One thing people today don't realize is that the current situation is a direct result of the optimism of the early and mid 2000s.
In the 90s, people (outside of the rust belt, but there were opportunities elsewhere so people just moved) were getting richer, they were seeing their wages rise, they saw that they had opportunities, and felt that their kids were going to have opportunities. In the early to mid 2000s the dot com bubble burst, but there were other things doing well, and so people generally kept that message going.
People hate Millennials for expecting to get out of college and be making 200k/yr, but that was the expectations many of them were fed. They thought they were going to all be rich, especially if they had tech skills which were widespread. It felt to many people like the future was so bright you had to wear shades. In Canada, it was common knowledge that people were making 200k/yr working in the oil and gas industry doing blue collar jobs, and down in Kitchener there were companies like RIM knocking it out of the park, so it felt like there were limitless opportunities. In the US, there were lots of stories of people doing incredibly well for themselves, mostly out of the tech industry.
When you feel like you're going to be ok, and you feel like your kids are going to be ok, that changes the calculus of the whole world. Suddenly, you start looking around at people who don't seem to have it as good as you and your family, and you start asking how you can help them. It seems like you should be trying to help others.
In 2007, a survey whose results were widely distributed in the advertising world showed that most people were progressive to the point that most advertising and branding started to re-tool aggressively. The companies started to embrace wokeness back then because people felt like they had a duty since they were doing so well to try to pay it forward.
The problem is, it was all based on a lie. In the US in 2008, it became apparently just how much of the wealth in the western world was a lie. And it continued to be propped up by selling our future to banks. From 2008 to nearly 2020, many people were sold on the fiction of the longest economic recovery in history because the numbers were kept good looking. In fact, unemployment went to an unprecedented 4%. According to the numbers, everything was perfect forever. Unfortunately, people need more than good numbers to thrive. They need personal success, and people weren't experiencing that.
There's an entire bloc, a chunk of the millennials who grew up in the golden age thinking that they'd be CEOs, and they integrated those ideas to the point that they never got rid of them. Many of them are NEETs today, but assume they're just the exception, held back from their rightful place while everyone else must have been doing ok, sort of the opposite of the left's "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" meme, a "failed potential-CEO". Some of those people woke up from the trance and realized that the world isn't as they assumed and started changing their views, but many of them are still NEETs who think everyone who looks like them is highly privileged and is living a blessed life and they look at every dollar in someone else's pocket and assume everyone else is rich and so they should get their cut after all.
Big companies and political parties aren't like speedboats, they're like cargo ships. They take forever to turn, and they have overwhelming amounts of inertia so they can't stop easily or start easily. The resistance to woke grew after 2008, including moments like gamergate where corruption in gaming journalism was brought to light but quickly dismissed, but those people were just the canary, and big companies ignored the dead bird and kept moving on. Brexit in June 2016 and later that year the election of Donald Trump as president also showed that the real consensus outside of elite circles was changing, but it was ignored and attacked as if those two things being shut down would be enough to change the underlying attitudes. It appears that now, in 2024, after years of inflation and growing suffering that you can't hide behind numbers -- when there's homeless people in every open spot in your city and food banks are running out of food, the numbers become irrelevant. They're starting to turn now, but it's a long and slow slog, and they've killed off most people who might actually do the positive things for affected industries.
Canada's trajectory was much different. In 2015, things were still reasonably good -- oil and gas had just crashed but people didn't realize how much that hurt the entire country yet, and that's one reason Justin Trudeau came to power -- people felt good still because even 2008 didn't hurt too much, and so people agreed with him that some of the wealth Canadians thought the nation had should be used to pay down some moral debts such as the lack of running water on many native reserves or inequality based on race or gender. When people wonder how a guy like Trudeau could get into power, that's the answer. Things were good under the previous liberals, good under the conservatives, and people felt like they could afford to take a hit for the greater good.
There are some people who were highly successful in the woke paradigm, and for them progressive ideology still makes a lot of sense because they personally are doing well and so they feel like they need to pay it forward, but the problem is most people don't feel so successful. Even big companies are failing using the woke paradigm. Back on the ground, there's a lot of able-bodied men who dropped out of the workforce entirely, but they don't show up in conventional numbers because to find a way to make it you have to claim you aren't actually able-bodied. That's why so many people can be NEETs but the unemployment rate claims to be at all time lows. For people who aren't NEETs, they've watched rents multiply by many times, mortgages at insane principal valuations and high interest rates, food much more expensive, and even services got way more expensive -- Netflix used to be 10 bucks a month, now it's 25 bucks a month and you actually need to subscribe to like 6 different services to get the same quality service.
I think we're seeing reality hit for much of the world. Even people with good but not elite jobs feel it, and those feelings affect people's politics. Politically when people are feeling good they want to pay it forward, but when they're feeling bad they want to be left alone.
I think this will change how the government works over time. People will eventually ask why the government makes up 50% of GDP, and what it's doing to earn all that money, and the answer is that it isn't doing a lot and it's time to trim a lot of fat. People don't feel generous when times are bad, and numbers aside I think we're in some of the worst times of our lives by far. Falsified and gamed numbers are gilding, but beneath the surface is nothing but rot.
