These are not all directly related to the world of conspiracy and include a lot of personal opinion based on personal scrutiny. I’ll link some sources as I go but take this mostly as speculation.
People space themselves out betterA botched pandemic response can help in one way. There’s never been a good reason beyond profit to do things like build a sports arena to pack a city’s worth of people into a small space. But even something like standing in line at the bank or grocery store has changed - people don’t crawl right up behind each other like they used to. The arguments about mask mandates and forced policies continue, and I doubt people do it purely out of respect for other’s personal space as much as being trained for a lengthy period of time and growing accustomed to it.
People are a lot crankier
Like fussy toddler level crankier on a daily basis. We haven’t adapted to every year being another heat record year.
I wish my job was sitting in the air conditioned comfort of my parent’s basement making up ridiculous stories of direct energy weapons and how being a bigot is going to make everybody happier. It’s like there was a previous civilization on our planet that traveled to Alpha Centauri to grift off them in the Pleistocene Era, and now they’re police are trying to force a confession out of us with their heat ray.
The insurance industry is collapsing, outright admitting that they aren’t going to service areas hit the worst by climate change phenomena. Real Estate is loaded with house flippers that want to turn an elderly person’s affordable home into an overpriced debt trap and a fractured property management industry struggling with commercial space downsizing. The stock market is way too volatile and retirement portfolios are stagnating while people are borrowing from long term savings to get by.
So you lost value, you’ll have to work longer instead of retiring in dignity, and forced to interact more with all the heat cranky people you wanted to get away from. Unless you’re in the 1%, then you get to use your money to donate to a political grifter to complain about how you shouldn’t be taxed fairly and supplement the electoral process with encouraging cognitively biased truth seekers who think everything is a hoax. That sounds fair.
The eye of the conspiracy storm is passing
There was an interlude where the violent content was dialed back, some social media policies targeting extremist conspiracies were enacted, and some of the big names were held accountable. What did you think? They were just going to fold up shop and give up? No way, misinformation for profit has been around way to long for that. They’re gearing up for round two, having adapted to the new political climate. Which like the financial crisis hasn’t changed as learning from mistakes is not an option. Buckle up. 2024 is going to be a record breaking year for conspiracy content.
But nobody can pay for it. We know how to turn oceans into fresh water. We know how to give terraforming Mars a good go. We know how to do fusion power on paper. Etc… And there’s going to be lots of other stuff we’ll learn to do that nobody can pay for. My skeptical and pessimistic brain encountered this story:
Great! It’s going to do wonders for structural engineering! And that will mean that when the time comes to deconstruct/recycle it will be like finding out about plastics all over again. More stuff accumulating taking up the finite space available. Fortunately, I was able to distract my skepticism and reawaken my inner nerd to appreciate how ingenious we can be as a species. Maybe someday someone can figure out a scientific way to stop grifting from taking such a big hunk of funds off the income stream.
I dont have the exact lineage, but there’s a long line of some particular dog breed being declared a public risk. The amount of money people squander on their pets is staggering, yet understandable. People suck. It’s only natural to look for companionship with some other type of interactive living creature. And people suck so bad that there are those that don’t have a fucking clue how to properly take care of another nonhuman living creature. So we’ve gone through all kinds of different large breeds of dog to project our own empathy failures on to. Bloodhounds, Dobermans, German Shepherds, Pit Bulls, Chows. Good news for the grifters, people have made good money by overblowing the viciousness of some breed.
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