[ArekDymalski]

>Stacked on top of each other across roughly a hundred days, these events are something a historian of computing security writing in 2050 will probably file as a turning point, regardless of what else happens between now and then.

And yet, the public conversation around them has been quiet to the point of being strange.

There's a lot current events that once would have been considered historical: trip around the Moon, war out of nowhere, unprecedented explosion of kleptocracy l, enormously scandals and so long. Noone of these are moving much of the needle among general public.

Why? I think such indifference or rather apathy/torpor is a result of people becoming tired of constant stream of crises (either imaginary or real) that we're being flooded by. The capacity to react with something more than a shrug is finite. And I think we are being drained.

[titzer]

The idiocy out of the Whitehouse is an intentional strategy to flood the zone with crap that sucks all the air out of the room. They have intentionally broken the ability of the public to become informed through a number of means: attention atrophy, lowest-common-denominator mudslinging, and massive, manufactured, stupid global crises. People have become deaf and desensitized.

The fact that humanity sent people back to the moon barely even registered. Crazy times.

[CoastalCoder]

> The fact that humanity sent people back to the moon barely even registered.

Are you sure that people would have cared much even in better times?

Although I'm just as subject to the fatigue as everyone else, this just isn't a pursuit that I see as important.

TBH I think dealing with global warming, cancer, homelessness, AI impact on human cognitive development, and the loneliness epidemic are far higher priorities.

[nemomarx]

If I recall correctly opinion polling on the original Apollo program wasn't universally positive either. Space missions don't impress people who want money spent on the ground, it etc

[fhdkweig]

The famous spoken word poem Whitey on the Moon was on exactly this topic.

"Accompanied by conga drums, Scott-Heron's narrative tells of medical debt, high taxes and poverty experienced at the time of the Apollo Moon landings. The poem critiques the resources spent on the space program while Black Americans were experiencing social and economic disparities at home."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon

[RGamma]

"Amusing ourselves to death" was eerily prescient. Now that the amusement stopped, what might happen next? Not the metaverse, that's for sure.

[lamasery]

I think nobody cares about the moon thing because 1) they aren't landing, and (this one's more for people who are paying some attention to this stuff to begin with) 2) it's basically the same mission they already ran on auto-pilot, but with people on board, so... I dunno, hard to get excited about some very-expensive passengers on an automated ride.

I mean, part of why they cut the Apollo program short was because nobody cared back then either, after the first ~2 landings, so they muddled on a while longer but support simply vanished in a hurry. It'd be surprising if people started caring more now. I suppose if we land people on the moon it'll be a bit more of an event than this one (the landing, not the launch) but I'd expect interest to plummet again after that. Hopefully they have better-selected video feeds for the landing than they did for this launch, I had my kids watch it and it was bad enough I think I'll have trouble getting them to sit down for another NASA launch stream.

[fhdkweig]

I'm interested in it as a means to an end. Supposedly this is to get ready for a lunar base. I would love to see that in my lifetime. Also, while it is not a mission objective, I want to see a space elevator which currently we can only do on the moon. Due to the lower gravity and slower spin, it is possible to make a space elevator out of Kevlar rope, which we can reliably make in bulk.

[phil21]

> Why? I think such indifference or rather apathy/torpor is a result of people becoming tired of constant stream of crises (either imaginary or real) that we're being flooded by. The capacity to react with something more than a shrug is finite. And I think we are being drained.

I think it's more that the impact of all these constant string of "crises" ends up having very little impact on the average American's lifestyle. Groceries a bit more expensive, gas higher, rent continues to creep up. Some giant incomprehensible national debt number gets higher. Those all suck and people complain about them - but they are complaining about them in packed bars while they drink $7 beers and eat $30 burgers and fries.

You can only yell so many times that the world is ending before people tune it out since their day to day lives are largely unchanged. Just look at the focus on complaining about almost irrelevant things like the price of eggs or whatever totally irrelevant culture war topic of the day. It's societal bike shedding.

I am firmly of the belief (and have been for quite some time) that the "average" middle class American is going to need severe pain - as in widespread great depression level pain - before anything really changes at all at the ground level. Americans have simply become so used to living the lifestyle being part of an insulated hegemonic superpower empire that they have taken that for granted as how things generally will always be no matter what happens. There is zero consideration for the amount of sheer effort, will, and constant vigilance it took to build and maintain such a state of being.

Or put another way: Inertia is a hell of a drug.

[tokioyoyo]

Because it doesn't really matter and has no legs? Over the past 15 years, we had a lot of data exfiltrations, lots of breaches, hacks, and etc. Nothing really happened, world moved on, people figured out a way to live around it. People who work at those companies get affected, but in general, unless the entirety of banking system collapses because of the hacks... nobody will really care. Even during the hay days of Equifax hack people were chatting how things will "happen this time". Nothing did.

[mwigdahl]

Agreed, call it future shock or the Singularity or just overall outrage fatigue, people just aren't reacting to these kinds of things at a level commensurate with their risk or danger.

[SoftTalker]

> people becoming tired of constant stream of crises

They aren't tired, they're distracted. X/TikTok/et. al. are all fire and motion mechanisms.

[jmcqk6]

Yeah, it's not indifference or apathy. It is overwhelm. There are too many things that need attention and not enough attention.

[atkrista]

One word, Hypernormalization.

[yoyohello13]

I know for my part I am so tired of the constant crises. At this point I just want the inevitable collapse to hurry up and happen already so we can just focus on picking up the pieces and move the fuck on.

[energy123]

The precipitous drop in fertility even in low income countries. The rise in populism and fear.

It's the phones, humans are being DDoSd. We need government intervention against many aspects of modern technology.

The profit motive works when it comes to reducing manufacturing costs and passing some of that on to consumers through the beauty of competition. It doesn't work so great when it's X training a transformer model to maximize the amount of time you spend doom scrolling so they can feed you gambling advertisements.

[lotsofpulp]

Total fertility rates dropped long before smartphones.

[scottyah]

Well society had to go and get rid of religion, so people needed another opiate.

[rootusrootus]

Considering how attached to his phone my hyper religious evangelical father-in-law is ... I don't buy it. If there is a causal relationship between those things, it goes the other way.