Ask Lemmy

Some things are slightly shittier, some things are way shittier, and a lot of things are a lot better. What do you mean specifically?

Politics and the Supreme Court have gotten a lot shittier since 2016 (like a steep decline, rather than the slight decline before).

The wealth gap has been getting shittier since the 70s. Wages haven’t kept up with productivity, while living expenses have only increased.

The housing market is shitty if you’re young or don’t have generational wealth.

Technology and medicine have gotten way better over the last ~100 years.

General consumer safety has gotten way better since the 50s.

Literacy levels and the rate of high school graduation have gotten way better.

Climate change is killing the planet. Deregulation is making climate change worse. Green energy isn’t coming fast enough.

Capitalism and specifically the notion that corporations have a duty to the shareholders has made companies and products shittier, but TVs are really cheap, and computers are really fast.

Robotics has gotten incredibly advanced, as has AI. Whether that’s shitty is pretty much up to opinion. I’d say it’s neutral, and depends on how they’re used.

Speaking of which, war was already horrifying, and now robots have made it vastly more horrifying. I don’t see any way that’s going to stop.

Food has become either really nutrient dense and amazing or really calorie dense and horrible, depending on how much money you have.

Speaking of money, there are a handful of people who have like half of the money. Maybe the guillotine went out of style too soon.

Video games and movies basically just look indistinguishable from reality now. And deep fakes are about to make it a lot easier to create that kind of realism.

For the most part, high speed internet access has slowly been getting better and better, both in speed and availability. Surprisingly, it’s stayed about the same percentage of the median income while doing so.

Streaming services have gotten so shitty it’s unbelievable that they’re still in business. But piracy has been making a comeback, and self hosting pirated content has gotten a lot easier. Physical media is also making a comeback.

Bigotry has gotten worse as a problem, but not worse in terms of percentage of people who are discriminatory. It’s just that the extreme bigots have basically taken over one of the political parties. (I mean, it basically was the party of bigotry before, but they had the decency to be subtle about it.) The younger generation can hopefully fix that problem as they enter voting age.

That’s all I can think of for now.

Yes

By almost every measure, the world is better than it has ever been. Violence, poverty, starvation are all at or near record lows worldwide. Average lifespans are way up. We are just way, way more aware of what is going on in the world, and bad news drives more clicks than good news.

There are some cracks, no doubt. For example climate change is showing its ugly head, inequality is rising in the US and some other developed countries, and lifespans are taking a slight dip in parts of the US. But, compared to almost anywhere at any time during history, this is a golden age.

In terms of crime and violence, the world has never been safer than now. For anyone not a white dude, overall economic and legal situation has never been better than now, though we are in the "one step back" part of two steps forward, one step back.

Environmentally a mixed bag, to some extent pollution is less but it's spread out more, and the accrual of all the old pollution, it's cumulative and having more of an impact on our weather and climate, overall I think that's worse, but people want to compare it to some past that didn't exist - it was bad before too.

And yes we are WAY more aware of the shittiness now.

If I can use a floor cleaning metaphor:

The floor was pretty filthy in the 20th century, but a lot of it was swept under the rug so it looked pretty clean at casual glance.

Thusfar in the 21st century, we threw out the rug and bought a smaller one, did a modest job at cleaning up some of the dirt under it, and there's a small number of people who deliberately shit on the rug because being decent human beings isn't a thing they can do.

And I think that brings us to 2024.

How do you define "things"?

On a global scale and on average, life for humans is getting significantly better than, say, a century ago. The number of people dying from preventable diseases, war, natural disasters has been steadily going down for a while now.

Of course there are many more people on earth than there were 100 years ago, so accumulatively there is a lot more suffering now.

Also, the lives of individual people, the state of certain countries and areas are certainly getting worse.

As for non-human animals... For most of them the world is getting increasingly less habitable and for those who are raised in an industrial setting for human consumption, living conditions are largely atrocious.

I think your question is too broad for a single answer. But you might be interested in this now 17 year old (!) TED talk by the late Hans Rosling, which at least partially answers your question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

Both, probably.

The internet has given a lot of people a platform, and created accessibility for an endless audience that is always hunting for new drama. A lot of people seem to thrive on vicarious conflict, and of course so do the platforms that sell engagement. There's no need to wait for the nightly news broadcast anymore, you can get your fix 24/7 on Facebook, Xitter, YouTube... or right here on Lemmy.

