For most young people, there is no future and they are hopeless, at least here in the US. Their choices are the military, a lifetime of debt, or working multiple jobs at 100+ hours a week to pay for a life that is so price-gouged our grandparents wouldn’t recognize it. Most will never own a home or be able to afford a family, and the older generations consider them a failure for circumstances over which they had no control.
The second reason is that social media algorithms have proven to be both addictive and exceedingly good at modifying the way people think, and people that are always angry and utterly convinced that everything they think is correct will keep their eyeballs glued to ads.
Excellent points. Are there any mechanisms that could reasonably push back that do not involve starvation and violence? I genuinely hope there are and that we find and use them.
Are there any mechanisms that could reasonably push back that do not involve starvation and violence?
If we could get the vast majority of Americans to participate in an economic or general strike, that might. Truly, I wish we could get every American to opt out of Black Friday this year and just buy nothing, because that would turn the heads of people in power and demonstrate our collective power in a positive way.
But I’m not naive enough to think anything short of unimaginable calamity will change the trajectory we’re on. I’m actually keeping a portion of my portfolio in liquid cash on the possibility that the AI bubble bursting causes a dot-com-adjacent drop in the markets.
Two reasons:
For most young people, there is no future and they are hopeless, at least here in the US. Their choices are the military, a lifetime of debt, or working multiple jobs at 100+ hours a week to pay for a life that is so price-gouged our grandparents wouldn’t recognize it. Most will never own a home or be able to afford a family, and the older generations consider them a failure for circumstances over which they had no control.
The second reason is that social media algorithms have proven to be both addictive and exceedingly good at modifying the way people think, and people that are always angry and utterly convinced that everything they think is correct will keep their eyeballs glued to ads.
Excellent points. Are there any mechanisms that could reasonably push back that do not involve starvation and violence? I genuinely hope there are and that we find and use them.
If we could get the vast majority of Americans to participate in an economic or general strike, that might. Truly, I wish we could get every American to opt out of Black Friday this year and just buy nothing, because that would turn the heads of people in power and demonstrate our collective power in a positive way.
But I’m not naive enough to think anything short of unimaginable calamity will change the trajectory we’re on. I’m actually keeping a portion of my portfolio in liquid cash on the possibility that the AI bubble bursting causes a dot-com-adjacent drop in the markets.