-
@ Flobee
2023-07-20 16:57:59My plan with this space is to casually document current events and attempt to snapshot my current worldview in a way that will help me remember how things stand today when I look back later. My impetus for this comes from Adam Townsend's concept that we're being overloaded with information in an attempt to displace our idea of what 'normal' is and used to be. He refers to this as "Dark City" a movie I haven't watched, but the concept being that every morning people wake up in a new body with no memory of their prior life. Looking back on the events since 2019 (pre COVID) and if I'm honest even pre 2016 (pre Trump) I have to admit he has a point.
If you try to project yourself back to a time before COVID and/or Trump, can you really remember what the world was like? Perhaps even more convincing, if you're old enough, can you remember what the world was like before 11 SEPT 2001? I'll use a video from Youtube recorded in 1987 to demonstrate my point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYbe-35_BaA
Assuming the video still exists when you're reading this, lets examine just how different the world was before the internet and before 9/11. This video is recorded at 2:30 in the morning at a 7-11 (gas station) near Disney World in Florida. For the sake of any younger readers I will point out that the recording of video at this time was fairly new at the consumer level and as such a guy with a camcorder was novel. Lets note some differences in how people acted then versus today in 2023. In no particular order:
-
Everyone is very relaxed. These are all presumably strangers but they interact with a casualness that you would only see today with people that are extremely close. They're aware that they're being recorded but there is no real sense that they need to be careful with their words or actions. They're just mildly amused that he is recording them.
-
It's 2:30 in the morning and nobody is afraid. If you were recording this today you would likely get ignored by most people and potentially have someone threaten you for recording them. You certainly wouldn't have a 100% success rate of getting friendly conversation. Its worth noting that this is being recorded in a highly populated area which as of today would make it significantly more sketchy.
-
The soda costs range from $0.49 to $0.69.
-
They are smoking inside.
I bring this up simply as example of how much we've changed just in the lifetime of the current adult generation. I can clearly remember a time where we implicitly trusted everyone we met. Our common humanity was emphasized and it was assumed that everyone was at least as well intentioned as you yourself were. There were obviously exceptions but that assumption was present in most interactions. The idea of 'stranger danger' and 'predators' existed but it was often a fear that existed 'out there' not where we lived.
People didn't self-censor even when being recorded because that recording would produce a single copy on VHS that was quite difficult to share outside of physical possession. One could bring it to a news station to have it broadcast of course, but that was unlikely unless you were doing something newsworthy so people didn't really care that much. The internet changed that once Youtube really took off (say around 2007-2010) but it still took a long time for us to begin changing our behavior. I would argue that didn't really take off until social media was ingrained in everyone's life which I would estimate happened around 2012-2015.
I'll probably end here for now but I plan to talk a bit more about the post-9/11 years up until Trump, then the time from Trump until today as best I can. From that point I'll look to talk about what I'm seeing today and what I currently think is going on. I don't claim to be right, and a reserve the right to change my mind completely, but that is kind of the point. I tend to believe we're being deceived at an every increasing pace and my intention is to record my views and they shift from narrative to narrative.
-