Several commenters seem to shrug off the trend. The trend is real and worrisome.
-- There exists an expectation of infrastructure and acceptance of a way of living that is more evident, totally tragically, in administrations.
-- Silence is very difficult to find in some territories - large inhabited territories -, and what is crucial is the widespread structural ignorance of the importance of silence.
-- Finding untainted food is not as easy as some are suggesting. Already that DDT was found on the Himalayas (and similarly on the soil of special control agriculture) should tell of a problem.
-- Direct relation with responsible parts in the economic supply is declining.
-- Finding natural fabric is a grave issue in some areas. I have been there: for Winter clothing, all plastic, or outlandish prices. Being told that true leather jackets are now luxury items (which is paradoxical as beef is still on the market), or being unable to find wool, is a clear sign that, exactly, "Things That Used to Be Normal Are Now a Luxury".
-- And very surely, once I did not have to spend ages of research to purchase good quality items. Shrinkflation is a real thing, and an obvious problem. (And a piece of the absurd: "buy n items of lower quality and lifespan to maybe get a decent one" in the "save the planet" times.)
I don't think these things are luxury at all, but can be packaged as luxury. For example, you can find quiet parks in most metro areas or you can go to a retreat in a resort in the mountains.
For years I've been buying only 98%+ natural fiber clothing. I can still find t-shirts for about $10, but I do have to spend time examining the tag on clothes. I also noticed that Nordstrom's app can filter by fabric type, but the clothes there are sold at a premium.
Yes, you can find these things at a good price, but, for example, not all natural fibers are the same. I buy 100% cotton T-shirts that have undergone certain processes that still make them pretty poor quality. That's why it's complicated to find these things easily nowadays. I understand your point, and in the end, there's no other option but to stay informed.
Darkness. Before 1900 every human being that ever lived had perfect darkness every night they looked out their window. Today you have to go between hundreds to thousands of kilometres away from cities before you see it.
This is just complete hyperbole with no substance.
For 1, I still have yet to go to a restaurant where I couldn't ask the waiter for a physical menu instead of reading the QR code (not to mention that QR code menus are still far from the majority in every city I've been to, small and large). Are there any other examples where you "need" to be online when going out?
For 3, I've never been to a supermarket that doesn't have fresh local produce. The existence of a ready-made meal or of a more complicated snack food doesn't make produce in the same store any less real.
Yes, you can still get a paper menu, but you need to ask for it in many places. Also, in Asia, for example, many places require you to order using a tablet, and for me, that's not appealing at all. But yes, you can still live with it, of course.
About point 3, yes, you can find local products, but 95% of the products in supermarkets, at least in Spain where I live, have more than 10 ingredients.
The implicit contract is that you are online if you have to ask for the damned menu. It is not an improvement in the dining experience to scan a QR code to order, or to read a menu, an important part of the dining out experience, on a cell phone screen. Yes I can ask for a printed menu. Nope, I don't want to. I'm eating out to get away from staring at a screen. Is that really that hard to grasp?
And then they want a tip from their QR code ordering system. I love AI, and I work with AI, but JFC tipping an honest to god waiter (and ya know, if it's a charming robot that puts on some theatre as a waiter - not a gloried tray on wheels, that's cool too, but my cellphone isn't that) is an important signal to the quality of the service and you've rubbed me wrong from the get go forcing me implicitly to bring my phone in the first place.
AI's prominent spokesmodels considered harmful IMO
> restaurant where I couldn't ask the waiter for a physical menu
Happened to me. In one, "Ok, if you don't have own ways to read our electronic menu, I'll hand you the owner's tablet". (Bankrupted after a few months after years of prestigious service to its customers - the quality was good, the management "simple".) In another, "Ah, oh, so you do not have a way to... Really?! Well... Ok... Look: what would you like to eat?" - the manager did not know his own menu (but was open to discuss possibilities).
