Perhaps it was always so, but for several years now it’s felt like the collective consciousness has extreme presentism. Huge events sweep across the world, everyone experiences them, and then they’re forgotten. Even the recent past is gone. As for the future, the order is assumed eternal. Only the present exists.
Sure, this is the default state. But it's not inevitable. As Clifton Fadiman wrote, we must strive to "disenthrall ourselves from the merely contemporary".
Meanwhile on Farcaster: "We've got a Meme channel now!🥳" (That's what brought you back isn't it?)
just droppin' by to say I appreciate that this isn't a cross-post (I checked). fwiw for me that makes this seem like an earnest cast or at least an mvp. accordingly... i'll bring the broom if you bring the dustpan🫡
Does this arise from your concern of not enough people remembering the recent past of fed actions?
Agree and we are just starting to see the ramifications of it. It’s still the early days
Max desensitization. History doesn’t even need to rhyme anymore. It can just repeat and come across as novel. Hollywood is saved.
Oh absolutely, for example politically I am still in 2011 (Anonymous, Occupy, Free Speech, Anti-SOPA/PIPA, Right to Repair) but everyone else has essentially memory-holed how politics was like then and apparently now I am "far-right", it's crazy to think how far the Overton window has shifted.
the uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty, and agitation of the modern bourgeois epoch has done a number on us
There is so much information flowing at such speed that it feels like drinking from a fire hydrant everyday keeping up. Pretty sure the past was eventful too, but we didn’t experience so many things in real-time.
Machiavelli observed that the masses will forget everything — except having their freedom taken away. For this you will earn their unceasing hatred. I think Red US is very much remembering things — bc they believe freedoms have been removed. I think much of Gray US will react the same if crypto / AI get banned.
In The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault writes extensively about Recurrent Redistributions in History and our failure to recognize our repeated mistakes in the past that leads us to repeat these patterns in the future. Ex. Default swap melt down in 2008 and the unsecuritized credit lending bubble popping today
We all lost our footing so we don’t know what to focus on, and so lose agency.
Alan Watts talks about this in terms of events - the life process as a single event (the present). Starts ~4:30 https://youtu.be/KH1tlIHmCt8
history has been so easily rewritten ppl are starting to only trust the present
What are the largest ones we’ve forgotten that we should bring back
Seems like collective consciousness is a stateless machine
Maybe your assumption that this is a new phenomenon is itself an example of presentism. I think this is normal. Fads come and go fast, tragedies are dealt with then we move on to the next challenge. It's just how people deal with things.
Yeah, well maybe the entire industry tasked with securing a better future, VC, shouldn't have adopted the Logan Paul thesis of scamming cash out of crisis victims for short term, extractive, zero-sum gains. Genuinely disgusting.
"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." - Cicero (circa 40 BCE) I just get annoyed at the presentism of the books, honestly.
But also what do you make of the sense that some people use the past to kind of find loose change, moral debt to cash out in the present? If I’m cynical I would say the past, for many people, has immense utility as an endless source of grievance, and little else.