I’d put my money on lowered barriers to entry on the internet and eternal September effects as the primary driver of this. In my experience the people I interact with IRL haven’t really gotten any stupider. People can still code or solve business problems just as well as they used to. The massive spike in stupidity seems to have occurred mostly on the internet.
I think this is because of 2 effects that reinforce each other in a vicious cycle.
Barriers to entry on the internet have been reduced. A long time ago you needed technical know how to even operate a computer, then thing got easier but you still needed a PC, and spending any amount of time on the internet was still the domain of nerds. Now anyone with a mobile phone can jump on twitter and participate.
Social media platforms are evolving to promote ever dumber means of communication. If they don’t they’re out competed by the ones that do. For example, compare a screenshot of the reddit UI back when it started vs now. As another example, the forums of old made it fairly easy to write essays going back and forth arguing with people. Then you’d have things like facebook where you can still have a discussion, but it’s more difficult. Now you have TikTok and Instagram, where the highest form of discourse comes down to a tie between a girl dancing with small text popups and an unusually verbose sign meme. You can forget about rational discussion entirely.
So I hypothesize that you end up with this death spiral, where technology lowers barriers to entry, causing people who would otherwise have been to dumb effectively to participate, causing social media companies to further modify their platforms to appeal to the lowest common denominator, causing more idiots to join… and so on and so forth. To top it off, I’ve found myself and other people I would call “smart” disconnecting from the larger public internet. So you end up with evaporative cooling on top of all the other aforementioned effects.
The end result is what you see today, I’m sure the process is continuing, but I’ve long ago checked out of the greater public internet and started hanging out in the cozyweb or outside.
I’d put my money on lowered barriers to entry on the internet and eternal September effects as the primary driver of this. In my experience the people I interact with IRL haven’t really gotten any stupider. People can still code or solve business problems just as well as they used to. The massive spike in stupidity seems to have occurred mostly on the internet.
I think this is because of 2 effects that reinforce each other in a vicious cycle.
Barriers to entry on the internet have been reduced. A long time ago you needed technical know how to even operate a computer, then thing got easier but you still needed a PC, and spending any amount of time on the internet was still the domain of nerds. Now anyone with a mobile phone can jump on twitter and participate.
Social media platforms are evolving to promote ever dumber means of communication. If they don’t they’re out competed by the ones that do. For example, compare a screenshot of the reddit UI back when it started vs now. As another example, the forums of old made it fairly easy to write essays going back and forth arguing with people. Then you’d have things like facebook where you can still have a discussion, but it’s more difficult. Now you have TikTok and Instagram, where the highest form of discourse comes down to a tie between a girl dancing with small text popups and an unusually verbose sign meme. You can forget about rational discussion entirely.
So I hypothesize that you end up with this death spiral, where technology lowers barriers to entry, causing people who would otherwise have been to dumb effectively to participate, causing social media companies to further modify their platforms to appeal to the lowest common denominator, causing more idiots to join… and so on and so forth. To top it off, I’ve found myself and other people I would call “smart” disconnecting from the larger public internet. So you end up with evaporative cooling on top of all the other aforementioned effects.
The end result is what you see today, I’m sure the process is continuing, but I’ve long ago checked out of the greater public internet and started hanging out in the cozyweb or outside.