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by jenniferhooley
1 day ago
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"I thought we were beyond this by 2026." Have you been asleep for the last 4–8 years? We aren't even 'beyond this' compared to where we were 15 years ago. In case you haven't noticed, the US has been going backward for years: Americans fundamentally don't give a shit about anything except maximizing GDP, regardless of cost - and in fact, some sectors thrive on that externalized 'cost.' I've noticed your sentiment a few times on HN lately and I'm befuddled every time, like what in your life makes you think we are beyond this kind of thing? |
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I've been thinking about this question for a couple of days.
I think that, for the purposes of your analysis - that "the US has been going backward for years", it's important to make two observations:
a) This sentiment is precisely what has fueled Trumpism in the first place. If we just change which things we long for in the good old days, but keep the same timeline pessimism about what we've lost and why, it seems to me that we're likely to cycle around the fear/greed/predation we see, objection to which enjoys consensus (albeit with tribal labels perhaps). I don't have a strong sense of whether the US has been going backward, because I'm not sure it's possible for it to have (or to have had) a particular discrete direction in the first place. I don't long for what we've lost.
b) Let's look at POTUS approval. Of the single simple (perhaps oversimple, I don't know) metrics we might use to assess the narrative that "Americans fundamentally don't give a shit", it's a pretty good one. At some future point, the US government will wash away into history as they all eventually do, and the POTUS approval rating will be (and likely will already have been approximately) zero. The historic lows we're seeing in this area now are, to me, cause for enormous optimism. We have more and more inroads toward consensus regarding the illegitimacy of this institution. We are finding ourselves in agreement that the power vested in this office is invested poorly.
None of this is to deny that I'm nonplussed about the status quo. The murder of over a hundred children with a single tomahawk missile is probably the most horrific of any crime committed by an American in my lifetime, and it's not at all obvious how even to stand in the service of justice in its regard.
But what I do see, and what I do observe that everyone around me seems to see, is that we are accelerating toward novelty, leaving the lifeboats that brought us from the great ships of the industry and agriculture to these shores, and figuring out who we are.
In the past six months or so, I have begun to feel, for the first time since our fiddler Kuba Hejhal - one of the best on earth IMO, and I know some HNers had the privilege to see him on stage and perhaps have their lives changed in some small way for it - left this world by his own hand, that I can write and play optimistically about the evolution I see.
So I can't say that I have a single answer that can satisfy your critique, let alone convert your position to mine, but I thank you for noticing my sentiment, and I hope that we are all open to our minds changing as the records and shows and codebases flow.