Caving in to moral nihilism
The culture on X today is remarkably friendly and inclusive. It is a cheerful place. That cheerfulness is another differentiator. If you believe the world is falling apart and doomed only to get worse, that our obvious and real problems cannot be surmounted, X is not the platform for you. If you think the world is full of fun and amazing people and things, that humanity’s defining feature is our collective ability to solve any problem, that the only time better to be alive than today is tomorrow, it might be.
This whole article is a great example of, what I am calling, a moral nihilism and what made me eventually stop reading Daring Fireball, unfortunately. Instead of fighting and resisting by not using Twitter / X, people are actively using it, and now even calling for others to use it.
I do not like the apologetic approach Gruber is taking here: "I do not want to be there, but everyone is." - not only it puts his critique of the current US affairs into question and seemingly performative and for the sole purpose of virtue signaling. On the other hand, it captures this exact moment of our lives nicely - people gave up making moral and ethical decisions, they stopped having bigger dreams than just don't be bothered for another day and enjoy their social media. But let me tell you this, by being ignorant, by even indirectly supporting oligarchs, fascists, autocrats, you are giving them power. Yes, buying Teslas and using X are supporting Elon Musk, they are fuelling even more money to the richest person in the world. This is all caused by the advent of social media, TikTok, Youtube, all of this. Yes, you can find great stuff there, but in general those algorithms are made to numb you down, do become complacent and to not care about the world around you and how the decisions you are making are impacting others who are sharing the same world with you.
Either we, collectively, wake up, or there will be nobody remaining to fight for basic human rights, for morality, for humanity. We have already gave way too much power to the rich people, who turned out to be not so great, being immoral, locking systems down for driving profits instead of opening them up for serving the community. I will repeat myself, but billionaires should not exist, there should not be a world where we have classes, where we have a selected few accumulating all the wealth while majority lives from paycheck to paycheck.
The sooner we wake up, the better chance there is to make a difference. Else we will fall into the totalitarian dystopia, where our rights, as humans, as individuals, as moral beings, will no longer apply. We will become just means for the top 1% to get even richer, to have even greater "net worth", whatever that is... FUCK SUCH SYSTEM!