Comic Strips

That’s the neat part, there isn’t!

But being more serious: I think I can express the feeling of things being particularly worse now in a way that isn’t just recency bias.

Sure, over time technology has improved and that’s generally speaking allowed for better standards of living, at least for the people at the right end of that technology. (Not so great if you’re being conquered because someone shows up with guns for example.) So you could look at the past and say it was worse because materially things like food availability and medicine have become better over time.

But key to this was that all of this was a struggle of humans over nature. To the extent things were bad, there were tangible things we could do to improve.

These days, so many of our problems are self-inflicted and technology and economic development mostly makes them worse. Climate change is the obvious big one, but then there’s stuff like:

• Weapons have become increasingly destructive and centrally usable. A small number of people can cause a lot more damage than they ever could in the past.

• Surveillance technology invades our privacy in a way that’s unprecedented in human history.

• Automation, communications, and transportation technology have made workers less and less powerful and therefore more subject to abuse and artificial poverty. This is one of the more messed up things about capitalism. Technology gets better and rather than getting the benefits of that progress, it actually hurts a lot of people.

• Advances in science and technology, particularly data science, allow the powerful to hyper-optimize the bad things they were always doing or enables them to do things they’ve wanted to do.

• A financialized economy creates economic catastrophes where people go homeless or starve without any actual changes to material conditions. The numbers got screwed up or the investors panicked and now everything sucks for no reason?

• More generally, we can produce enough of the necessities of life for everyone, but capitalism ensures that those necessities won’t make it to people. Capitalism depends on scarcity. If you had a house you wouldn’t need to pay a landlord. If you had food you wouldn’t need to pay food companies. If you had both you wouldn’t need to go work and put up with awful conditions. We’ve solved our most fundamental problems and yet because of the interests of the system and those in power, that progress gets held back.

In the past, even if things were rough now, you could maybe look forward to them improving. Now it feels like the walls are closing in. Unless we actively do something about it, things are going to get worse for most people as more and more wealth accumulates in private hands, as we become subject to increasingly powerful forms of control, and as the powerful destroy the environment we need to live.