>everyone keeps shitting themselves over baseline gender politics
>nobody aware enough of autonomic intelligence feedback loops controlling the market, and the market moving to a content marketing method, which means the market is mainly selling narratives, which means autonomic intelligence feedback loops are selling narratives, which means literal fucking abstract mathematic algorithms are in charge of the proliferation of culture since religion is fading out and there's no longer a common cultural narrative, so fanatics turn to neo corporate idolatry, and the marketers don't realize they're playing with fire and sooner than later a crowd of disgruntled fanatics are going to come close to, if not outright kill someone like the frenchies back in 08
Things are so much worse than you could possibly imagine.
Okay so back in the day, some computer nerds made machines that would take in a bunch of outside data, process it, and try to predict the future. To fund it, they predominantly sold the information to people who wanted to buy and sell stocks. Enough people started doing this that they started making the machines send out stock reports themselves, which other machines took in as data to further sell, buy, and report on stock themselves.
This eventually created a massive feedback loop of stock data being managed by autonomic intelligence (not the same as artificial intelligence) that outright blocked the human element, and right now the open secret is that the market is out of human control. If anyone tried to remove these data loops, even one out of sync chain link could cause the world economy to collapse over night.
You following me so far?
So basically, in tandem with this technology, the internet happened and a load of marketers started moving to "content marketing", which is the idea that the product and the marketing are the same thing and that you're selling a lifestyle story, which is why if you pay attention, most companies that used to just sell a product have made massive investments into media space. This is fine in and of itself, the 80's had a similar version of this. The problem is that easy proliferation of consumer data reaches autonomic intelligences, and they begin to report on what kind of narratives sell vs what ones dont. Simple, right? Well, not really. Y'see, we live in a post hypernormalisation world, a soviet term for a propaganda that keeps things are something when the reality is different. When you mix in marketing and propaganda with feedback loops, and add on top of that google's ad program that essentially bubbles people into feedback loops, and only give them what they want to hear so you can sell them something, it basically creates mass psychological dissonance between different groups of people that, consciously or not, have their life's context formed around media narratives. It's one reason why the social justice stuff is hitting so hard now despite the fact that america is an otherwise pretty prosperous country with no major problems causing anyone to starve.
Anyway, the implication is that you basically have cultural narrative context being created by literal abstract machinations who may or may not be intelligent. That's no good, cause there is no moral parameter to stop the data from trying to get everyone to kill eachother. See, people keep thinking the robot revolution's gonna be like terminator, but it's gonna be more like the shining.
So people have their lives contextualized by inhuman machinations, which, okay, its pretty bleak but not outright destructive, right? just a bunch of consumers being taken for a ride, right? Well no. Y'see, the consequence of religion more or less falling out of style in the public consciousness is that there's no longer a single cultural narrative. So you just dont get to see tim at sunday school, so what? Well the larger point of contention is that there's always been a considerable percentage of any population that gives way to fanatic behavior, which in antiquity usually meant religious fanaticism. But if the narrative of religion is weakened, and the only alternatives to narrative are autonomically generated content marketing narratives too shallow to really make a lifestyle out of, you run into a phenomenon where a percentage of the population essentially migrated between brands in a pseudo idolatrous methodology. When you really come down to it, a fanbase is literally just the same thing as a cult, they both act as a community that bring people together to discuss a specific narrative. Except the religious ones actually at least try to offer the illusion of being beneficial to society at large, while the autonomic models are there purely for profit and offer hedonic sensory overload to compensate for any shallowness.
Did you ever stop to think about how we live in a world where a bunch of people do crazy shit over cartoons, harass people, send death threads, sell cars for sauce, etc? Do you really think that's just normal behavior? No! those sort of people would've been in a fucking monastery a couple hundred years ago, they're fanatics, pure and simple. Nothing wrong with being a fanatic if its constructive, but these narratives dont have that interest in mind.
So, to put it bluntly, we quite literally live in a society where abstract mathematical formulas are in charge of a market that pretty much doesn't sell products anymore and is more focused on selling narrative scams based around the perimeters from these formulas, and a bunch of wackos who in another lifetime would've been witch burners who have nothing too spiritually satisfy their intrinsic obsessive tendencies are replacing a common cultural narrative with many different smaller ones in different tribes, which is how you end up with nazis and commies in a prosperous capitalist country thinking the end of the world is next week, literally creating their own problems.
One could argue that we have too much freedom of choice when it comes to information about narratives, and its actively harming this society. The russians use avant garde techniques in their propaganda to give their population so much bizarre data to sift through they just conform with no real goal in mind, the chinese just censor and have less overall data fed to their population. But americans simultaneously have too much data, and too little diversity in the data, making it easy for context to corral them into a specific mindset. And all it takes is a pair of eyes to see that the current mindset for american populations is apathetic vs messiah complex murderousness
The silver lining is I think that these marketers dont know they're playing with fire. I don't think its entirely out of the question that some day soon a crowd of angry people will actually lynch content creators for not towing their own narrative complex, and very soon they may begin to live in fear. People think this sexual harassment stuff is a big happening, but I think its only going to be a drop in a larger bucket that'll be the 2020s.
If not apocalyptic, they'll be interesting times.
Fuck off. Any era when the majority can read and write is far from the worst.
You got social mobility, literary, access to heating and plumbing, all of the knowledge you could every want, and the ability to broadcast every thought you've ever had whenever you want and have it be seen by anyone
The existence of a highly influential group of elites is a given for any society, and this one is actually way less powerful than most of them are, since they aren't able to keep knowledge from people via language.
You should be happy you aren't a serf literal slave, you unappreciative shit
The lack of cultural unity is a result of overpopulation, not a lack of religion. Rome switched religion half way through and they were perfectly fine until they got too big and collapsed under their own weight
Human beings are adapted to live in tribes, not societies. We're apes, not termites. Once you have too many people in a group, the group becomes unstable and falls apart
That's why Japan has such good cultural unity even though the culture discourages western-style organized religion. The nation's so small and isolated that there's not enough people for any sort of cultural split to occur
>You got social mobility
Hardly. The law may not impose barriers to it, but social mobility is largely an illusion hanging over from the 1950s-70s. At least if you were a feudal serf nobody blamed you for being a serf. Under our benevolent meritocrats, it's now a personal failing to be poor and unpopular. This is despite the fact every economics textbook under the sun will admit that there is a level of unemployment that is intentionally maintained to control prices without resorting to more restrictive methods.
>MGS2 postm-
Why english thinkers see Postmodernism as an evil thing?
>The majority can read
The majority are functionally illiterate when if they're capable of reading the McDonald's drive through menu.