The point is not with the exceptions: it is with the creeping ignorance that gives assumptions for granted. And you should be ___very___ worried when the ignorant is not a service provider, but maybe your administration that takes for granted electronic money or a google|apple|microsoft account.
Silence died before social media. Silence died with pervasive flat screen TVs everywhere sometime during the mid-90s. I was in grad school at the time, and one by one, the previously quiet spots in cafeterias between meals and nooks went loud with a TV permanently tuned to ESPN or 24/7 news. It was like the planet Kakrafoon Kappa as if the most dangerous thing in the world was to allow students to be alone with their thoughts. Then it hit the restaurants and cafes.
And while one could get away from this by taking a walk, cell phones finished the job. It's unreal to see someone walking their unruly dog, borderline shambling, while they stare, transfixed, into their phone. And I am out of you-know-whats w/r to this. Zuck won because he gave people what they craved. It wasn't what they needed, and it's up to the people to break their own addictions. I figure that's either after the commencement of my dirt nap or some contrived utterly avoidable apocalypse scenario triggered by our collective negligence on par with an expectedly dirty telephone as the root of a global pandemic.
TikTok has ruined public transportation for me. One idiot blasting short videos on their phone at 7am is so annoying. I remember back in the 90s there were signs for no boomboxes on trains. Now it's nearly expected that someone is mindlessly scrolling TikTok at max volume per car.
What you are describing is actually the coma of civic society: in proper societies (I have witnessed them), the «idiot» ("layman in civic education") would have been corrected by the affected and informed by his acquaintances.
It is a grave sign of downfall when disturbing elements roam unreached by any wakers.
Note that the phenomenon is symmetrical in the "upper" strata: just like in the lower "kids (of any age) are an island", in the upper administrations embrace the absurd without the voices of the intellectuals chastizing them.
I used to go out into the Mojave Desert for a few days. It's quiet out there - so quiet that your own footsteps are very loud. You're also very much on your own out there. That dirt road you're stopped on might see two cars in the next 24 hours, or zero. It was amazingly freeing. You could hear yourself think, and nobody could bother or interrupt you.
Then my wife started worrying about my safety out there, and insisted that I carry a cell phone. Well, she was undoubtedly right that it was safer (this is another reason that married men live longer). But a bit of the freedom disappeared too - now I could be interrupted at any time, and sometimes I was.
> But a bit of the freedom disappeared too - now I could be interrupted at any time, and sometimes I was
...Remember what you are there to do, so keep it off and only turn it on periodically... Maybe if it is a matter of being able of being geolocated (so with frequent status updates), you could code an application that updates said status periodically (e.g. 40mins disconnected, 5mins updating, in a loop).
> wife
Maybe watch Deliverance (Boorman '72) together: it could confuse her into a state of indecision...
Scientifically speaking, time is a measurement of how much worse things have gotten. The irony is that this is also one of the oldest truisms that humanity has grappled with over the millennia. See: Hesiod's Ages of Man, Biblical Genesis, The Epic of Gilgamesh and many other Mesopotamian epics, the Vedic Yugas, etc.
Are you saying that "entropy" = "worse" and that somehow these human stories of earlier golden ages reflect a law of physics? Seems much more likely that they, like this article, reflect the ingrained human psychological tendency to remember the past as better than it actually was...
> remember the past as better than it actually was
Yes, I very clearly remember the not so faraway past when shoes last decades, when non-filled soles (as opposed to e.g. grids of blades) would have been considered a crime and an obvious matter of public health, and similarly for the use of toxic materials.
I also remember the times when machinery used quality material and lasted accordingly; when blinding lights were obviously considered a basic matter of health and when beeps and bebibeep melodies were considered a nuisance. And much more.
I grant you: the past offered people and systems with common sense - now largely gone.
The clothing quality issue is in manufacturing and reducing the amount of fabric and thread used to make items. Seams are the bare minimum now etc. Likewise trainers soles have stopped using rubber and moved to far less durable synthetic materials.
