this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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Microblog Memes
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People have always complained about how new tech warps people’s minds. Like back in the day there were people saying the same thing about books when the printing press was invented
And they had a point. While the printing press (not books, those are way older) was a tool that could be used for good, many quickly realized that it gave propagandists a whole new set of tools to manipulate people with. Newspapers had a ridiculous amount of opinion-making power for quite a while there, they just got replaced by radio, TV, and then social media and now LLMs.
What if very powerful people are literally using tech to warp people's minds on purpose?
You mean like gasp writing subverting books?!
I mean like literally controlling who people talk to and how often, and without most people being aware of how much they are being controlled.
Information always comes from somewhere, that's why they banned books (& "ideas") and promoted "their ideas". You can't talk about democracy, equality, ... if it hasn't been presented to you as an Idea. Old as the world!
Tiktok and ChatGPT
The other day I heard a Joe Walsh song playing from a coworker's phone on break, and I was ready to excitedly nerd out over classic rock with someone.
But my coworker went, "Who? It's a TikTok," and my enthusiasm deflated like a balloon.
I guess we're both showing our age. Sigh
Because it does.
Ask a 20yo to do simple math without using a calculator.
The more "helping" technology we rely on, the stupider we become.
Ask a 20yo from the 70s to use Excel. Nobody could do that back then. How stupid.
It's an equally wrong argument.
People's skills adapt to what they need frequently. If they need something, they will learn how to do it and they will know how to do it. If they don't need it, they will lose it. Why would you want to keep maintaining a skill you don't need? It doesn't make you a better person.
You went backwards, i went forwards, slight difference there.
People are losing basic cognitive skills.
People are losing/not learning skills they don't need. That's it. They learn other skills instead, that they do need.
Everyone has basic photography and photo editing skills. Something most people really didn't have in the 70s. Most people know how to use a smartphone or a PC, again not something that the average person could do in the 70s.
Then again, in the 1890s most people knew how to handle a horse and hardly anyone knew how to control a car back then.
Even back in the late 1990s a large portion of the adults were afraid to touch a computer, because they thought it was some arcane magic, and now that's not an issue any more.
In the 80s and 90s, calligraphy was a quite common skill. Nowadays it's not necessary any more because if I want text to look nice, I print it.
There's no such thing as a "basic cognitive skill" that everyone needs to have in every circumstance throughout world history. Because stuff changes and skills that were super important 30 years ago just aren't nowadays.
Case in point, to return to your original argument: It was a common thing for pupils in the early 2000s to ask their teachers why they need to be able to do long division if they can just use a calculator instead, and the common answer was "You won't have a calculator in your pocket all the time". Well, we do now.
When common core math was introduced across the US, I wanted to know what all the hubbub was about, so I looked into it. Funny that, despite so many parents decrying it, a few instruction pages ended up giving me (as an adult) the number sense that hadn't fully developed from my time in school. I use constructs from it all the time now and mental math has never been easier.
Calculators are great tools, but being able to do quick math in your head before everyone else can finish punching the numbers in makes people wonder if you have super powers.