Intro
Next time you’re out at a restaurant, look around at families, couples, people by themselves. What do you notice? Is it more like this first or second image below?
How does these scenes compare to even the year 2010? 2000?
Is the group engaging with each other? Or are they more interested in the most recent snake oil that Kim Kardashian is selling on Instagram?
Look at people waiting in line at the market/bank/etc. too. Or walking down the street. Or on the train. Or even at social events…
People have become one with their cell phones. The phone is simply an extension of the human that’s holding it. We’re not quite at cyborg levels but we’re also not that far off.
Soon, Elon Musk wants to put a chip in your brain.
In conjunction with this rise in cyborg-ism, people seem to be a whole lot stupider too.
Not just their (and my, to be honest) attention spans, but their brains have been rewired to seek short-term dopamine hits. They can’t focus on anything for more than 30 seconds so as a result they lack the ability to think critically about a topic.
This ties into many topics I write about – the lack of both critical and relational thinking prevents people from thinking deeply about their lives, what is reality, and many things. To think critically about how states like Florida and Texas remained essentially restriction-less during the so-called pandemic, while other states and countries were the opposite, yet health metrics look very similar – this requires an attention span of more than 30 seconds.
As technology becomes more ubiquitous in everyday life, the trend seems clear – people will continue to get stupider. But there’s some hope as well.
Are people just stupider in general?
The public education (indoctrination) system was never really designed to create critical thinkers. It was created to provide the industrial machine with workers, as George Carlin called them,
From grade school to universities, it’s evident that the classes cater to the lowest common denominator. ‘Nobody can be left behind’. Grading on a curve. It’s called ‘grade inflation’ and even high level universities such as Harvard have been practicing this for years. I read that the median grade at Harvard is in A- now.
The students are certainly more ‘woke’ than before, but in my experience they’re certainly not smarter.
I’ve worked with plenty of people from so-called prestigious universities and while they proved they can recite/remember information for a specific college test, which is a lot of what university has become, they’re majorly lacking in any common sense. They followed the societal script and kissed the right asses to make it where they are.
Just because they’ve been indoctrinated into Gender Theory and Marx, and received their ‘A-’ grades doesn’t mean they understand anything about how the world really works. They haven’t gone through any real hardships or rites of passage.
An article from CNN in 2018 lends some credence to the fact that people are getting stupider,
IQ scores have been steadily falling for the past few decades, and environmental factors are to blame, a new study says.
The research suggests that genes aren’t what’s driving the decline in IQ scores, according to the study, published Monday.
Norwegian researchers analyzed the IQ scores of Norwegian men born between 1962 and 1991 and found that scores increased by almost 3 percentage points each decade for those born between 1962 to 1975 – but then saw a steady decline among those born after 1975.
The article continues,
“It’s not that dumb people are having more kids than smart people, to put it crudely. It’s something to do with the environment, because we’re seeing the same differences within families,” he said.
These environmental factors could include changes in the education system and media environment, nutrition, reading less and being online more, Rogeberg said.
The last point about being online more is what I’m positing here. The other factors undoubtedly make a difference, but I think there’s a clear relationship between more tech and less brains.
The article concludes with this,
“In my view, we need to recognize that as time changes and people are exposed to different intellectual experiences, such as changes in the use of technology, for example social media, the way intelligence is expressed also changes. Educational methods need to adapt to such changes,” Morris said.
I don’t think this guy has been on Twitter recently.
Intelligence isn’t only expressed differently, it has clearly regressed. It creates an environment where long-form thought processes can’t be expressed, and thus results in clickbait attempts to get one’s point across in as little characters as possible.
On the other hand, podcasts have emerged from technology and this has revolutionized the world in many ways. Think of Joe Rogan’s reach and how he can mold public opinion. There is a desire for ideas, expressed in long-form content, that push the preconceived notions that people may have. To challenge their thinking. But unfortunately the attention span of many isn’t designed for a two hour podcast.
Also, the world has become so polarized that any hint of a fact/opinion the listener doesn’t like means the podcast is turned off. And the echo chambers continue, in fact getting more polarized.
If we extrapolate this to even 5-10 years from now, what will this all even look like? Combined with some climate lockdowns as I’ve written about, or another fake pandemic (or a real one), and reliance on tech will only increase. It’s a strange thought experiment.
What’s the solution?
The world is clearly becoming more digitalized.
Tech has brought us decentralized cryptos that have unprecedented potential for disruption. This can bring a lot of freedom with it. It’s also brought various online platforms that allow pockets of people to connect and perhaps bring their relationships to the real world too. To then form communities of like-minded people.
There’s a lot of good that has, and will, come from tech. I’m not a ‘Skynet is 10 years away and will kill us all’ kind of guy.
Tech has also brought us the idea of 15 Minute Cities as I’ve gone into depth about. This ‘sustainability’ push is the big agenda item for the upcoming years.
Tech also enable the COVID lockdowns as well. Without Zoom and other tools, the global economy wouldn’t have been able to withstand that many people staying at home. The parasite class isn’t fully ready for most of the useless eaters to perish just yet. But consider how prior respiratory viruses didn’t shut down the world – the tech wasn’t ready for such policies to go into effect. COVID policies were enabled by tech.
This infrastructure is being used to enslave us, just as it has the potential to liberate us. There’s a yin and yang, as is the case with just about everything.
I think a big part of the solution is to first recognize how, as I’m positing, as tech advances, people get stupider. From there we can figure out how to limit the bad side effects while maximizing the positive changes it can bring.
Don’t just give your three year kid a cell phone after you get home and call that ‘parenting’. That’s clearly creating a population of stupider people.
Maybe it’s not using any tech 30 minutes before bed. Or putting the phone on airplane mode and outside of your reach while in bed.
It’s also saying ‘no’ to the 15 Minute Cities being forced upon the public - these are are analogous to a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s saying no to vaxx passes and digital health IDs managed by technocrats without our best interests at heart. It’s saying no to CBDCs.
Point being, we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater regarding smart phones, and tech in general.
But the trend I see across the world is that more tech is just breeding generation after generation of ever-stupider people.
And if we consider what the parasite class wants – a dumbed down population instead of critical thinking and able-bodied population – it frightens me a bit.
Let’s see how this plays out in the coming years. A part of me just wants to get some land and unplug from the majority of it, though.
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