very fragile ones.
Besides, I'm not sure how applicable the examples given in the study are to a modern nation state. (You can't run a nation like a military, and religion and nationalism are on the decline, so those are probably not sources of future social cohesion either.)
I want to stress that the large majority of people coming into the US are probably good people, but that doesn't mean we are free to ignore the possible systemic effects of mass immigration. Good intentions can often lead to negative outcomes when we don't look beyond the immediate future and our idealized conception of things.
It doesn't help that any discussion around reducing immigration is immediately slandered as racist. How deluded have we become when even attempts at reducing illegal immigration are ridiculed and rejected?
This claim is flat out wrong.
I guess they usually don't die...
I want it to stay that way.
A large number of deported migrants are not running from any nation at all - many of them were raised from a young age in the country that will deport them once they become adults. They have known nowhere else; it is cruel and arguably immoral to send those somewhere else.
Some of them will be surprised, as they won't know they were from somewhere else.
Another large number are people from different countries who simply fell in love and want to be together in spite of law preventing them from doing so legally. It is cruel and arguably immoral to prevent them from being together.
A third large class are not breaking any law at all, it is the authorities breaking the law by not applying their own rules correctly or consistently. See also "deport first, appeal later" legal systems, where of course you can't really appeal once deported as it is impractical to do so.
A fourth class are people for whom the law is simply arcane and insane. For example people deported because one of their bank accounts dipped briefly below some threshold for a moment and there is an arcane rule saying it is not allowed. Or for not having long held a class of insurance that nobody knew about until one day people were being told to leave for not having it, and nobody can say how to obtain it anyway. Or for correcting a minor error caused by their accountant in their tax return, as encouraged by the authorities, and then being labelled a terrorist and threat to nations all over the world due to abusive misapplication of "bad character" law that wasn't created to be used that way.
And then there is the fact that nations of laws change their laws from time to time. Causing people who were once legally entitled to permanent residency to become unwelcome overnight.
Did people immediately utilised the press as a tool of mass enlightenment, and began printing academic literature? No...
The very first popular printed literature were books on witchcraft and on Jew/Moor/Huguenot/Hussite burning.
Not sure I agree with that, you don't have to be like other people to get along with them. A strong social fabric at it's root is things like being willing to talk to all walks of life and not nurturing a fear of the unknown.
I can't think of a single example of a heterogeneous society that has lasted a comparably long time. Would you care to point to one, or cite some studies to show their effectiveness vs those that are homogeneous in nature?
I'd argue that a strong sense of shared identity, such as that provided previously by religion in the West, and which still currently holds strength elsewhere, is crucial to the success of a given society. The War state, and then post-War state, of the West also had a strong sense of shared identity and bound together as a result. Evidence points towards it.
The current state of the West is a testament to the disarray caused in a heterogeneous society with no sense of shared identity and the mutual obligations that result from it. The divisions and gaps are only widening, the issues around it are only becoming worse, and those who stand to benefit from it are using it to its full advantage.
Comparable to what?
I mean, just as one well known and google-able example, the Roman empire was obviously thoroughly heterogeneous. Maybe the key is that most people couldn't really travel? So no one from Lutetia ever really knew any woman from Alexandria for instance. Whereas today in Paris, obviously, a large number of people know people from Alexandria.
EDIT: I realize that if you were in the Roman Army, you were an exception to the general rule of people not knowing people from other parts of the empire. Obviously, Romans had to fight together against the barbarians. (Or rather, against the other future Romans.) But that would be an example of one of the few ways your average Joe in Marseille would get to know your average Joe in Leptis Magna.
But I digress. Most large, long lasting empires were not only enormous, but heterogeneous by necessity. Rome, China after warring states (even before actually), definitely Persia. In fact, I can't really think up any examples of contemporaneous homogeneous societies that could have even dreamed of competing with the historic behemoths.
And the issue at hand isn’t whether homogenous societies could “compete” with empires, but whether they’re more likely to persist (and have less alienation among the people).
If memory serves, most of the college books considered the height of Roman quality of life, as well as Roman influence in the world, to be the time of Diocletian's reign. (I think he was the tetrarchy guy, but people are free to correct me if there are real historians out there.) In any case, obviously Rome was heterogeneous, again just going by memory here, but it must have been at least before the first century BC. (Assuming the Bible is to be believed. Also, why else would we call it "BC" and "AD"?) So that's like, at least 4 centuries right there.
Persia you can probably go what? At least a thousand years. And that's assuming you only start at Cyrus the Great.
China is China. Different dynasties like the British, but even if you only counted the dynasties that ruled uncontested over all of the different ethnic groups, you'd be talking about a millennia or two at least as a political grouping whether by birthright, marriage or usurpation.
Just pointing out that while some heterogeneous empires certainly fail, all of the empires in mankind's history that were great and long lasting, were unquestionably heterogeneous. I mean, some people may correct me on some details here and there, but in essentials that can't even be debated. It's extremely difficult to take out these empires. And despite what is generally believed, the historical evidence indicates that well run empires are not at all likely to fail on their own. (Even in the face of élites fighting each other, well run places just stand by and watch the old emperor get assassinated, and then, Hey! New emperor in Rome today!) Even at their heights, unless you have a few millennia to wait for failure, they typically just haven't gone away as fast as the homogeneous empires have.
Another example is Yugoslavia. Or USSR
The common ingredient in all of them: Unfree
It s perhaps not an accident that liberal democratic nation states were culturally homogeneous
Hellenistic Greece perhaps? Lasted for 300 years or more, and it was very diverse.
