[ricardobayes]

What good is something that only looks good from afar? Most new tech is exactly that, for posturing to gain shareholder value - very few innovation in actually useful things that make peoples lives better. It's all self-serving, to consume more and get people hooked on digital experiences.

[solumunus]

I’m not arguing that social media is a net benefit to society, but you’re acting like it’s all downsides. It’s been an extreme economic enabler for a lot of people. There are many people earning money independently who would have really struggled to put themselves in a position to do that 20 years ago. For independent businesses or artists it’s an invaluable promotional platform.

[ricardobayes]

You know I really don't know about that. Generally speaking people had more dispensable income after WW2 in the west than right now. People had a job lined up if they wanted to work, work was abundant. Back then any kind of job would pay well and most households had one earner. Being able to earn money through the internet today doesn't really replicate what these people had back then.

If you wanted to start a band you had multiple ways to promote them: I would argue some of the best known bands came from the pre-internet era (Beatles, Rolling Stones etc). In fact social media made it so you need a prohibitively high marketing budget to cut through the noise.

[solumunus]

But that economic situation is not contingent on the Internet, it’s unrelated.

> I would argue some of the best known bands came from the pre-internet era (Beatles, Rolling Stones etc).

Of course, that’s what you would expect. Pre Internet music was more curated, there were less bands finding ears but the bands that were popular were therefore much more popular. The internet gives the music consumer WAY more options. The biggest bands are less big and less successful, but on the other end of that is it’s WAY more possible to have a music career as a niche artist today. A huge percentage of the music I listen to is music that would have been completely inaccessible to me pre-internet.

[benj111]

Define "good from afar". We romanticise the notion of the wild west, while ignoring the poverty death and disease. Would you rather live in the wild west or today, where the issue is AI which at this point is more a #SVproblem than even a #firstworldproblem.

[ricardobayes]

That's a very interesting point. I'd think the "happyness/contentness" levels are not necessarily tied to life expectancy or poverty.

I would argue despite some global tendencies being way up (like people out of poverty) we are at a local minima right now for happiness for the middle class. It is entirely possible middle-class people had it better in the late 50s/60s despite multiple statistics being much better today (e.g. crime).

In a way it is also entirely possible, that a medieval peasant was happier than an overstimulated, modern human being, despite having a "worse" life.

[benj111]

Tbf I think my view is it's about improvement over your own life. We expect our children will do better than us and that our lot will improve etc.

That sets expectations. We are at a high base, but things aren't getting better thus we can't look back at our own life and see that we have been successful.

I suppose the question is, where are we in the life cycle? In the industrial revolution life was pretty crumby for a lot of the working class. Do we have to wait for society and laws to catch up so we get to that 1950s/60s heyday of life for the working class. Or is this a plateau and the disruption will makes things worse before they get better? Or is the west going to stagnate while china or whoever takes over?

[ricardobayes]

Yes, very true, and I can already thank you for the thought-provoking discussion. I think we are the first generation who don't necessarily expect that children will do better than us, in fact, in many ways we know that they won't: climate change etc.

The current gen alpha is also the first generation since measurements began, who are doing worse at school, measurably, than the previous generation. All research points to the inclusion of digital learning devices in school as the cause of that.