Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush. If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.

Genetic engineering is enabling us to harvest monocultures that completely fuck up the ecosystem, in the long run not only underlining important dynamics such as species needed for polluting plants, but also the very soil on which they grow.

It's been a while since I read Brave New World, but that also didn't stand out to me as the most central part of his critique to me. In my reading it was about how modern society was going to turn us into essentially pacified consumer slaves going from one artificial hormonal kick to the other, which seems to be what social media is for these days.

Things that seem like short term good ideas, and certainly great business ideas, might fuck things up big time in the long run. That's why it's useful to have some people doing the one things humans are good at - thinking creatively - involved in processes of change, and not just leave it to the short term interests of capital.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If someone had the imagination to write a sci-fi novel about Fox news and the rise of Trump, they would have.

You kidding, right? Those stories have been dime a dozen since the late 90s at least.

24 warned us about having an evil, terrorist US president. As have done a few movies in the past. Streaming platforms were pretty much masturbating themselves over "Confederate US AU" script offerings as early as 2014. Not to mention the nowadays trite trodden trope of "Nazi US AU".

Heck, you don't even need fiction. Chile's cup in 1973 was paid for by the CIA as a social experiment to produce the rising and establishment of a dictatorship.

[–] RegularGoose@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Television and increasingly digestible media is turning our brains to mush.

No it isn't. Global connectivity is just putting a spotlight on the the fact that most people are and always have been fucking stupid and/or dangerously undereducated.

[–] sab@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

I mean, it's a challenging hypothesis to prove. I might just be pessimistic.

I think there is some reason for valid concern though. The New York Times memoriam for Clifford Nass is an interesting and somewhat worrying read.

Dr. Nass found that people who multitasked less frequently were actually better at it than those who did it frequently. He argued that heavy multitasking shortened attention spans and the ability to concentrate.

Maybe more practically, it's just hard to argue America wouldn't be in a better place right now if it wasn't for Fox News and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica.