Neither, we just tend to look at the past with rose-colored glasses, forgetting how shitty things have always been.

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You wrote this on what even to recent ancestors of yours would be classified as Clarke Tech, AKA “Indistinguishable From Magic”

We have some new problems, some old problems, some problems that are getting better and some that are getting worse, that’s just how history works most of the time.

The significant change vs 20 or 30 years ago is the increased attention focus on those bad things because literally every form of media has at least some form of perverse incentive to fixate on those bad things “if it bleeds it leads”, an idea so old it’s how the western world knows about Vlad the Impaler some also ran count of part of Romania that spent more time as a hostage than he did as a ruler, but who ruled with a hand so bloody that it inspired the creation of one of the three quintessential gothic horrors of English literature.

Things are shittier by design. It’s called planned obsolescence. Things are designed to maximize profits:

• crappy quality
• high price
• bonus of making you buy another one when the first one breaks

(Sorry, I still don’t know how to do a Lemmy link.)

https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/112308356048172080

From Aral Balkin: “I don’t understand why everything is so fucked up and we seem incapable of fixing any of it!” This is because you believe you live in a democracy when you actually live under capitalism. (And it is functioning exactly as designed.) PS. Not your fault; you’ve been taught your whole life that the two are complementary when they’re diametrically-opposed. #capitalism #versus #democracy

Some things are slightly shittier, some things are way shittier, and a lot of things are a lot better. What do you mean specifically?

Politics and the Supreme Court have gotten a lot shittier since 2016 (like a steep decline, rather than the slight decline before).

The wealth gap has been getting shittier since the 70s. Wages haven’t kept up with productivity, while living expenses have only increased.

The housing market is shitty if you’re young or don’t have generational wealth.

Technology and medicine have gotten way better over the last ~100 years.

General consumer safety has gotten way better since the 50s.

Literacy levels and the rate of high school graduation have gotten way better.

Climate change is killing the planet. Deregulation is making climate change worse. Green energy isn’t coming fast enough.

Capitalism and specifically the notion that corporations have a duty to the shareholders has made companies and products shittier, but TVs are really cheap, and computers are really fast.

Robotics has gotten incredibly advanced, as has AI. Whether that’s shitty is pretty much up to opinion. I’d say it’s neutral, and depends on how they’re used.

Speaking of which, war was already horrifying, and now robots have made it vastly more horrifying. I don’t see any way that’s going to stop.

Food has become either really nutrient dense and amazing or really calorie dense and horrible, depending on how much money you have.

Speaking of money, there are a handful of people who have like half of the money. Maybe the guillotine went out of style too soon.

Video games and movies basically just look indistinguishable from reality now. And deep fakes are about to make it a lot easier to create that kind of realism.

For the most part, high speed internet access has slowly been getting better and better, both in speed and availability. Surprisingly, it’s stayed about the same percentage of the median income while doing so.

Streaming services have gotten so shitty it’s unbelievable that they’re still in business. But piracy has been making a comeback, and self hosting pirated content has gotten a lot easier. Physical media is also making a comeback.

Bigotry has gotten worse as a problem, but not worse in terms of percentage of people who are discriminatory. It’s just that the extreme bigots have basically taken over one of the political parties. (I mean, it basically was the party of bigotry before, but they had the decency to be subtle about it.) The younger generation can hopefully fix that problem as they enter voting age.

That’s all I can think of for now.

I’d say shittier. When I was little, politicians were bad but were at least relatively sane. Now it’s just one big game of Moby Dick.

According to the Grandpa association the good old times are way back before you’re born, so how would you even know?

Yes.

Mostly we’re more aware of the shittiness. On the whole, most things that were problems decades, generations, or centuries ago are objectively, measurably better now. However, there are specific things that are recurring problems or newer problems that have never existed before. Some of those are very serious problems that we are currently trying to, don’t yet know how to, or have failed to deal with. Things like climate change, mass misinformation in the information age, nuclear threats, gun violence, political corruption, war, and threats reproductive rights, LGBT human rights, and religious rights. So… bit of column A, bit of column B.

I think a lot of people grew up with the internet, and don’t realise just how new it is to have bad news shoved down your throat day after day just to generate clicks

That just… wasn’t a thing before

So I’d say, more aware, plus greedy cunts want to make you aware more often

Things are shittier right now than they were 10-20 years ago, but they’re a lot better than they were 50+ years ago.

It’s both. Capitalism runs a boom/bust cycle over each century. The “Great Depression” was about 100 years ago, following which the advent of union reforms and bunch of other things you should read about yourself cuz I forget fixed working conditions for actual people, and then the capitalists spent the next hundred years eroding those rights, basically (heavily oversimplified). the previous century was the same thing. It’s a shitty system and if it’s really the best we can do (hint: it’s not) then we don’t deserve the mantle we’ve placed on ourselves that declares us an intelligent species.

If I can use a floor cleaning metaphor:

The floor was pretty filthy in the 20th century, but a lot of it was swept under the rug so it looked pretty clean at casual glance.

Thusfar in the 21st century, we threw out the rug and bought a smaller one, did a modest job at cleaning up some of the dirt under it, and there’s a small number of people who deliberately shit on the rug because being decent human beings isn’t a thing they can do.

And I think that brings us to 2024.

How do you define “things”?

On a global scale and on average, life for humans is getting significantly better than, say, a century ago. The number of people dying from preventable diseases, war, natural disasters has been steadily going down for a while now.

Of course there are many more people on earth than there were 100 years ago, so accumulatively there is a lot more suffering now.

Also, the lives of individual people, the state of certain countries and areas are certainly getting worse.

As for non-human animals… For most of them the world is getting increasingly less habitable and for those who are raised in an industrial setting for human consumption, living conditions are largely atrocious.

I think your question is too broad for a single answer. But you might be interested in this now 17 year old (!) TED talk by the late Hans Rosling, which at least partially answers your question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w