Gregory's Serveri think the privatization and financialization of everyday services and goods has done more than anything in culture to make society decohere. interacting with the world on basically any level now largely consists of attempting to outwit giant systems designed to exploit you. from the perspective of an individual, there is virtually no consistent expectation of any duty of care, moral responsibility, or trust evident in daily life, so there's little to suggest you value those qualities either
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   @janvenetor @jk my husband will not read Kafka because dealing with the British benefits, social care and NHS bureaucracies is like living in a Kafka story already  @RachamimOnWheels @janvenetor @jk there's a bunch of tv shows and books I just can't read any more too. Dirty Politics, about the NZ 'national party'. West Wing and Veep. Big Money Crime. I still force myself to read Arendt - The Origins of Totalitarianism & On Revolution. Even if I'm sometimes viewing the pages through tears.  @jk Yes, and most of all when those doing the scamming are clearly higher on the social status scale. Getting scammed or robbed by a loser sucks, but getting taken by a megacorp, by a rich guy, or by the state itself is multiple times more scarring @jk Whenever people bring up "broken windows" or its more reputable offspring, I just think about cars. All these Porsche Cayennes and giant Escalades zooming around, cutting me off, killing my friends, often as not with concealed license plates and a high-status, perfectly coiffed person behind the wheel. "Jokerize" is a joke word but it's a real thing  @stevenbodzin @jk As I drove my 12yo to school this morning, we encountered a road-raging driver in an Escalade. Half again the size of my vehicle. With behaviors aimed at me and my car, the man behind the wheel yelled, honked, flipped me off, ran up hard on my bumper, tried to push me out of my lane with his massive vehicle, got in front of me and braked hard, and just otherwise bullied me for more than 2 miles. 1/2 @stevenbodzin @jk All because minutes before, I'd signalled my intentions & changed lanes into a lane with a gap of 4 or 5 car lengths behind me. Bad luck for me, I was going the speed limit and Escalade cockwomble was going about 10mph above, and the lane I entered apparently belonged to him. After harassing me for 2 miles, he finally gunned his engine & zoomed ahead to run up on several other cars & get pushy with their lanes too. I called the police and gave them his license plate. 2/2  @courtcan that´s so terrifying and unpleasant. It´s good you kept your head and that you felt comfortable calling the cops. Around here I would assume it was a cop. Good luck. @Uair @courtcan This is an interesting perspective to consider. All limitation of anti-social behavior is supposed to fall to the state now but the state does jackshit about any of it below or above a given threshold. Like you said, ways people used to discourage certain types of antisocial behavior weren't always good, but letting it go unchecked is likely worse in some ways, especially when it comes to shit like straight-up nazis feeling comfortable as hell in public now. I was on a highway here recently where a guy was being dangerously aggressive. I pulled over to call the police and let him go ahead - but you have to be careful stopping when you are dealing with someone like that. Anyway, just as I was about to turn off the highway about 20 minutes later, I saw the police had him pulled over. Call them in. Get a dash cam. They endanger everyone on the road. Let their insurance companies deal with them. @jk I spent a summer working for a public library, where I rode around on a cargo bike full of books and set the bike up at spots around the community. It was pretty wild how many folks were just relieved and suddenly thrilled by the fact that they could just chat with a stranger who genuinely cared about them and had no ulterior motives to sell, scam, or pitch anything.  @kellenjmalek @jk Wild. I thought about doing this just for fun as a way to get rid of my extra books. I guess I should take this as a sign to do it haha  @jk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FM7XeaSO0M has a line it that goes just, "A fake card in a fake bank machine" and that line just evokes so strongly all of what you just said. @jk yes! it should be pointed out that regulation of business practices can do much to mitigate this problem and because of that it is worse in some countries than in others (as a european, trying to book an airbnb or going to a grocery store in the US is a soul crushing experience). but you are right in principle and perhaps we should go beyond just regulation... guaranteed sick leave and similar things can truly transform how people think and what they expect from businesses and each other. Stockholm syndrome when corporations (executives and investors) hold us hostage. Our only hope is strong government and regulation, but the boss tells us not to trust government, they take our money. Whereas the boss gives us money, so clearly has our interests at heart. Money corrupts everything, because it is the perfect reputation laundry. We talk about “dirty money”, but there is no such thing as clean money. It all has blood and drugs on it.  @jk we all believed politicians were corrupt when they were still honest. the new ones just play for us the role we already expected to see, so they seem like *honest* crooks. @jk are cracked windowpanes such a concern? I have a few. I was going to get around to replacing them some year. @jk there's a requisite acceptance of futility piece here, too, and the 'I'll just not think about this' required to live with it. Adhesion contracts attached to everything electronic that we use for daily life. There are definitely analogues to an abusive relationship or a panopticon-style imprisonment environment, as far as lack of meaningful consent and constant surveillance go    @nasser @jk I think it's even weirder than this—I have a theory that (in the US at least) appearing to be a charlatan now actually makes a person seem *more trustworthy*, since it's a strong cultural indicator of that person's opposition to the values of the political left (sort of a "schismogenesis" situation a la Dawn of Everything). being on the take is a marker of social status for this group and people see being grifted as prosocial behavior (hence the popularity of MLMs in red states) @jk the youngs are not depressed because they have smartphones, they are bereft because they have never known anything but this.   @jk Well put. I would only tack on: ...and at some point you just don't. @jk Not to mention the additional gaslighting and move to redirect onus on top of everything else. So many sensible-looking areas and spaces of discourse, but it is common that you bringing up concerns (centered around these exploitative systems and scams) gets seen by others as either a) Spreading/sowing FUD  @jk there was a whole four season TV show in the US and the finale was basically what you said writ large @jk @federicomena With big bureaucratic (government) monoliths, people can feel crushed by an unfeeling machine with no alternatives available. With privatization, there was an optimism that multiple vendors would compete against each other to the benefit of their customers, but it’s too easy for would-be competitors to effectively collude against their customers who now have less representation than they did with the monolith!  @jk I find this with pretty much all interactions now. Not just "the system", but just every day interactions. A lot of it caused by the fact that "the system" is non-functional and nobody has any more fucks to give. In that movie about Milgram he dies while waiting for his wife to fill out the paper work to get him into the computer, and he cites the reason he'll get no help because it was one of the outcomes of his studies: computer says.  @jk Shifting this paradigm back towards humanity seems necessary before we all give up. @jk  @jk  @jk I think I see the point you're making - the systems we interact with are complex and often misaligned with our goals. We also have more options than before these systems existed, don't we? I mean, it's nice that I have the option to request a ride at any moment, even if surge pricing exists and the platform exploits drivers. It's not like traditional cabs had my best interest in mind, right?  @williamgunn @jk But it seems like those options can now only come within that system of repression Imagine an open-source Uber/Lyft where drivers get paid fairly. It seems impossible @jk I agree, but literature also tells us this is far from new. Fiction like "Grapes of Wrath" comes to mind. Theorists, like Marx or, hell, even Smith (who hated landlords, lol), discuss and warn about many of our problems. Any history about life prior to regulation, particularly on food and medicine, speaks volumes. It seems to me actually rarer when we avoid chaotic, predatory systems. Time and again, antisocial sorts rise to power and destroy society and the relationships within it. @neonharbinger @jk The difference today, in as much as there is one, is that more and more spaces and types of interactions that weren't expected to be sites of extraction now are.  @jk Horrors aside, it does mark as an interesting social experiment. The data is interesting at least. I think there are brains that can cope with these situations, exercising care; being morally responsible; and finding people to trust in the face of all this. But clearly most struggle if this isn't relatively easy to start with. But the decoherence, to me, is an independent variable. It was going to happen whether neoliberalism was implemented or not.   @jk there is a ideological component, even in Argentina where there are *comparatively* stronger public institutions the right always speaks of some scam the public sector is always perpetuating  |
i think getting deceived and scammed constantly, all the time, by everyone, at every level, has somewhat more of an effect on a person's moral expectations than witnessing a cracked windowpane in their neighborhood