I wish Freud was alive today. I can't help but think that the hysterics manifested in mainstream or social media are not actually real, that people wouldn't make such illogical steps if they were alone in an island. Instead they seem to be reactions , rooted in something deeper somewhere that's causing mass hysterias and delusions. It does manifest in the shifting ways of life too, the lack of sex, the lack of humor and the limited ambition shown by the 1-2 latest generations.
I do love Taibbi's writing, even though i think he spends too much time criticising things that soon won't matter
Freud was wrong with almost everything he said. He had merit from a philosophical point of view, he coined terms extremely well, but he is definitely not a scientific, was dangerous for his patients and his theories are still dangerous (your child is an autist because you, poor mother, did not pay enough attention to him! and other rubbish about children rape fantasy and other). Lacan, at least, was not as dangerous (but still a pseudoscientific).
Psychoanalysis is still very much a pseudoscience and is based on even less that the new psychological trend with microexpression and all that jazz.
> limited ambition shown by the 1-2 latest generations
If this is really a thing, then the generation prior would have shown more entrepreneurship, is this the case in the US? It is really to opposite in Europe anyway, so this should be wrong.
Social media, if anything, played a positive role and showed its strengths. Thanks to early warners, some people managed to keep their sanity, some others found flaws in studies, some others were warning people while the media was being partisan, some others taught people how to behave while government and the media were delirious about going/not going to protests/rallies etc. The "media of record" will never admit it, but the internet/social media proved that "access to multifaceted information" dominates over "parroting the elites". People are learning to distrust the mainstream elites, and that's a good thing.
balaji has a beef with mainstream journalists since many months ago, and probably rightly so. I can't help but feel however that this whole outrage is covert advertising for Clubhouse which (even though i am not famous enough to use) seems basically a repackaging of the decades-old concept of phone hotlines.
That said, balaji is right, the media overplayed their role as arbiters of truth and are now losing. I d trust my twitter feed better than any paper.
brave's biggest innovation is the introduction of direct payments. i hope that catches on, even if brave fails, because it will truly transform the economics of the internet.
