Your P2K Articles (2021-10-01)
Kindle Highlights
Instead, the social media prism presents the most miserable members of every identity group as exemplars of that group.
It’d be nice even if someone built a crawler-indexer that you could use to search for everything including things that weren’t popular or judged by algorithms to be ‘relevant.’
It’s almost impossible now to find a blog that’s not on a focused theme because that’s what search engines focus on and how websites profit. But you want the opposite, a blog that never tried to focus or even thought about it. There used to seem to be endless search
The democratization of online communication has demonstrated the hypocrisy of this view. There was always a moral imperative to be more caring and inclusive; it is now a political necessity. We all hate Facebook, and Facebook (the corporation) is, admittedly, terrible. But to a large extent, we hate Facebook because Facebook is other people.
Electoral democracy requires active participation, however, and this limits the kind of people whose views are represented even in a world of universal suffrage. This electoral democracy still excludes the poorest and least capable in our society, who cannot keep up to date with politics and make it to the polling station to actually cast a ballot.
Adjusting for wealth, the United States at present is particularly brutal. Government programs are stingy. Social and familial groups have been eroded by capitalism’s demands and the horrors of mass incarceration. Veterans are numerous and suffer terribly. Mental healthcare is inaccessible. Recreational drugs are cheap, ubiquitous and powerful. Wage growth is non-existent. And that was before the pandemic.
First of all you should be coming up with at least five possible business ideas every day. This part should be basically effortless. People trying to sell this part are scamming you. If you are going to be a successful entrepreneur at all you should innately be looking around you at your life and the lives of others, thinking what are their problems. What are their desires. What do they spend money on. Which of those things are broken or could be done massively better or cheaper or faster.
Millions of Americans are miserable. The internet has “gotten worse” because Americans are not ok. Near-universal internet access means that there are immiserated, lonely people spending many hours a day online. The breakdown in the social fabric, climbing “prime-age” unemployment and high rates of addiction and mental illness manifest themselves in our mutually-constructed online spaces. There is a misery that wants to make itself known–to inflict itself on the world–that social media enables. We are reaping what we’ve sown; the interconnectedness enabled by the internet and the gains from open communication/cooperation cannot succeed while so many are left behind.