At the same time, information technology has enabled businesses to operate, scale up, and pivot to new markets like nothing in the past... so the exploitation can happen faster than ever before. It's also enabling services of all kinds to reach the people that need them faster and more accurately. The technology isn't inherently good or bad, it just accelerates everything.

Some things are getting worse, and you're more likely to hear about that on the internet then you are to hear about things that are getting better.

People today tend to fixate on the things that are out of their control. Perhaps it’s because we have lost our coping mechanisms. Perhaps it’s because they never learned any. We live in the most technologically advanced point in time we have ever known. Few of us need to go out and till the earth to grow our own food. The majority of us don’t have to physically work as hard as previous generations. Adults and our children find their enjoyment and existential dread by watching tiny screens filled with useless entertainment. Maybe things are fine. We just make shitty choices about what to do with our time, and what we give our attention to.

In a goal of progress, it’s best not to compare.

We could argue the world of today is better and in some ways it’s worse.

We don’t burn lead in gas anymore though perhaps in future there will be a better way to provide energy to transportation.

Minority rights are a lot further in many ways than they were before. tomorrow we will be much further than we are today.

The type of slavery we had before was far worse. We could still do better though.

People with 4th stage cancer actually have a chance now where they didn’t before. Hopefully tomorrow there will be a true cure.

Computers have made many jobs easier. Though they do have known flaws that it seems only computer scientists know about. General public still over fantasize computers are capable producing real life level intelligence today. One day someone will fix all those computational faults and then yea, computers will be super powerful but possibly even more scarier. Hopefully after that someone does reign it in…hopefully.

Internet made WFH a possibility which has lead to less impact on our environment with travelling. But it also made a direct gateway for scammers and pedos to be a lot more effective and dangerous. Perhaps in the future there will be a better way to prevent such activity.

On a political level I’d say we are way more polarized compared to what we used to be. This comes down to us though. Not just whoever is president. We are many someones who make up this world and have just as much to answer for acting like monsters while a monster rules a country.

there is always room for improvement.

Why not both?

I think a lot of people grew up with the internet, and don't realise just how new it is to have bad news shoved down your throat day after day just to generate clicks

That just.... wasn't a thing before

So I'd say, more aware, plus greedy cunts want to make you aware more often

Here's a brief snapshot of US history between 1962-1974, when my parents were school age.

• Soviet submarine B-59 comes terrifyingly close to starting a nuclear war with the United States (1962). This event was unknown at the time but the threat of nuclear war was very real.
• The Vietnam War begins (1962).
• President John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas(1963).
• Alabama governor George Wallace makes the now famous declaration in his innaugeral address, "...segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever." (1963).
• The Harlem [race] riot marks the first of numerous violent race riots across the country (1964).
• Malcolm X is assassinated in New York City (1965).
• Martin Luther King is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee (1968).
• Bobby Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles, California after winning the California democratic presidential primary (1968).
• 4 College students are killed and 9 more wounded after being fired upon by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University.
• Richard Nixon becomes the first and only US President to resign after the Watergate scandal (1974).

And those are just some of the major highlights. Things have been plenty shitty in the past.

Things are shittier right now than they were 10-20 years ago, but they're a lot better than they were 50+ years ago.

We’re more aware of it. We constantly drink from a firehouse of outrage and anxiety. Yea technology

Both.

The top 0.01% are able to exert more and more influence over the world, and are using it to concentrate wealth even more into their own pockets.

And regular people have access to smartphones that allow them to communicate worldwide instantly. The cost of more basic smartphones has plummeted, so more people have more cameras connected straight to social media.

But it's also that some things are genuinely worse. I am fairly sure that there are still more slaves alive today than at any other point in history. However as a percentage I believe it's lower, it's just due to the world population being so high.

People tend to be more educated and more empathetic. Violent crime is significantly down to the lowest levels ever, especially compared to the 70s.

What sucks is that some people are becoming irrelevant: old age, certain political beliefs, certain religious beliefs, etc. They are burning down the house on the way out. Also the house of cards that is the economy that was always going to collapse one day is now collapsing.

Socially we’re better off. Economically we’re worse off. I suspect that we go back to a mainly urban and more sustainable form of living like prior to the baby boom.

