I find increasing evidence that we're heading the same way as migration is used in a way that creates an underclass and the previously homogenous high trust society dismantles ever so slowly as resource constraints (graying of the population) puts pressure.
Neither the US nor European countries have been "homogenous" for centuries.
> migration is used in a way that creates an underclass
The underclass always existed, especially in the US.
Have you, by any chance, fallen for the "great replacement" BS that is constantly being peddled by the far-right and Russia? Because your entire argument reads just like it.
>Neither the US nor European countries have been "homogenous" for centuries.
Europe has been rather damn homogenous.
The attempts to reframe that by putting a magnifying glass on the exceptions just end up standing out and sometimes being weird.
It's also only ever people from more diverse cities who seem to think differently.
Here in Belgium a rather damn urbanised country now i can get you a municipal census list from 300 years ago that just happens to feature almost all the same family names that i went to school with. This same census yields very different results if you go more west. One kid on that school was and looked african among hundreds. It is not the same today.
At the next school i went to there were only 2 Russian kids and my generation already saw manifold more of this long distance migration than there once was.
On the other hand in the bigger cities such as the capital there was more diversity but even there in living memory different parts still had different dialects tied into socioeconomics. Today it speaks mostly a different language, has different ethnic zones and belgians make up 20% or less of the population. Turns out this changes how people see it's funding.
yes there's exceptions in the balkans and among other ethnic borders but many people today wouldn't even call that diverse.
Disregarding exceptions the average working class people were not quite as mobile. 32andme and the like would have been out of business from the start if that weren't the case. My grandmother cried when she took 2 busses for her first job. It was such a shocking distance to her and everyone she knew down her family line had been farmers in that area. She can also still describe ever old person in the wider area if not trough name then trough very extended family ties. We didn't have the language unifying drive of france and the netherlands so their dialects are all very very local.
The US has always been much more diverse and the people more mobile from my understanding but it's not like it did not have major demographic shifts either in places like new york.
>The underclass always existed, especially in the US.
There was an underclass but when there's no sectarianism and everyone essentially self identifies as the same "tribe" i dare say it's easier to tackle. From easier unionisation to no influx of distinct people without little generational wealth earning less on average and doing less attractive jobs by design. The US and anglo world in general actually do better on this front. Trough distance and other factors they attract wealthier, more educated and less religious migrants who more easily assimilate in a larger cultural sphere and in the case of the US can't really lean on a social safety net. Comparatively here there's muti generational issues.
>Have you, by any chance, fallen for the "great replacement" BS that is constantly being peddled by the far-right and Russia? Because your entire argument reads just like it.
What? I can see, have a memory and there's plenty of demographic data?
Hell the original comment that got my one line response is particularly contrasting:
Most of our new cars are SUV's and crossovers now.
There's now a more easily visible demographic difference in who uses which mode of transportation.
(we have a company car system so incentivise car use for the upper middle class too whilst the poor can get cheaper or free public transport)
It should be no suprise then that public transport is very gradually getting less coverage as it's being defunded whilst there's an entire growing issue with violence towards personel.
Whilst gated communities are indeed not a thing i'd dispute that we don't have an equivalent among the richest.
Go to Knokke or the south of Brussels,etc
>When you personalize by algorithm, it's an implicit fine-grained choice by the individual
I'd argue it's not so much a choice by the individual in that the individual often isn't consciously aware and may actually choose to use the same thing without the algorithm that pushes them towards things such as bubbles if that were even a clearly presented option.
It never gets to that in countries already deeply aligned.
They all agree on this because it will be a hidden sticking point for some others,
If that's not an impediment some lobyists will make it so.
If that doesn't work us ambassadors, state departments and/or USTR will pressure or even put you on a trade watchlist.
If that doesn't work some 3 letter agency folks will land on a domestic airfield and have some talks.
