That was a great read.
The point of all of this is to say: the tech utopia fantasy is truly dead to me. The image of the cool, hippie, leftist Silicon Valley tech is wrong.
I feel this in my soul, because I was that leftist hippie who got into tech because he believed all this shit and getting disillusioned over time was just fucking painful and made me hate those goons with a passion.
The straw I have left is that I’m not alone and that more people realize this and we make our own communities again that don’t suck. There’s still a long way to go, and Fedi has its own problems, especially when it comes to kick out the racists, sexists, and other bigots, but I try to stay positive that we’ll get there. At least to a degree.
(I mean, we have Awful and it’s an example that you can keep the bar nazi-free if you want to.)
Just looked around their blog/website. Lots of great stuff here. Thanks for sharing.
Seconded! I’m happy to find another cool ‘small,’ kinda personal type of website/blog. Reminds me a lot of how surfing the World Wide Web used to be (in a good way!)
I’m glad they’re citing their sources. But on the other hand most hard quality of life indicators are up globally, even if the perception of the way the world is trending is negative.
What’s a hard quality of life indicator?
I think a good place to start are the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. I know things feel bed, especially in the United States, where there are severe regressions. But at a global level many things are far better than ever for billions upon billions of people, especially in China and India.
TL;DR - At a worldwide level, hunger and extreme poverty is down, while healthcare and education is up. War is also up, and the environment is suffering more than ever.
A bunch of interactive charts are available here where you can scrub through time: https://ourworldindata.org/sdgs
I’ll summarize in case you don’t want to go through the charts yourself.
- Worldwide, extreme poverty is down sharply over the last 30 years.
- We’ve seen a decrease in undernourishment since 2000, but a regression since COVID hit.
- Since 1985, maternal mortality ratio has improved everywhere in the world except North America.
- Literacy rates have improved worldwide (especially in Africa, India, and South America) since 1990.
- There’s not a lot of historical data about gender equality, sadly. About the best indicator I can find there is ratio of women to men in political positions, which has been steadily increasing for over a hundred years at this point. We have a long way to go on gender equality.
- Since 2000, access to clean water and proper waste disposal has improved worldwide
- Percentage of energy generated by renewables has been pretty stagnant over the last decades. Moreover, the UN report bundles fossil fuels under “clean” energy sources, which I strongly disagree with. I probably don’t have to say why this is a big fucking problem, but I will anyway. We’re quickly cooking our planet with all these unclean energy sources.
- Economic growth has been spotty worldwide since they started collecting data in 1961. Besides, GDP per capita is a stupid way of measuring financial success, because it doesn’t control for the dragonlike financial hoarding that the ultra rich do.
- Infrastructure has been pretty stagnant since they started collecting data.
- People living below 50 per cent of median income has remained stagnant or worsened for the most part over the last few decades. I think that’s what most people feel when they talk about the world worsening. I know I do.
- The percentage of prime living in slums has decreased since 1999.
- Domestic material consumption per capita has increased since 2000, making the world a more unsustainable place.
- Greenhouse gas emissions have been sharply rising since 1850! This is a huge fucking problem, as mentioned before.
- The ocean has been getting steadily more acidic, and there has been little progress on preventing overfishing of the oceans. This is another big fucking problem.
- Our forest area is shrinking, deserts are getting bigger, and species are going extinct. Some minor gains have been had in creating more protected areas, but that seems to be a token effort at best compared to the enormous biological disaster occurring.
- Death in armed conflicts has been increasing since 1989. This statistic actually surprised me a bit, because it’s true even if you exclude the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Palestine wars.
- I’d skip this point since it’s mostly an indicator for whether or not a nation is participating in the UN goals, but for completeness, it looks kind of spotty worldwide.
you’re pushing the “But on the other hand most hard quality of life indicators are up globally” line but like, the number of negative things you’ve listed is more than the positives.
I mean, it’s almost as if you are manipulating yourself into questioning and rejecting reality*. You should stop doing that
*there is no one word description for this action. Believe me, I looked, and I’d use it if it existed.
Sure, that’s fair enough. I was emphasizing more on the critical short term things like food security (something that can kill in weeks) than on long term things like climate change and environmental destruction (something that can kill in decades).
I think my point was that most people focus only on the bad things that are happening without acknowledging the massive good things that are also happening in the world.
mods that’s pinker’s 17th alt
“People say their life sucks, but I looked at some numbers and actually they’re wrong!”
stop gaslighting yourself
The planet is slowly cooking but the GDP line goes up 🤷
