[jdw64]

When society is affluent enough, people say it will become corrupt and fall apart. But when society has truly deteriorated, stories of heroes come to mind. If you look back at the era when cyberpunk social critiques emerged, the world that led that movement was wealthy, with a thick middle class. But when society starts to become poorer, those kinds of stories become stressful for the public. When you have room to breathe, such macro-level critiques serve as a 'healthy amount of stress' for survival. But when survival itself is at stake, it becomes much harder to be tolerant of criticism.

That's why the countries where cyberpunk flourished were wealthy ones

[api]

I’ve toyed around with this hypothesis about dark music and edgy culture.

The roaring 90s were full of this: dark music exploring critical themes or things like depression and addiction, lots of social criticism, and edgy offensive humor. The mid to late 90s were an economic boom time for a broader segment of people and were optimistic in a way that’s hard to explain today.

I like to put it this way: it’s not that things were all better in the 90s. They weren’t. But people thought they were getting better.

Now people don’t want those things. They want light entertainment, either no criticism (the right) or only approved types via approved critical theories (the left), and offensive edgy stuff is out and may get you cancelled (which side cancels you depends on the content).

[jdw64]

It seems like we think alike. I feel like the dark and critical themes of the 90s were ahead of their time back then. A lot of what they predicted actually turned out to be accurate. The cultural media of the 90s said things like 'this is what will happen if wealth becomes concentrated or corporations take over'—and it's actually playing out in a similar way.

But as our society has become more stratified by wealth and the vast majority have become poorer, people no longer have the mental space to think deeply. They've come to love clear, simple answers. I interpret this as the world becoming too excessive. Because there's so much information that it's hard to even find meaningful content. Critical interpretation has also become difficult. Just look at AI. It's different today and different tomorrow, and for freelancers like me, it's like we have to deliver immediately.

There's material poverty, but I think mental poverty is more due to the pervasive FOMO, the fear of falling behind in the flood of information

As you said, it's 'only approved types via approved critical theories.' As people lose their margin for error, they also lose the capacity to consider others' perspectives.

I think you explained it better than I did.

[butlike]

You're right. I just got a 3 day ban on reddit for a dark (not explicitly dark) joke. People don't want to look at shadows nowadays.