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The silver lining of this cloud is that it acts as a selection force on institutions, too: If people are harder to pacify, institutions have to step up their game and deliver, or failing that, market themselves better. And that parallels a broad trend that's been in place since antiquity: building sustainable institutions instead of succumbing to warlords and despots. Legal codes, religious orders, and so forth have built up a vast underlying structure to face the ordinary challenges of humanity at its worst. There's nothing to suggest that that trend ends because we have some new gadgets. But it takes place as a reaction, a series of rapid cultural changes. I would say that we had such a shift take place post-2008: besides the economy, the smartphone era took off and everyone since then has contended with a new status quo of limited privacy, temporary status, broad-not-deep social networks, and a constant background noise of gossip and scandal. Have we gotten better at navigating this world since 2008? Absolutely, I would say. In the first four-to-five years we had a whole bunch of theories about a massively connected world get tested in reality, culminating in stories such as Anonymous, Wikileaks, Arab Spring, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and Gamergate. The years since then have seen various reactions to those stories play out as one major figure after another gets embroiled in scandal. Even if this is fostered by state actors, the overall effect is one of "boiling down" institutions to their basic premise, where they are easier to challenge, as the arrangements that locked them in before get severed. And I think the public recognizes that to some degree - the low empathy comes in combination with a renewed interest in a private approach to philosophy, rather than a collective one - a sense that existing institutions fundamentally don't have the right answers and something has to be done. We're merely acting in accordance with the times. |