> Spend a few hours on twitter and you will think America is a 21st century Weimar Republic. But spend time talking with neighbors and friends in the flesh and you find that this feeling ebbs away. The economy is doing well. People are getting paid bounding sums. Nothing seems so fraught as the online hordes would have you fear.<p>I don't really recognize either side of this dichotomy?<p>Twitter is full of people being funny, kind, weird, fascinating as well as angry trolls, of the profesionall and amatuer kind.<p>Real life has illness, death, war, pollution and assholes as well as art, music, love, weddings, births, friendships etc.<p>I'm generally optimistic that things are getting better, on average, for the human race but don't see how pretending horrors as well as small unnecessary hardships aren't happening every day helps that progress.
Does this seem suspect to anyone else? It's hard to believe an author trying to instill in you the idea that everything is fine, actually, when stuff is pretty obviously not actually fine.<p>My neighbors are not well off. I am not well off. The people I know are mostly below or hovering around the federal poverty guideline. Far from making great sums, and it's been this way for a long time.<p>Are we sure the author isn't just rich, and coming largely from rich parts of society?
The main idea of the article is tone of the national conversation is biased by people who are frustrated:<p>> These are also the people who drive the national conversation on twitter. Academics, journalists, policy hands, and lawyers.[2] The people who form the narratives that we understand our country have been frustrated by fate. They live uncertain, precarious lives; even the most successful and secure are surrounded by defeated legions. Each old college friend is a reminder of what they could have been or might soon be. They are more likely to be stressed by circumstance. Do you think that stress does not carry over into their perceptions of the country writ large?<p>At least for me my social media activity ramps up a bit when not so happy.
Outrage sells. The National Enquirer's entire business model has used this for the past 50+ years. The big difference is that the major news centers have copied that model and the author's thesis that it's a response to the move online makes sense.<p>But there is something about online discourse that attracts extreme opinions like mice to cheese. This really dawned on me when I checked out the subreddit r/decaf for people quitting coffee.<p>I mean, how extreme could a subreddit like that be?<p>Well, it turns out, incredible extreme. It's nothing but posts about "caffeine is just heroin" and "we need to ban this dangerous drug" and "I'm pretty sure caffeine caused my skull fracture".<p>It's this bizarre mix of every extreme view you could imagine, obsessive thoughts, anxiety and hypochondria. And posters just feed off of each other.<p>And I was just curious to read some dull opinion about "my sleep is better when cut down to 1 cup of coffee a day".
For a brief period, journalism was a respected professional-class career. Social media and streaming video killed that, so it's back to muckraking. I have confidence that eventually new economic models will emerge that allow writers to better meet the demand for "real" journalism, but figuring that out will take time and more societal adjustment to technology.
> It is a common observation that internet life and real life don’t really match. Spend a few hours on twitter and you will think America is a 21st century Weimar Republic. But spend time talking with neighbors and friends in the flesh and you find that this feeling ebbs away.<p>Oh that’s fantastic for your neighbors.
<i>The economy is doing well.</i><p>It was..until around 4 months ago<p>Here is the lifehack to making a living at writing: be famous, well-known at something else and then pivot to writing. that usually does the trick.
Journalism is this weird profession where its individual members have very little personal power and clout, because doing good research and writing is not a huge barrier to entry. Most are just freelance cogs in a big capitalistic machine that isn't doing very well by capitalist standards. But collectively they wield immense power to set the narrative that essentially drives democracy. I suspect this encourages pack behaviors.
<i>Academia produces thousands and thousands of adjuncts working far below the average American wage. To get to that stage you must spend five to eight years laboring as a graduate student, again working under the average wage. Only a fraction of those who go through this experience end up securing a stable university job because of it.</i><p>Maybe 10+ years ago the situation was so bleak, not nowadays you see tons of otherwise no-name academics, of all areas whether it's science , math, sociology, political science, or economics, carving out niches online, such as substacks, twitter, podcasts, YouTube lectures (like 3blue 1 brown), selling books on Amazon, fundraising, etc. It's not like your options are only limited to teaching at a university. One of the hidden benefits of academia , even if the pay sucks, is you get branding power, which you typically do not see with other professions. Noah Smith, for example, was something of a failed academic but now runs a hugely popular econ Substack blog.