/pony/ - Pony

>>1196743
>Why is the void of the internet and social media so popular?

We're a social species with a drive to communicate with each other, but we're also a violent species that tends to exclude more than a few people we keep close, so meeting our social needs can be a challenge.

Truthfully, the internet doesn't always fix that, and sometimes makes it much worse, but the need remains.

>>1196743
I'll put the economist hat on and say that runaway cost disease and runaway hyperinflation coupled with runaway inequality, all from about 2000 to 2025 or so, has meant gigantic social and cultural changes:

>People used to be able to move from place to place easily.
>People used to be able to travel easily.
>People used to be able to go to amusement parks in person easily.
>People used to be able to go to deluxe restaurants easily.
>People used to be able to have 'social services' in terms of parks, playgrounds, libraries, malls, and the like that they could just 'hang out at' easily.
>People used to be able to contribute significantly to charities in person easily.
>People used to have psychological safety and security in their healthcare when just being out and about easily.
>Et cetera.

When life itself changed so that literally not dying became a struggle that's an order of magnitude harder in 2025 compared to when it was in 2000, then what used to be a simple social activity in person like "Let's have all of the co-workers at a certain place go out to see a movie together! It'll be fun!" went from being a normal thing to a fantasy scenario. It's quite a massive economic change. Leading to quite a massive social change in turn. I still have trouble dealing with it all.

Because I was born in 1988, myself, I have direct, physical memories of what Earth was like during the 1990s and 2000s economic and socio-cultural eras. Or, at least, the United States. And it was better. It just was fucking better. It just was. In basically every way you can imagine.

Today, though, we have online social spaces. And it's the substitute for what we used to have physically. That can't exist anymore. Instead of walking with our legs, we move little avatars in VR spaces. And the like.

I don't know where this ends. I'm still amazed that I'm personally alive and kicking have lived through two different cultural times as different as night and day. As I get older, I might stop believing that the past even existed.

Hell, I guess I'm game for having my physical body mostly destroyed and my brain put into a jar full of fuzzy liquids with wires attached all over it. According to whatever happens in the 2030s. Is that what the super-intelligent AIs and the governments that they'll run will want of me? When it takes over? I guess? Maybe? Maybe not? But probably?

>>1196744
I see.

>>1196745
Interesting. That does seem to help explain the paradox. (I think I would rather not be turned into a pony if it means I get put in a jar.)

>>1196745
>>1196746
There's an academic piece that's related here with pondering.

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/diagnosing-william-baumols-cost-disease

"Cost Disease is used to explain why prices for the services offered by people-dependent professions with low productivity growth— such as (arguably) education, health care, and the arts— keep going up, even though the amount of goods and services each worker in those industries generates hasn’t necessarily done the same."

"Chicago Booth’s Initiative on Global Markets asked its panel of U.S. economic experts to evaluate Baumol’s most famous theory, and it fared strongly: 59 percent of the experts polled agree that 'rising productivity in manufacturing leads the cost of labor-intensive services— such as education and health care— to rise.' When the responses are weighted according to how confident respondents’ are in their responses, 88 percent agree with the statement."

It's a tough world out there, since some men and women face skyrocketing changes in what $$$ means to them!