Have you spent much time around teens to people in their early 20's? Social skills no longer exist or most of them. They can't look at you, they can't give you their attention, they can't carry a conversation in person. They stare at their phones, feeling underprivileged because their favorite social media accounts seem to have better, flashier, fancier lives than them so they too highly curate what they show to the world.
As a 34 year old I can look at the generation before me and the generation after me and see a stark difference in social skills.
You used to fall into one of a few groups, now everyone thinks they need to find individuals exactly like them which requires them to search the world far and wide to find someone that identifies as some random string of letters (not necessarily representative of their gender and sexual preferences).
I suspect people in general feel more alienated, more alone, than ever before in human history because of the internet.
Just in the past week there was a thread here on HN about a hair cutting robot and the number of people claiming that they hated having to go to the barber because, God forbid, the barber/stylist might attempt to talk to them [1] was just flat out shocking. They'd rather have a machine cut their hair than have to be around other human beings!
Go out to eat, or go walk around in a populated area (outside or inside). What do you see? People staring at screens, people with earbuds in, throngs of people ignoring each other to interact with strangers on the internet. People sitting at the same table, eating food, texting other people or even texting each other instead of having actual conversations.
Take something like a dating app. Instead of walking up to someone and saying hi, you mindlessly swipe pictures waiting for someone to swipe you back. Then your match tries to find all of your social media so they can quickly see if you are worth the effort of getting to know, instead of actually asking you questions and getting to know you.
https://manybooks.net/titles/forstereother07machine_stops.ht...
"The Machine Stops is a short science fiction story. It describes a world in which almost all humans have lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in isolation in a 'cell', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Most humans welcome this development, as they are skeptical and fearful of first-hand experience. "
E.M. Forster wrote this in 1909
But crime, particularly violent crime, is at or near historic lows.
The first few questions specifically asking about the topic show the opposite of what you claim.
Or maybe there's just a lot of noise in the responses. "More crime" gained 10 points between 2004 and 2005.
TV news stations care about ratings, papers care about circulation. Fear stories keep people watching/reading.
I don't think that the nature of media reporting, while likely a factor, is a sufficient explanation.
>poisonous oligarch funded divisive politics
That is probably a large part of the reason people believe in the widespread crime myth.
There are also not-so-obvious ways. For example, returning to a society where most of our trips are on foot and transit rather than by the isolating and dehumanizing bubble of personal automotive.
As always with public policy, the question arises of what's the better way to address problems. The gulf from recognizing a problem and implementing policy to solve a problem is vast.
Smoking creates small favors and the need to ask for them. Phones don't do this.
Our sister country is so similar, yet so different, we have very compatible laws, have plenty of immigration and the same outlook on plenty of topics.
In addition, every single American I have interacted with , has been kind, cool and caring. Yet for some reason, Canadian society just seems healthier and more content, at least as far as the overall well being the population goes.
Perhaps I'm just too naive and am missing something obvious.
> Canada, unlike the U.S., is a country where nearly all arrivals come in through the front door, in the open, during daylight hours.
> Almost everyone who immigrates to Canada has to first apply from overseas, and before they’re granted entry they’re subjected to extensive vetting by Canadian authorities. Those who make the cut have to wait months or years for their turn in line before being let in. Over the past 20 years, about 5 million immigrants chose Canada. But the vast majority only entered the country after Canada also chose them.
This means people are now working as slaves for banks, making life pointless. This is why people are angry.
Many people, perhaps, but not all. Many, maybe most, of my friends and family are nothing like slaves for banks, and aren't carrying anything like a burdensome load of debt.
Perhaps the OP's statement could be modified to "Many people are angry because they care about owning land but are unable to do so without becoming slaves to banks".
Your restatement makes more sense, but speaks to a specific subset of the general population.
Yes.
> most, of my friends and family are nothing like slaves for bank
Anecdote.
That is a very bold statement, with no data, that I can disprove by a simple counterfactual: me. I often feel more alienated because of the internet, mainly because I find it easier to replace "real" human interactions with, well, things like this, typing into a screen.
Of course, I have no idea if I'm representative of a significant sub-population of the US, but stating your opinion as a "very obvious", and somehow implying it is based in fact, is a logical fallacy.
You can replace US with Western Society, because everything you described I can find analogs too in the UK/Europe. Fear of immigrants - check, fear of crime from immigrants - check, oligarch funded politics - check (Brexit). Maybeeee, there is a touch of truth to the family part with the US's high incarceration rate for African-Americans that could impact families in ways that Europe doesn't have; but wage stagnation also means young adults aren't leaving the home as early as previously so there's that. I just don't think what you laid out is unique to the US.
Black americans are a minority though. So if they are, say 20% (which I don't think they are even that), what explains the alienation in the other 80%?
What a racist and poisonous stance. This seems to indicate a preference that the US should just be a homogenous White Anglo Saxon Protestant society, along with "good family values" such as sexism and keeping women "in the kitchen".
No thanks.
Are you sure about that? Australia has similar issues.
At the end nothing of that has to do about the possibility of having a welfare state. The decision is just political.
We're seeing niche groups and products being killed off because they're not in the average of that area.
The US is alienated from widespread fear of crime, immigration (aka the actual sociological results of Robert Putnam, rather than the yammerings of some Buzzfeed wanker), poisonous oligarch funded divisive politics, and the general disintegration of anything resembling a family life or social fabric in US society. There are various obvious ways of decreasing social alienation in US society; the problem with that is, most people aren't going to like it. The opposite of alienation and social atomization is basically conformity and homogeneity, and that's bad for business; and especially bad for the oligarch types who engender this kind of alienation.
Fiddling with the internet in a futile attempt to decrease social alienation is like buying a tank top to increase your physical fitness.