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Have you ever had a creepy guy who hangs around the school desperately trying to impress little kids? Yeah he's the online version.

Every teacher I hear from (US) these days basically says the newest generation coming up is completely screwed. Unreal levels of behavioral issues that are not being addressed at home. Complete lack of engagement with the lesson plan, unfinished assignments all over. They need to curve grades left and right just to get the majority of the class to pass. The parents are more emboldened than ever to make the teachers' lives hell over things they know nothing about and refuse to take responsibility for.

It's easy to brush it off as the standard generational nose-thumbing...but this seems different. Something is really breaking down and I think social media is at the center of it.

I don't think it is social media. It is much more simple: people can't spend time with each other. Employers keep reducing the wages, while maintaining or increasing the amount of work their employees have to do. This means that workers can't invest time into friends or family, which in turn deprives children of healthy role models.

Jackasses like Tate get to influence the children, because there is a void that has been left empty - Tate has enough wealth and time to fill in for society. Work culture is a ravenous beast, forever chasing workers. If you pause, you lose everything. So you might as well sacrifice the time you could spend with family, since you would lose them anyway if you shirk being a breadwinner.

Optimization for the sake of line going up, inevitably destroys everything that surrounds the pillar that society is forced to worship.

Stories like this are what I think of every time the topic of regulating social media comes up.

We know it's programmed to create rage machines. We do, and then people act surprised when social media works as designed.

Good, grbage humans won't pass on their genes

This is totally a diffusion of social media issue. Twenty years ago, the media that kids had available for consumption was age rated. We had agreed as a society that certain things should not be visible to children until they grow up. It was possible to do because it was centralized (TV, movies, radio, print) and it was accountable to regulatory bodies and the rest of society. If a TV channel showed something as shitty as Tate style propaganda, there was institutional pushback, there were letters to the editor, there was someone specific to be targeted for accountability.

With social media being dominated by US style "freedom of speech" algorithms and US style acceptance of the impossibility (or even undesirability) of regulation and with completely unaccountable megacorps running them while giving very minimal if non-existent attention to who is watching what, we have a complete lack of age rating. We have given up on the idea of protecting childhood it seems.

Coupled with every fucking other issue being brought up in this thread, from COVID, to economic issues, to cultural misogyny, there is a perfect storm...

I would say we were doing well but we were doing okay at best

Where are the parents, if my son pulled that shit I would put him a position where he MUST listen to and work for women until he realizes how ridiculous he is.

When I was a kid in the 80s & 90s that's when the parents get brought in.

Let's not pretend like these children aren't having this behavior reinforced by their parents.