If that doesn't work some media might peculiarly shift it's tone.
etc
Like how you never stab your enemies because you'd go to jail, even though it never gets to jail because you don't stab your enemies because you'd go to jail
Indeed tho we of course also have rare examples of what happens when someone does stab someone which keeps the memory fresh and spain did get the state department and USTR pressure in the past, sweden nearly ended up on the 301 Watchlist. The cia did both use foreign/multinational media for it's goals and defended it's interests, etc
This is like saying short form content scrolling apps are adictive but it's just the same as TV back in the day.
Yeah there were studies on TV addiction. Yeah it was a discussed topic. No they're not equally addictive. It's not even close.
Having lived through it, participated in it, and being able to personally contrast people then and now. It's not particularly different, outside of the fact that in the past you had 0.1% of people (if that) using these services, whereas now you have the majority of humanity doing so, so all that's really changed is scale.
Beyond that I think there's also a first principles approach one can take. Not only were these services addictive, but so was Facebook (and other similar services) long before 'the algorithm' was a thing. The core interaction is interpersonal, and people simply want to see what other people are saying. We could define that as FOMO, entertainment, or whatever else - but I think this is the shared common core.
Even on this site, there are many people who are clearly addicted - myself probably amongst them. Yet there's not even a notification of when something you've written has been responded to, let alone some guiding algorithm. Even having to jump through hurdles to achieve interpersonal dialogue, it is still quite addictive.
>Having lived through it, participated in it, and being able to personally contrast people then and now. It's not particularly different, outside of the fact that in the past you had 0.1% of people (if that) using these services, whereas now you have the majority of humanity doing so, so all that's really changed is scale.
Having lived trough all the same i'd say the exact opposite and i'd even add that phones add a constant presence element that is a differernt factor but still i'd say theres a very noticable difference.
And if we look past our own experiences the reason why is fairly straightforward.
The whole point of the algorithm is to make it more addictive.
All those companies would not spend their time and effort on it otherwise if it did not help on this front.
And the fact that they spent quite a lot of research on it and make it quite intricate with lots of computation involved and the fact that it is quoted plenty as the reason for new players such as tiktok coming to prominence should tell you it's a quite impactfull one.
Again as mentioned above I'd strongly recommend using an LLM to search for some info from this era. These systems were all considered extremely addictive.
As for the algorithm - in modern times all these companies driven by advertising. The algorithm works as a means to enable more effective advertising, and especially native advertising. It also likely helps build more effective profiles on people which can then be further monetized with advertising. I'm certain it increases addiction, but that's like saying that the special jingles and bells and whistles on a slot machine increase addiction. You're just adding to an already highly addictive baseline.
I also don't think TikTok really 'won' because of their algorithm. Facebook is now for parents and grandparents, while younger people moved onto other services to find their own place. I think the same sort of view of a service being dated became true of YouTube, even moreso as it moved more from YouTube to CorpoTube. Most, if not all, alternatives tried to be YouTube but with less content and worse CDNs. TikTok actually tried to put the 'You' back in 'YouTube' and caught on exactly like YouTube did back in the day. Go figure.
>Again as mentioned above I'd strongly recommend using an LLM to search for some info from this era. These systems were all considered extremely addictive.
Which is so relative it's meaningless. Cigarettes are also extremely addictive but i'm not about to compare it to TV
>I'm certain it increases addiction
Then what's the discussion about? Companies incentivised and given the technological means to create a more addictive product create a more addictive product. Don't tell me it's by hapenstance or that it's just an insconsequential increase on an addictive baseline when the difference is so easily noticed and the things only wielding the addictive baseline are comparatively abandoned if not for societal innertia.
>I also don't think TikTok really 'won' because of their algorithm. Facebook is now for parents and grandparents,
There I think it's actually both. It's both the new things away from the old and the algorithm was actually good whilst youtube's was garbage in comparison. There were other contenders and ones that died (vine) so i think their execution was also part of it.