Which is as capitalism demanded unfortunately. We live like Temu Kings of old but there will be a bar tab for the party eventually. Good luck predicting when though.
Even if you did want to live there you probably can't develop anything on it because someone in an ivory tower decided that a certain number of ferns per square meter makes it a wetland or that it's probable habitat for some endangered desert bug, never-mind the fact that on the same land across the street BigCo somehow managed to put in a solar farm.....
Author here: I always wash my clothes in cold water, 100% of the time. I really don't know what happened, but the T-shirt was already ruined after 3 or 4 washes. Any advice is more than welcome :)
New cloth used to be luxury when I was a kid. Now everyone has 100s of pieces. I remember sewing and wearing cloth, and no one does it now. Also he kinda answered his question:
> it(natural fiber cloth) lasted less than shirts I’ve paid 5€ for
For being offline and in silence, it is as achievable as ever, if not more. Companies/friends etc. now are more respectful of time and being offline or not picking up call now than they were 20 years ago.
Yep. Precisely because of our efficient manufacturing, throw-away culture a lot of gadgets that used to be serious luxuries are now nearly free. For example basic espresso machines. In my area you can get one for $25 off FBM any day. Or (adjusted for inflation) affordable sandwiches with tasty ingredients nobody had heard of when I was a kid (I'm old). Or pretty decent bicycles if you're willing to learn a little how to fix them. Or low-end smartphones for about the price of a landline phone back in the day (adjusted for inflation) and cellular service plans that are actually much cheaper than a landline used to cost.
Or synthetic clothing. Sure, natural fiber stuff is in retreat but some synthetic stuff is actually really comfortable.
Several commenters seem to shrug off the trend. The trend is real and worrisome.
-- There exists an expectation of infrastructure and acceptance of a way of living that is more evident, totally tragically, in administrations.
-- Silence is very difficult to find in some territories - large inhabited territories -, and what is crucial is the widespread structural ignorance of the importance of silence.
-- Finding untainted food is not as easy as some are suggesting. Already that DDT was found on the Himalayas (and similarly on the soil of special control agriculture) should tell of a problem.
-- Direct relation with responsible parts in the economic supply is declining.
-- Finding natural fabric is a grave issue in some areas. I have been there: for Winter clothing, all plastic, or outlandish prices. Being told that true leather jackets are now luxury items (which is paradoxical as beef is still on the market), or being unable to find wool, is a clear sign that, exactly, "Things That Used to Be Normal Are Now a Luxury".
-- And very surely, once I did not have to spend ages of research to purchase good quality items. Shrinkflation is a real thing, and an obvious problem. (And a piece of the absurd: "buy n items of lower quality and lifespan to maybe get a decent one" in the "save the planet" times.)
I don't think these things are luxury at all, but can be packaged as luxury. For example, you can find quiet parks in most metro areas or you can go to a retreat in a resort in the mountains.
For years I've been buying only 98%+ natural fiber clothing. I can still find t-shirts for about $10, but I do have to spend time examining the tag on clothes. I also noticed that Nordstrom's app can filter by fabric type, but the clothes there are sold at a premium.
Yes, you can find these things at a good price, but, for example, not all natural fibers are the same. I buy 100% cotton T-shirts that have undergone certain processes that still make them pretty poor quality. That's why it's complicated to find these things easily nowadays. I understand your point, and in the end, there's no other option but to stay informed.
[dead]
Darkness. Before 1900 every human being that ever lived had perfect darkness every night they looked out their window. Today you have to go between hundreds to thousands of kilometres away from cities before you see it.
The night sky isn't dark. What you're looking for is cave darkness.
Very true
This is a real loss, unlike the manufactured despair in the article.
This is just complete hyperbole with no substance.
For 1, I still have yet to go to a restaurant where I couldn't ask the waiter for a physical menu instead of reading the QR code (not to mention that QR code menus are still far from the majority in every city I've been to, small and large). Are there any other examples where you "need" to be online when going out?
