No Stupid Questions

It's not really so much the rapidness of the changes, but what is rapidly changing that worries me.

If we were rapidly moving towards progress, I'd be fine. But we are rapidly going fucking backwards here in the states.

I’m absolutely shocked at how racist the future got.

Idk if anything technological change has massively stagnated because exploitation of workers is far cheaper than reducing costs through innovation.

Disposable culture: He predicted throwaway products, and now we have single-use plastics, fast fashion, and gadgets that feel obsolete within a year.

Tech burnout: Toffler said technology would become outdated faster and faster. Today, if you don’t upgrade your phone or update your software, you feel left behind.

Compare the leap between iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4 and iPhone X to whatever the newest one is.

My phone is a Pixel 4a and the only noticeable difference between it and the latest pixel is that this one has a headphone jack and the others don't and they look like shit and have a worse selfie cam lol.

There used to be a time where upgrading your GPU every year would get you better bang for your buck long-term because improvements were so rapid. Now your 1070Ti can still run most games fairly well and with something like a 3090 you can last another 5 years easily, while the PS5 is barely any different to the PS4.

• Information overload: This term literally came from Future Shock, and if you've ever felt exhausted just from scrolling through your feeds or reading the news, you know exactly what he meant.

I don't get this one at all. I don't feel exhausted whatsoever, information is actually stimulating. Of course if you only scroll the news you'll feel depressed because we live in a dystopia, but that's not information overload, it's just sad. On the other hand if simply reading anything makes you overwhelmed that just seems like a lack of reading stamina so you can just not do that, or develop that stamina.

Transient relationships: He warned about shallow, fleeting social connections — something social media, dating apps, and global mobility have absolutely amplified.

I don't think this is a bad thing.

Rent instead of own: Services like Airbnb and Uber fit his prediction that we’d move away from owning things and toward renting everything.

Job instability: He nailed the rise of the gig economy, freelancing, and how fast-changing industries make it hard to stay trained up and secure.

This is all basic capitalism and it's consequences.

EDIT: not sure what I said that was so controversial as to being deserving of downvotes.

I always feel like these posts are written by ChatGPT when I see multiple — in the text.

I think some people are, but not everyone. But the people most prone to that future shock are the older, wealthier generations, and they're using their wealth and positions of power to take out their confusion and fear on everyone else that still sees that the world has room for improvement.

Nah bro, we're suffering from Late Stage Capitalism and Christo-facism.

This isn't a bug this is a feature of the US. It's always been intended to be this way. The mid 20th century was the outlier.

Here's the Futureshock documentary I was show in high-school around 1982 for anyone interested https://youtu.be/fkUwXenBokU

If you leave your phone at home for one day, take a walk, get some coffee, meet a friend - but don't use your phone, schedule in advance and tell them you'll be phone-less, etc. You'll find yourself feeling way less overwhelmed by a lot of these things. Phones keep us constantly aware of the changes around us. They make it seem like the world is whirring around much faster than it is. Basically, I guess, I'm suggesting "touch grass". But I do think phones, in particular, are the worst for making us crash out like this.

Future Shock is pretty spot on with it's predictions. Reading it convinced me to try and take things slower, and to spend less time on the phone, on the internet, which helped. Then covid came along, and pushed me right back into information overload...

Interesting points, maybe a book I'll have to give a read to. I've long thought that information overload on its own leads to a kind of subjective compression and that we're seeing the consequences of this, plus late stage capitalism.

Basically, if we only know about 100 people and 10 events and 20 things, we have much more capacity to form nuanced opinions, like a vector with lots of values. We don't just have an opinion about the person, our opinion toward them is the sum of opinions about what we know about them and how those relate to us.

Without enough information, you think in very concrete ways. You don't build up much nuance, and you have clear, at least self-evident logic for your opinions that you can point at.

Hit a sweet spot, and you can form nuanced opinions based on varied experiences.

Hit too much, and now you have to compress the nuances to make room for more coarse comparisons. Now you aren't looking at the many nuances and merits, you're abstracting things. Necessary simulacrum.

I've wondered if this is where we've seen so much social regression, or at least being public about it. There are so many things to care about, to know, to attend to, that the only way to approach it is to apply a compression, and everyone's worldview is their compression algorithm. What features does a person classify on?

I feel like we just aren't equipped to handle the global information age yet, and we need specific ways of being to handle it. It really is a brand new thing for our species.

Do we need to see enough of the world to learn the nuances, then transition to tighter community focus? Do we need strong family ties early with lower outside influence, then melting pot? Are there times in our development when social bubbling is more ideal or more harmful than otherwise? I'm really curious.

Anecdotally, I feel like I benefitted a lot from tight-knit, largely anonymous online communities growing up. Learning from groups of people from all over the world of different ages and beliefs, engaging in shared hobbies and learning about different ways of life, but eventually the neurons aren't as flexible for breadth and depth becomes the drive.