Ask Lemmy

It’s called corruption and yes every institution eventually becomes corrupt.

The trick isn’t to give up, but to constantly renew the institutions by being present and alive and talking openly about what’s wrong, how to make it better, etc.

Yes, it's a drunkard's walk. All systems constantly and inevitably evolve towards concentration of resources.

People talk about entropy being the big-bad, but selection is entropy's personal wetwork consultant, and she is a cold heartless bitch.

It's like a rainforest: you start off with a bunch of tree species that all grow at the same rate. Then some chance mutation makes one tree grow just a little bit faster, and hey look not only does it get the sunlight the others trees don't, it shades them out so they can't compete. That's some hellacious selection pressure right there, and so the arms race is on.

You can't stop that from happening, it's baked into the very fabric that all the systems are built on.

Some deer decides that big antlers are hot, and a million years later all the males are stuck walking round with a fucking tree growing out of their head. Fuck the individual, keep them teetering on the edge of starvation or violent death at all times, extract maximum efficacy at all costs.

Goodhart's law ruins everything.

Everything from biology to economics and fucking video games. Oh no, you don't get to play a fun creative entertaining build, you slavishly follow the meta or you're out of the running. It's the same in business, it's the same everywhere you fucking look.

Every slightly sub-optimal build of [organism | business model | social organisation | I dunno, school of fucking architecture ] since the beginning of forever has been outcompeted by something slightly more effective, and has been abandoned, throat slit and dumped on the roadside like an underperforming child prostitute.

And enshittification is just one aspect of this. Anything that exists can be out-competed by something else a little more ruthless, a little more exploitative or unscrupulous, a little more expensive, a little more shitty. And at any step, someone can not take that step, in which case things stay as they are... or they can take it, in which case it gets worse. And once they have taken the step, there's no going back. One little step at a time, salami-slicing us all to hell.

You can never fix it from inside the system, because the system is always rigged to protect itself - you don't get there in the first place unless you've already subverted the things that could stop you. All you can ever hope to do is burn it all down and start again.

The problem you're describing has been described countless times before. Plato talks about it at length. It's literally the basis for 1984.

So, the answer is yes.

The good news is, it's part of a cycle of revolution and enshitification. Things get bad, the masses decide they've had enough, and strike back, things get better for a while, until they follow the same path they did the first time, and the cycle repeats.

But.

Every time it happens, things get a little worse. The relentless march of time and enshitification will gradually consume the planet, until human civilization collapses entirely. Maybe in our lifetime, maybe in 200 years, maybe in a 1000. But some day, all we've built will come crashing down around us, because while each individual may have foresight, society does not.

Not if we can solve the billionaire problem

There is nothing new under the sun...we are the same monkeys that we have always been. Technology / circumstances have changed though, somewhat. Nature + Nurture, with the former unchanged and the latter altered might produce something different? But people thought that the internet would solve all the world's problems, and if you replace "internet" with anything else at all, repeat as nauseum, you get life... so no, it both "changed everything", while also changing nothing.

Strong societies beget weak children, who produce vulnerable societies, which after (as?) they fall apart beget strong children. That is what I see anyway, right or wrong. That is why it is important to ask questions as you are doing. Entropic decay can only be overcome with effort. You can't solve the world's problems, only your own - and those who are willing to listen. As an example, we cannot fix Reddit, only make a new place to be better, but that takes WORK.

No we won't because soon resources will ends and the basic, like food, is already poisoned. We burned the candle very fast in this last hundred years, not very much progress that entertanament, we should have moon colonies at this point but we aren't even closer to the idea. I think human race will ends in next 200 years.

Because misguidance is easy, natural forces are disruptive, and this thing we call mental health is fragile and twisty, total satisfaction will never be possible. The next best thing to do is to prepare, and that helps at least half of things. Fortunately victory typically favors the wise if no gimmicks are used.

I'd like to think there's a way to keep shitty people out of power and concentration of resources to a minimum, but unfortunately, that conflicts with human nature.

The people who have power are generally the type of people who want power over other people. We haven't solved the problem of preventing sociopaths and psychopaths from becoming powerful yet, and it's hard to believe that society will ever solve that problem, since sociopaths and psychopaths will always exist. People who care about others generally aren't the type of people who seek power.

Even if, for example, we have a proletariat state, people who seek power will find a way to gain power. For example, if it's a direct democracy without representatives, propaganda will be a very useful tool. If it's a communist government with centralized planning, there will be a way to control the centralized planning. We already know how representative democracies can fall since we're living it. With social democracies, capitalism still exists, so that's pretty easy to exploit and revert back to straight capitalism.

I can see the beginning of replies in notices, I come to the thread and see no other comments. I’m not having this issue in any other threads. Wondering if it’s an issue with my instance?

Yes.

Interesting. I came to reply to a comment in a thread that had some that went poof! And .ml moderation is problematic?

It's called a nuclear world war.