Unfortunately, there's going to have to be a divide for a time between the working people and the bureaucrats because wokeness primarily benefits college educated bureaucrats and the sort of change in government and industry we need to see will ditch a lot of that. Government spending has to go down because debt is so high throughout the western world that you can't keep spending debt. We've paid off credit cards with other credit cards for so long that the credit cards are all maxxed out (and it doesn't really matter what the government debt limit in the US is, for example, the spending on debt maintenance is already more than the entire military)
The good news is that many of those college educated bureaucrats are actually people with high potential to do real good work. They'll fight to the last man over this, but if we stop taking our best and brightest and wasting them doing busywork at desks and start using them to build things again, the result should actually be a net increase in everyone's wealth, even though those non bureaucrat jobs aren't as comfortable or as numb as the real jobs in the real economy creating real value for other people.
It's stressful doing real things, and you actually have to deliver on your promises, and that sucks compared to just "doing stuff" towards nebulous goals The thing is, the stress is the price you pay for doing real meaningful work that actually affects the world. How many people are stuck in bureaucratic jobs or doing woke nothingness, and how many of those people are actually happy in that role? They must realize they aren't doing anything meaningful, and it must chip away at their souls.
The movies The Matrix and Fight Club became iconic for generations of people in part because they were earlier warnings of the dangers of the fake manufactured bureaucratic world. Both the narrator in Fight Club and Neo in The Matrix start their story working a corporate job. The Narrator flies a lot for work but works in an office when he's not on the road, Neo works in a stereotypical office, and it's part of the shorthand of the films that these jobs aren't fulfilling, they aren't making them happy, they aren't contributing anything meaningful to the world, and both stories are stories about finding meaningful labor. In both movies, the main character finds power and purpose in living a less privileged life -- The Narrator moving to a leaky shack next to a paper mill, Neo moving to "the real world" where they live a spartan life and eat disgusting goo. From my standpoint, those authors didn't know the right answer and so living in a more spartan existence like that seems to them like living closer to reality, but the same could be accomplished by getting people out of offices and into boots on the ground actually doing things.
In the 90s, people (outside of the rust belt, but there were opportunities elsewhere so people just moved) were getting richer, they were seeing their wages rise, they saw that they had opportunities, and felt that their kids were going to have opportunities. In the early to mid 2000s the dot com bubble burst, but there were other things doing well, and so people generally kept that message going.
People hate Millennials for expecting to get out of college and be making 200k/yr, but that was the expectations many of them were fed. They thought they were going to all be rich, especially if they had tech skills which were widespread. It felt to many people like the future was so bright you had to wear shades. In Canada, it was common knowledge that people were making 200k/yr working in the oil and gas industry doing blue collar jobs, and down in Kitchener there were companies like RIM knocking it out of the park, so it felt like there were limitless opportunities. In the US, there were lots of stories of people doing incredibly well for themselves, mostly out of the tech industry.
When you feel like you're going to be ok, and you feel like your kids are going to be ok, that changes the calculus of the whole world. Suddenly, you start looking around at people who don't seem to have it as good as you and your family, and you start asking how you can help them. It seems like you should be trying to help others.
In 2007, a survey whose results were widely distributed in the advertising world showed that most people were progressive to the point that most advertising and branding started to re-tool aggressively. The companies started to embrace wokeness back then because people felt like they had a duty since they were doing so well to try to pay it forward.
The problem is, it was all based on a lie. In the US in 2008, it became apparently just how much of the wealth in the western world was a lie. And it continued to be propped up by selling our future to banks. From 2008 to nearly 2020, many people were sold on the fiction of the longest economic recovery in history because the numbers were kept good looking. In fact, unemployment went to an unprecedented 4%. According to the numbers, everything was perfect forever. Unfortunately, people need more than good numbers to thrive. They need personal success, and people weren't experiencing that.
There's an entire bloc, a chunk of the millennials who grew up in the golden age thinking that they'd be CEOs, and they integrated those ideas to the point that they never got rid of them. Many of them are NEETs today, but assume they're just the exception, held back from their rightful place while everyone else must have been doing ok, sort of the opposite of the left's "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" meme, a "failed potential-CEO". Some of those people woke up from the trance and realized that the world isn't as they assumed and started changing their views, but many of them are still NEETs who think everyone who looks like them is highly privileged and is living a blessed life and they look at every dollar in someone else's pocket and assume everyone else is rich and so they should get their cut after all.
Big companies and political parties aren't like speedboats, they're like cargo ships. They take forever to turn, and they have overwhelming amounts of inertia so they can't stop easily or start easily. The resistance to woke grew after 2008, including moments like gamergate where corruption in gaming journalism was brought to light but quickly dismissed, but those people were just the canary, and big companies ignored the dead bird and kept moving on. Brexit in June 2016 and later that year the election of Donald Trump as president also showed that the real consensus outside of elite circles was changing, but it was ignored and attacked as if those two things being shut down would be enough to change the underlying attitudes. It appears that now, in 2024, after years of inflation and growing suffering that you can't hide behind numbers -- when there's homeless people in every open spot in your city and food banks are running out of food, the numbers become irrelevant. They're starting to turn now, but it's a long and slow slog, and they've killed off most people who might actually do the positive things for affected industries.