Awareness. Things used to be much worse. Lack of medical knowledge, sanitation, food safety, early warning of natural disasters, and rights.

Yes.

I grew up in a realm where there was no internet, or cell phones. I don't use social media at all and continue to try very hard to tell the people that I care about that it's bad for you. It's like trying to convince a smoker to stop smoking (I am an ex-smoker of 30 years). I decry the need for always on always connected, right here, right now, listen to me. We're not evolved for that. We're apes, very complex, occasionally fun apes. We need that social and interpersonal and personal interaction.

As we stray further from the way our ancestors lived, we stray further from who we are as a species. There is a great argument to be made for cooperation but it takes a lot of strenuous effort to happen over distance and time that we struggle with.

I have lost my train of thought and with great trepidation at your misinterpretation, I bid you adieu good reader.

Both. I asked my father this in 2008. He said he thought things were worse than ever. I asked if maybe it'd always been this bad but technology made us more aware of how terrible things are. He was taken aback by that thought experiment.

Some years later, it's absolutely worse. Trump (in USA) showed that no one has to play by any rules to remain successful / powerful. Now repubs are mask-off terrible. But I'd also argue that their party had sanity in the past. Nixon gave us the EPA. That'd never happen now. From Reagan on they've been shit. Clinton was also shit. Obama didn't care, but he was eloquent. Dems sabotaged Bernie in 2020. There's no hope. Sorry, I didn't mean to be a downer.

And ads everywhere! It wasn't like this before. It's measurably worse even if it was already terrible.

You wrote this on what even to recent ancestors of yours would be classified as Clarke Tech, AKA "Indistinguishable From Magic"

We have some new problems, some old problems, some problems that are getting better and some that are getting worse, that's just how history works most of the time.

The significant change vs 20 or 30 years ago is the increased attention focus on those bad things because literally every form of media has at least some form of perverse incentive to fixate on those bad things "if it bleeds it leads", an idea so old it's how the western world knows about Vlad the Impaler some also ran count of part of Romania that spent more time as a hostage than he did as a ruler, but who ruled with a hand so bloody that it inspired the creation of one of the three quintessential gothic horrors of English literature.

(Sorry, I still don't know how to do a Lemmy link.)

https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/112308356048172080

From Aral Balkin: “I don’t understand why everything is so fucked up and we seem incapable of fixing any of it!” This is because you believe you live in a democracy when you actually live under capitalism. (And it is functioning exactly as designed.) PS. Not your fault; you’ve been taught your whole life that the two are complementary when they’re diametrically-opposed. #capitalism #versus #democracy

My vote is more awareness. Things are definitely not good still you have no idea what we are missing, like a fish in a tank trying to picture the ocean.

That said things were fucking awful back in the day. Don't worry, this entire way of life is a giant bubble and we will regress to the old norm

It's definitely the latter, I'm afraid.

I'm old enough to remember the days when people actually believed we'd all be zipping around in our personal flying cars - do you have any idea how abysmally ignorant you have be to be to actually buy into that?

I have to be honest, as soon as 2013 arrived, I entered my phase of nonstop complaining. I'm still in it to this day.

I complain about literally everything. Which is what leads me to believe that things are getting shittier. And also the fact that actual things that happened in 2013 also led to this such as... ugh, iOS 7, Creative Cloud, I could go on, but I'd be here all day.

Tl;dr: who knows?

This is an interesting question. I’m sure someone will say yes and use data. My thoughts are I don’t know and we can’t truly know.

If we’re more aware of the shittiness, then how can we be sure it wasn’t just as shitty before or less shitty than now? Data relies on documentation and documentation has been, and continues to be, reported sporadically or things are unsolved and thus omitted.

It's both. Capitalism runs a boom/bust cycle over each century. The "Great Depression" was about 100 years ago, following which the advent of union reforms and bunch of other things you should read about yourself cuz I forget fixed working conditions for actual people, and then the capitalists spent the next hundred years eroding those rights, basically (heavily oversimplified). the previous century was the same thing. It's a shitty system and if it's really the best we can do (hint: it's not) then we don't deserve the mantle we've placed on ourselves that declares us an intelligent species.

I'd say shittier. When I was little, politicians were bad but were at least relatively sane. Now it's just one big game of Moby Dick.