people acting like they got no mamas
I think the whole world's addicted to the drama
only attracted to things that'll bring you trauma
- the black eyed peas, 2003
that was 2003. before the advent of social media. 23 years later, we can see the rest of the song playing out, and worse.
what went wrong? what happened, really? it's the enshittification of the world. first, we let tech companies grow unchecked. then they went public at insane valuations just because of hype. they expanded to curating the information we see, and advertising being their hidden side business. they switched from benign policies to actively farming ragebait. smart people realized this could be used to influence public opinion, as opposed to selling stuff. it was first small targeted campaigns, but in an increasingly connected society, they realized the power of these platforms was far greater than anything else before it. powerful enough to push national elections one way or the other... and obviously this benefits extreme views! a sane nuanced view is hard to farm engagement with. to make things worse, AI suddenly started producing results after. decades of trying... made it easier to fake content. it got so good that people cannot tell fiction from reality. and of course, the countries that have not fallen prey to these tools, tendencies and struggles still are dealing with one of the structural problems of democracy - slowness to react to change and old laws working against their ability to deal with new threats.
this, ladies and gentlemen, is my summary of "what's wrong with the world mama"
unfortunately for us, just love isn't going to fix it.