When did everything become so stupid?
Recently I was wondering when it happened, perhaps with the idea that it might help identify the cause. I think I found the answer.
It would be easy to set this date at 2016, but I think it would also be wrong; just think about all that happened before.
Of course, stupidity is nothing new, idiotic politicians are nothing new and mass hysteria and conspiracy theories have always been part of history.
But something changed for the worse in the last one or two decades and it all began in 1995 imho.
It was the year of the OJ trial, when news turned into a weird soap opera for the first time and a strange chain of cause and effect gave us the Kardashians.
Around the same time non-linear video editing became available, which initially made reality tv cheap to produce and finally made it possible for everybody to make video clips.
The drudgereport was also launched in 1995, paving the way for breitbart and infowars.
But most importantly, it was the year of win95, which finally made the internet available to everybody with a pc (*).
The avalanche of stupidity that we experience now was an inevitable consequence of that year ...
(*) The Eternal September began already in 1993 and I admit that there is some uncertainty in the exact timing of the onset of the stupidity avalanche.
added later: One other data point to consider is the reversal of the Flynn effect: It suggests that IQ declined for post-1975 cohorts; this decline would have begun to show up in adults around 1995.
8 comments:
In Italy it was one year before, in 1994 with Berlusconi prime minister. Since then, dark ages.
Polo del Buon Governo 8-)
Feynman died 1988 , the last scientist with the balls to call bullshit.
Maybe stupidity just became more widely available?
"Someday, a great gathering of the unintelligent will take place, and by their sheer numbers and the intensity of their resentment they - we - will sweep away (all) institutions ..."
These prophetic words from the book "Dumb Money" are coming true now and the "great gathering of the unintelligent" is nothing but the internet itself ...
>> a great gathering of the unintelligent
I'm not so sure about that Wolfgang. Whatever human nature is, I'm pretty sure that intelligence provides zero protection against it. It seems to me that quite intelligent, and possibly well meaning people, often contribute significantly to what I perceive as the idiocy. Possibly some of the people in the Bush administration who advocated torture as a justifiable interrogation technique and took the US to war in Iraq fit in that category.
Anyway, if you want to get away from the idiocy of the internet for a while, I read a book that I enjoyed called, "She Has Her Mother's Laugh" by Carl Zimmer. It's kind of a compendium of all that we know about all forms of heredity. I'll warn you that it definitely for the general reader and does not go deeply into any particular aspect of heredity, but I learned a lot. Recommending a book is always a crap shoot, but maybe you would enjoy it too.
I also hope that you keep this tiny island of sanity on the internet alive. I've enjoyed it for a long time. Happy New Year Wolfgang!
>> island of sanity
Perhaps it really is just misplaced nostalgia for a weird remnant of what was formerly known as blogosphere ?
>> Perhaps it really is just misplaced nostalgia
Maybe. But I often find myself thinking the same thoughts over and over as if in a loop. Your New Year post could be interpreted in that way. Anyway, reading the thoughts of people I consider idiots just reinforces that loop. Reading thoughts that are sometimes different from mine but from people that I respect can sometimes interfere with that loop and take it in a new direction and that makes me feel like I've learned something. So I want you to continue to occasionally write your thoughts in this blog for purely selfish reasons.
Post a Comment