For all the outrage about slop, dances and dangerous and short form addictive content if the tiktok algorithm detected you liked ....let's say science and gardening videos in medium to long form it would give you exactly that and would only deviate enough (unless you searched on went on your own tangent) to see if your prefrences deviated but in a way that wouldnt be bothersome. In the meantime youtube was putting the same recommended unappealing vids among others in the sidebar for more than a year straight. It had all the annoying incentives that led to clickbait titles, thumbnails, intros, fillers.
I deleted tiktok because i have an addictive personality and it was too good at giving me both that dopamine fix and what i actually wanted in the moment.
Oh and as a 3rd factor it had less and less intrusive ads.
The issue I'm trying to point out is that attacking the algorithm isn't attacking the problem. It's like attacking, per your example, flavorings in cigarettes. Those certainly make them more addictive and more appealing to a certain demographic, but even without those flavorings they're harmfully addictive.
And I think without understanding the core problem, solutions are going to fail. If I were a self centered oligarch in charge of one of those companies, I would certainly ensure there was astroturfing focused on the algorithm, as the tides of society turn more towards regulating these businesses, because you can drag that issue out forever, make a surprised face when nothing meaningfully changes, and continue to play this game for decades.
And yeah I agree TikTok did some other things right as well, but I don't necessarily think it was the short-form stuff. It was the fact that 'you' - a regular nobody, could put out a video and have a reasonable chance of it reaching a massive number of people, very much like in the early days of YouTube. YouTube created a system where the big get bigger which inevitably leads to stagnation. TikTok created a more 'decentralized' system, for lack of a better term.
>The idea that you could have brewers trying to pay for everything in beer doesn't resemble anything that did or could have happened.
Why not? Tho i suggest only within small communities which made up a larger share of human life at some point and trade beyond them over larger distances would more often be facilitated by certain nonperishable and not too bulky comodities. We have plenty of evidence for such bartering trade even when currency was already more common. (salt for pelts, etc)
Typically that was not the case as far as I'm aware. It's why the black plague gave them so much leverage. They could go to a different lord.
But often the land belonged to the lords or at least they could take it within their region at their pleasing. There were not that much "neutral locations".
That wilderness was common land or hunting grounds belonging to someone.
I think we're both somewhat right, somewhat wrong. _Some_ peasants -- serfs -- were considered property of their lords, or well, of the land that the lord oversaw. If they ran away, they were rounded up and brought back, usually with a beating or worse. But there were also free peasants that rented said land. I didn't really mention them, because they deliberately chose to rent said land - they _could_ have tried their luck anywhere, but they _decided_ to try their luck on this lord's lands, and so, I thought, weren't really relevant to the conversation.
But it's not exactly irrelevant, either, right? It does add to the confusion to leave it out, so, my bad.
As far as the black plague, what gave even serfs so much leverage was the fact that there were so few people in all categories around anymore. Fewer peasants to work the land, so the prices of the free peasants went up commensurately. But even serfs who wants to run far away and set themselves up as free peasants elsewhere could frequently get away with it because a) fewer men on horseback to spare to chase them down, and b) the other lord they went and rented land from didn't have enough peasants to work his land either, and had a real vested interest in making sure they weren't caught and brought back to their original lord.
>A lack of originality can make things boring. Don't let your personal choices get in the way of objectively analyzing things.
It can but originality is not the end of aesthetics.
What's more the modernist architecture is globalised so the "unique" building's style gets recreated and seen in every single corner of the world where they all try to be avant garde in the exact same ways.
There's no vernacular architecture elements anymore which give a sense of place. Not even much of ones that make sense due to origin in environmental factors such as rain/snow in the nordics or heat in gulfstates.
>You can't honestly say the modern building I linked above lacks originality. How many other buildings have anodized scales on the outside which change colors based on the lighting?
I'll plainly say it. It lacks originality. I'd rather it have a painting on it than a trying to be the equivalent of a shiny TCG card the novelty of which will wear of very quick.
I find increasing evidence that we're heading the same way as migration is used in a way that creates an underclass and the previously homogenous high trust society dismantles ever so slowly as resource constraints (graying of the population) puts pressure.
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