China’s Youth Are Quitting the Rat Race to ‘Let It Rot’
wsj.com
Young people in China are becoming more rebellious, questioning their nation’s traditional expectations of career and family
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Young people in China are becoming more rebellious, questioning their nation’s traditional expectations of career and family
I'm waiting for Gen Z to realize that they've grown up interconnected and have the ability to coordinate like no one ever could before and when they realize that I expect them to flip the monopoly board.
This is exactly why the billionaires are dismantling the current social media platforms. Organizing is the only threat they truly fear.
As phrased in a recent anti-union campaign by Amazon: Watch out, your co-workers might be "vulnerable to organizing".
Can you expand on how billionaires are dismantling social media?
did you miss what happened to twitter?
No. I don't see how it was "dismantled." Can you explain?
Rate limiting and heavily pushed “premium” options have made Twitter near useless for large scale organizing.
600 posts a day makes it nearly useless for organizing?
Have you attempted to use the platform since the rate limiting? It’s approximately 2-3 searches before you’re rate limited out of the app for 24+ hours.
You’re also unable to view comments unless you’re logged in, so you’re required to give them semi-accurate information for an account too.
It’s literally useless for organizing unless you pay for it, which defeats the entire purpose of wide spread reach like it used to have.
Okay so twitter is useless. What about all of the other social media sites out there?
None ever had the organizational reach Twitter did. FB/Instagram require more personal data and are much worse for discoverability. Mastodon and BlueSky have the issue of nobody using them (in the grand scheme of things). Lemmy and Reddit don’t work well because of reach and censorship respectively.
There still isn’t something out there that replaces the use cases of Twitter.
You're kind of defeating the point here by talking about all of these other social media sites that are available, none of which you claim has been dismantled. . .and even rejecting some of them as not being good only because enough people aren't using them. This is not a dismantling of the system.
Twitter is literally being dismantled. It’s a shell of what it previously was, and does not work for organizing protests and other counter-culture due to the billionaires buying and taking it apart piece by piece.
The whole point of Twitter was reach. None of the other platforms have the same reach.
Also the other platforms are doing their best to follow twitters lead. So yes, it’s being dismantled.
Its capitalist owners rendered it useless for political organization.
This is just repeating the claim. Can you explain how so?
It is wasteful by way of being botted up to the point of inefficiency for individual political communication and its owners are happy to take payments from abusive operators responsible for the bots, if not doing the botting themselves. That's just Twitter. Other platforms experience similar crapitalist growing pains albeit not all exactly in the same way. For profit motivated entities, there's always a diminishing ROI on politically actionable systems.
Twitter was a bot fest long before Musk took it over. And that isn't a problem with billionaires, but an inherent problem with system itself that can be, and is, exploited by plenty of people.
I am of Gen Z. The opposite is true, I would think. Or, rather, the truth is more complicated in both directions. It's not true to say we've "grown up interconnected", by the 2010's, most of the mainstream culture was basically gone. You had maybe the marvel movies, but, you know, social media, the internet, kind of revealed a self-evident truth. That there wasn't a grand a unifying "american culture". At the very least, such a thing had been waning for a long time, but the counter-cultural movements of the 90's could still be considered a unifying culture of gen X, and elder millennials. Lots of people watched MTV. The closest thing zoomers have is stuff like mr beast, or kai cenat, which we might all be tangentially aware of, but we've all become atomized, there's a limited number of zoomers who watch that and that's not "the culture". There is less genuine engagement with a "the culture", and more awareness of a variety of subcultures, of a broadness.
You know, along those lines, there's also a lack of ability to coordinate. We can "coordinate", yes, you can use social media to DM and communicate with other people, but you're doing so at great risk. Basically every social media site now, of the major ones, is a fed honeypot, and you can be banned at any time for any truly revolutionary action or coordination. Your coordination is also easily trackable and visible and thus easily co-opted, corporatized, destroyed. I would've thought that tech literacy would've gone up with Gen-Z, you know, kind of along the same lines as a fish swims in water, but, you know, owing to that same metaphor, what the fuck is water, david foster wallace style. I don't know shit about that guy other than that single joke. The kids have no tech literacy, because everything has been crafted to be easily accessible, and simplified, by the companies that now control the internet.
