It seems society always goes down the shitter over and over following the same path. People rise to wealth and power extracted on the repression of the masses, massive disparity, ignorance exemplified, xenophobia and blaming minorities for any possible issue, laws signed with golden pens but becoming more meaningless when they’re only enforced to protect the wealthy…. Then some sort of collapse, fragmentation, and/or dystopia usually in conjunction with war, purges, and killing in the name of tribalism.

History seems to rewind the cassette and record right over the top with the same old song.

  • TheBananaKing@lemmy.world
    15·
    1 year ago

    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.