Canada's trajectory was much different. In 2015, things were still reasonably good -- oil and gas had just crashed but people didn't realize how much that hurt the entire country yet, and that's one reason Justin Trudeau came to power -- people felt good still because even 2008 didn't hurt too much, and so people agreed with him that some of the wealth Canadians thought the nation had should be used to pay down some moral debts such as the lack of running water on many native reserves or inequality based on race or gender. When people wonder how a guy like Trudeau could get into power, that's the answer. Things were good under the previous liberals, good under the conservatives, and people felt like they could afford to take a hit for the greater good.
There are some people who were highly successful in the woke paradigm, and for them progressive ideology still makes a lot of sense because they personally are doing well and so they feel like they need to pay it forward, but the problem is most people don't feel so successful. Even big companies are failing using the woke paradigm. Back on the ground, there's a lot of able-bodied men who dropped out of the workforce entirely, but they don't show up in conventional numbers because to find a way to make it you have to claim you aren't actually able-bodied. That's why so many people can be NEETs but the unemployment rate claims to be at all time lows. For people who aren't NEETs, they've watched rents multiply by many times, mortgages at insane principal valuations and high interest rates, food much more expensive, and even services got way more expensive -- Netflix used to be 10 bucks a month, now it's 25 bucks a month and you actually need to subscribe to like 6 different services to get the same quality service.
I think we're seeing reality hit for much of the world. Even people with good but not elite jobs feel it, and those feelings affect people's politics. Politically when people are feeling good they want to pay it forward, but when they're feeling bad they want to be left alone.
I think this will change how the government works over time. People will eventually ask why the government makes up 50% of GDP, and what it's doing to earn all that money, and the answer is that it isn't doing a lot and it's time to trim a lot of fat. People don't feel generous when times are bad, and numbers aside I think we're in some of the worst times of our lives by far. Falsified and gamed numbers are gilding, but beneath the surface is nothing but rot.
Unfortunately, there's going to have to be a divide for a time between the working people and the bureaucrats because wokeness primarily benefits college educated bureaucrats and the sort of change in government and industry we need to see will ditch a lot of that. Government spending has to go down because debt is so high throughout the western world that you can't keep spending debt. We've paid off credit cards with other credit cards for so long that the credit cards are all maxxed out (and it doesn't really matter what the government debt limit in the US is, for example, the spending on debt maintenance is already more than the entire military)
The good news is that many of those college educated bureaucrats are actually people with high potential to do real good work. They'll fight to the last man over this, but if we stop taking our best and brightest and wasting them doing busywork at desks and start using them to build things again, the result should actually be a net increase in everyone's wealth, even though those non bureaucrat jobs aren't as comfortable or as numb as the real jobs in the real economy creating real value for other people.
It's stressful doing real things, and you actually have to deliver on your promises, and that sucks compared to just "doing stuff" towards nebulous goals The thing is, the stress is the price you pay for doing real meaningful work that actually affects the world. How many people are stuck in bureaucratic jobs or doing woke nothingness, and how many of those people are actually happy in that role? They must realize they aren't doing anything meaningful, and it must chip away at their souls.
The movies The Matrix and Fight Club became iconic for generations of people in part because they were earlier warnings of the dangers of the fake manufactured bureaucratic world. Both the narrator in Fight Club and Neo in The Matrix start their story working a corporate job. The Narrator flies a lot for work but works in an office when he's not on the road, Neo works in a stereotypical office, and it's part of the shorthand of the films that these jobs aren't fulfilling, they aren't making them happy, they aren't contributing anything meaningful to the world, and both stories are stories about finding meaningful labor. In both movies, the main character finds power and purpose in living a less privileged life -- The Narrator moving to a leaky shack next to a paper mill, Neo moving to "the real world" where they live a spartan life and eat disgusting goo. From my standpoint, those authors didn't know the right answer and so living in a more spartan existence like that seems to them like living closer to reality, but the same could be accomplished by getting people out of offices and into boots on the ground actually doing things.
This analysis is flawed for it fails to realize that it was women who went woke not men and the women are still woke znd getting woker.
It was like 70% of the surveyed, and for young millennials at the time it was both men and women. 2007 was a different time than today, men did eventually realize they were supporting bad ideas.
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Men never really supported it, they were just trying to get laid
@sj_zero long but good, it doesnt help when govt attack savers and bitcoiners, by having services cut to them. people who warned about the inflation during covid on the legacy media (including social media) were also mysteriously disappeared.
so yeah, its clearly a deliberate herding that in progress.
its a miracle the matrix was ever made, i think the only other film that is better is a documentary i saw recently cant remember the name but it was about ww1/2, jfk and 9/11. if u look closely #themartrix is always sidelined today on the legacy tv networks, it always slips into the non-mainstream channels etc. they dont want people to question the current reality.