I think the only shot really is if the tech oligopoly is broken up, and not just in terms of regulation, like what the FTC does, but it has to be bred out. The environment and technology must change in such a way as to no longer allow those sorts of fiefdoms. Tech adoption must happen that eliminates that. Which it kind of can't, because the technology is still subject to all the material conditions and market forces, but then we're kind of encountering a chicken and egg problem. Fediverse is pretty good as a solution but we've seen limited buy-in, partially as a result of the conceit of the thing, and I think, you know, if we don't learn any lessons from the classic internet (we won't), we could just see some fediverse instance, a singular instance, get uber-popular, and then just kind of separate from all the others after they've grown to encompass the whole thing. Migrate away, bam, new monopoly, just as happened in days past.
In any case, the environment must change, tech literacy, media literacy, all the literacies must rise, and then I think we would be primed to flip the chess board. I would say that Gen Alpha might be the ones primed for it, but I think, you know. They're all like, the true Ipad kids, that are condemned to watch youtube kids content, which is the most reprehensible shit imaginable, with the worst of millenial parenting that I've seen. Maybe number blocks and alpha-blocks and bluey will save everyone, but I kind of doubt it somehow, the millenials seem a little bit too fucked up to break the cycle and I kind of don't really want to see what happens when a bunch of Gen Z parents who watch mr beast and can breathe in the polluted water start having kids. You know, I think the reaction is going to be much the same generation to generation, in terms of people who uncritically propagate the same shit, people who are nihilistic and angry at everything and take it out on their kids, and people who do their best to give the best to their kids and end up sheltering their kids in the process. I dunno. I kind of hope I'm wrong.
Also climate change is happening at a really good clip so that's maybe a bigger priority, cause unless that gets stopped, then this is all a moot point.
I think we just keep normalizing it and you wittpe down the population to those to unaware to notice it's shit but simply continue cause it's the animal drive and those who are psychopathic self driving who don't care if it gets worse cause they expect to get their own at any cost. And the world will spin on and get worse and worse without end until it does.
I would expect nothing of the sort. They're already been misdirected into the blanket "boomers bad" mentality, that all the old people living in poverty are somehow to blame for all their ills.
The ruling class will continue to rule, because they know exactly how to manipulate the plebs.
Of course it's the super rich, but who is voting for policies that support the super rich? It's not young people.
Well the young don't vote at all most of the time.
But when was the last time you saw a party with policies that didn't support the super rich? Since Reagan, no matter if the president wears a red or blue tie, the rich have gotten richer.
The only choice is how much poorer the poor get, with a side order of "other" hate. When the Zoomers are 50, don't worry. There'll be a whole new bunch of "others" to hate on, to distract them from the fact that they can just barely pay the rent. The boomers thought they'd be different too. Peace and love and hippies and Woodstock. Gen Z will be no different.
This but with the emphasis on the people who got fucking killed or put in prison or aged out of the ability for revolutionary action, while the rest of them kind of, left those guys to rot in jail, and went on to just exist passively in the system, and purport the same hippie mentalities, and then get sorted, just the same as last time. Power corrupts and is magnetic to the easily corruptible.
You know, I do wonder if, as the contradiction builds, and the farce kind of becomes more obvious, with like, the starbucks pride month rainbow logo while they also crush their unions, I wonder if everyone will make progress along that, as the marxists kind of tend to predict, with the whole "capital contains the seeds of it's own destruction" spiel. I dunno. I think probably people don't give a shit about contradiction though and are free to just keep living with a totally normalized cognitive dissonance.
Oh you're just doing some "both sides" doomerism. Got it.
Aw, reading comprehension too much for you?
Haha okay dude, you're clearly out of touch with the youth these days. Gen Z says "okay boomer" and that's pretty much it en masse. Gen Z is however not putting up with corporate bullshit as much.