Am I "old man screaming at clouds"?
Kids have always been disrespectful. Neighbors have always been assholes. Politicians have always lied. There's nothing new, and we keep having the same conversations, solving the same problems, over and over and over and over ...
But sometimes things actually change. Real time communication - starting with the telegraph, through the phone, radio, TV, the internet - has changed culture. We probably still have some ideas based in older societies that don't exist any more, which means those ideas don't work.
When we lived in small groups you couldn't just lie all the time. People would stop trusting you, stop helping you, and you'd have to leave the group. Trust mattered. But then population expanded enough that you could travel from group to group. Snake oil salesmen didn't care about staying in the group, so they would keep running the same scam then moving on. They didn't rely on trust, but on projecting confidence.
Then with better communication, your reputation could follow you. Burn your bridges too badly in one town, you could be burned before you show up in the next. Or that's what we thought. Does the new town really care what you did in the last one? Turns out they don't. We've reached a point where being known is more important than being trusted. Confidence is more important than knowledge. There's a reason "con man" is shortened from "confidence man".
With instant global communication, information overload, and algorithmic amplification of attention, are we really experiencing something new? Or am I just the latest guy to think my own time has unique problems never seen before?
But sometimes things actually change. Real time communication - starting with the telegraph, through the phone, radio, TV, the internet - has changed culture. We probably still have some ideas based in older societies that don't exist any more, which means those ideas don't work.
When we lived in small groups you couldn't just lie all the time. People would stop trusting you, stop helping you, and you'd have to leave the group. Trust mattered. But then population expanded enough that you could travel from group to group. Snake oil salesmen didn't care about staying in the group, so they would keep running the same scam then moving on. They didn't rely on trust, but on projecting confidence.
Then with better communication, your reputation could follow you. Burn your bridges too badly in one town, you could be burned before you show up in the next. Or that's what we thought. Does the new town really care what you did in the last one? Turns out they don't. We've reached a point where being known is more important than being trusted. Confidence is more important than knowledge. There's a reason "con man" is shortened from "confidence man".
With instant global communication, information overload, and algorithmic amplification of attention, are we really experiencing something new? Or am I just the latest guy to think my own time has unique problems never seen before?