For 3, I've never been to a supermarket that doesn't have fresh local produce. The existence of a ready-made meal or of a more complicated snack food doesn't make produce in the same store any less real.
Yes, you can still get a paper menu, but you need to ask for it in many places. Also, in Asia, for example, many places require you to order using a tablet, and for me, that's not appealing at all. But yes, you can still live with it, of course.
About point 3, yes, you can find local products, but 95% of the products in supermarkets, at least in Spain where I live, have more than 10 ingredients.
The implicit contract is that you are online if you have to ask for the damned menu. It is not an improvement in the dining experience to scan a QR code to order, or to read a menu, an important part of the dining out experience, on a cell phone screen. Yes I can ask for a printed menu. Nope, I don't want to. I'm eating out to get away from staring at a screen. Is that really that hard to grasp?
And then they want a tip from their QR code ordering system. I love AI, and I work with AI, but JFC tipping an honest to god waiter (and ya know, if it's a charming robot that puts on some theatre as a waiter - not a gloried tray on wheels, that's cool too, but my cellphone isn't that) is an important signal to the quality of the service and you've rubbed me wrong from the get go forcing me implicitly to bring my phone in the first place.
AI's prominent spokesmodels considered harmful IMO
> restaurant where I couldn't ask the waiter for a physical menu
Happened to me. In one, "Ok, if you don't have own ways to read our electronic menu, I'll hand you the owner's tablet". (Bankrupted after a few months after years of prestigious service to its customers - the quality was good, the management "simple".) In another, "Ah, oh, so you do not have a way to... Really?! Well... Ok... Look: what would you like to eat?" - the manager did not know his own menu (but was open to discuss possibilities).
The point is not with the exceptions: it is with the creeping ignorance that gives assumptions for granted. And you should be ___very___ worried when the ignorant is not a service provider, but maybe your administration that takes for granted electronic money or a google|apple|microsoft account.
Silence died before social media. Silence died with pervasive flat screen TVs everywhere sometime during the mid-90s. I was in grad school at the time, and one by one, the previously quiet spots in cafeterias between meals and nooks went loud with a TV permanently tuned to ESPN or 24/7 news. It was like the planet Kakrafoon Kappa as if the most dangerous thing in the world was to allow students to be alone with their thoughts. Then it hit the restaurants and cafes.
And while one could get away from this by taking a walk, cell phones finished the job. It's unreal to see someone walking their unruly dog, borderline shambling, while they stare, transfixed, into their phone. And I am out of you-know-whats w/r to this. Zuck won because he gave people what they craved. It wasn't what they needed, and it's up to the people to break their own addictions. I figure that's either after the commencement of my dirt nap or some contrived utterly avoidable apocalypse scenario triggered by our collective negligence on par with an expectedly dirty telephone as the root of a global pandemic.
TikTok has ruined public transportation for me. One idiot blasting short videos on their phone at 7am is so annoying. I remember back in the 90s there were signs for no boomboxes on trains. Now it's nearly expected that someone is mindlessly scrolling TikTok at max volume per car.
What you are describing is actually the coma of civic society: in proper societies (I have witnessed them), the «idiot» ("layman in civic education") would have been corrected by the affected and informed by his acquaintances.
It is a grave sign of downfall when disturbing elements roam unreached by any wakers.
Note that the phenomenon is symmetrical in the "upper" strata: just like in the lower "kids (of any age) are an island", in the upper administrations embrace the absurd without the voices of the intellectuals chastizing them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf5iwGZNY_Q
I used to go out into the Mojave Desert for a few days. It's quiet out there - so quiet that your own footsteps are very loud. You're also very much on your own out there. That dirt road you're stopped on might see two cars in the next 24 hours, or zero. It was amazingly freeing. You could hear yourself think, and nobody could bother or interrupt you.
Then my wife started worrying about my safety out there, and insisted that I carry a cell phone. Well, she was undoubtedly right that it was safer (this is another reason that married men live longer). But a bit of the freedom disappeared too - now I could be interrupted at any time, and sometimes I was.
