1579 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury 4 Jan \ on: The Loss of Shared Facts culture
This topic (erosion of consensus reality) is one of the most interesting things happening in the world right now, with implications that are hard to imagine.
I wonder if it will have weird parallels to antiquity, where propagation time (e.g., physical travel) was so slow that cultures were incredibly distinct and varied; except instead of long propagation times, now you have instant propagation, but people are inhabiting entirely different mental spaces due to tribalism, affiliation, etc.
people are inhabiting entirely different mental spaces due to tribalism, affiliation, etc.
At least in areas they perceive as being important. In art, which could be defined as novelty seeking, consensus seems like it has never been stronger.
Without audio it's hard to tell a modern foreign movie from a modern domestic one. Movies coming out of the far east are occasionally an exception (e.g. the chinese favoring intricacy and low contrast or bollywood's dancing), but fashion has mostly lost its borders.
It makes me wonder if consensus reality has always been broken and its just failing to collapse into sameness as fast as everything else.
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I like that nuance -- some things have collapsed into a singularity, some things have fragmented into shards. Which is which, and what forces determine that? Of course it was kind of sloppy of me to talk about reality fragmenting; it's easy to make grand pontifications and lose the important details.
The New Atlantis had a series on the death of facts -- I read the first article which I thought was really good but have not yet got around to reading the others. Makes me want to revisit it.
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Just thought of this paper I was reading this weekend about whether or not there was a global super-bourgeoisie -- didn't make the connection at first, but I think this is related to TFA and to this discussion.
(Short answer: yes, there is a global super-bourgeoisie.)
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That's a great point and I hadn't thought about it as a counter to the trend of global homogenization that people have been complaining about for decades.
Hopefully, it's possible for such distinct cultures to peacefully coexist when they're geographically proximate, because I think we'll be continuing without consensus for a while.
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Yeah, riffing on @k00b's point, I guess the devil must be in the details. I don't feel adequate to the task of opining, but there's a few contradictory ideas in the mix: we've all probably seen regions of the world where it's a complete enjambment of cultures, where people with seemingly nothing whatever in common from a {race, culture, economic} perspective sweat together on subways and in tuk-tuks, and it's generally fine.
And these other distinctions where you can't have a civil conversation with your neighbor who, from an outside vantage, would appear indistinguishable from you. So when can you co-exist peacefully and when not? How much of reality do we have to agree on, and could we curate that process?
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