> But a bit of the freedom disappeared too - now I could be interrupted at any time, and sometimes I was
...Remember what you are there to do, so keep it off and only turn it on periodically... Maybe if it is a matter of being able of being geolocated (so with frequent status updates), you could code an application that updates said status periodically (e.g. 40mins disconnected, 5mins updating, in a loop).
> wife
Maybe watch Deliverance (Boorman '72) together: it could confuse her into a state of indecision...
Well sure, and lots of things that used to be luxury items are now normal. The wheel turns.
Scientifically speaking, time is a measurement of how much worse things have gotten. The irony is that this is also one of the oldest truisms that humanity has grappled with over the millennia. See: Hesiod's Ages of Man, Biblical Genesis, The Epic of Gilgamesh and many other Mesopotamian epics, the Vedic Yugas, etc.
Are you saying that "entropy" = "worse" and that somehow these human stories of earlier golden ages reflect a law of physics? Seems much more likely that they, like this article, reflect the ingrained human psychological tendency to remember the past as better than it actually was...
> remember the past as better than it actually was
Yes, I very clearly remember the not so faraway past when shoes last decades, when non-filled soles (as opposed to e.g. grids of blades) would have been considered a crime and an obvious matter of public health, and similarly for the use of toxic materials.
I also remember the times when machinery used quality material and lasted accordingly; when blinding lights were obviously considered a basic matter of health and when beeps and bebibeep melodies were considered a nuisance. And much more.
I grant you: the past offered people and systems with common sense - now largely gone.
Cotton, linen, wool gang represent.
Clothes (patched up as needed), beyond the minimum, long used to be a luxury for the most part.
The clothing quality issue is in manufacturing and reducing the amount of fabric and thread used to make items. Seams are the bare minimum now etc. Likewise trainers soles have stopped using rubber and moved to far less durable synthetic materials.
Which is as capitalism demanded unfortunately. We live like Temu Kings of old but there will be a bar tab for the party eventually. Good luck predicting when though.
Real estate
There's still plenty of real estate. It probably just isn't where you want to live.
Even if you did want to live there you probably can't develop anything on it because someone in an ivory tower decided that a certain number of ferns per square meter makes it a wetland or that it's probable habitat for some endangered desert bug, never-mind the fact that on the same land across the street BigCo somehow managed to put in a solar farm.....
Parmesan cheese
I am pretty sure it's still there.
Merino as a fabric is just a more delicate fabric.
Author here: I always wash my clothes in cold water, 100% of the time. I really don't know what happened, but the T-shirt was already ruined after 3 or 4 washes. Any advice is more than welcome :)
New cloth used to be luxury when I was a kid. Now everyone has 100s of pieces. I remember sewing and wearing cloth, and no one does it now. Also he kinda answered his question:
> it(natural fiber cloth) lasted less than shirts I’ve paid 5€ for
For being offline and in silence, it is as achievable as ever, if not more. Companies/friends etc. now are more respectful of time and being offline or not picking up call now than they were 20 years ago.
Can we stop already with the flood of faux earnest ai slop blog posts - utter brain rot junk
[dead]
I don't know where the author lives, but usually it's easy to find a store selling something.
They've almost always been staffed by bored teenagers tho.
Also, things that used to be a luxury are now normal.
Yep. Precisely because of our efficient manufacturing, throw-away culture a lot of gadgets that used to be serious luxuries are now nearly free. For example basic espresso machines. In my area you can get one for $25 off FBM any day. Or (adjusted for inflation) affordable sandwiches with tasty ingredients nobody had heard of when I was a kid (I'm old). Or pretty decent bicycles if you're willing to learn a little how to fix them. Or low-end smartphones for about the price of a landline phone back in the day (adjusted for inflation) and cellular service plans that are actually much cheaper than a landline used to cost.
Or synthetic clothing. Sure, natural fiber stuff is in retreat but some synthetic stuff is actually really comfortable.