this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

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Considering the proliferation of AI-generated slop, as well as the lines between satire and reality being blurred, I wonder if future historians will have a harder time understanding what was really going on.

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[–] Adderbox76 18 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

My oh my. Check out Mr. Optimist over here thinking that they'll be time to be "historians" in between scavenging for scraps and battling the nuclear mutants for the last bottle of fresh water at the bombed out Tesco.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 hour ago

I was scanning, and thought you said we'd be battling nuclear mutants for the last bottle of Tabasco.

I don't know which version is more probable.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Well la-dee-dah! Look at Mr. "I think humans will still exist in 1000 years" over here. Let's be real, we're on track to extinct ourselves in the next 200 years if we don't make some very difficult and dramatic changes to our behavior.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 hours ago (3 children)

200 years? lmao, look everyone, this guy thinks our planet will support human life for another 200 years. At best another 80.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 minutes ago

I mean, not to be captain optimist here, but human extinction is a bit far. Humans are extremely adaptable, even if they have to carve out a niche in the worst case hellscape they will survive.

Might not exactly be comfortable.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 59 minutes ago (1 children)

The oil runs out in another 30 or 40; things are going to fall apart pretty quickly after that, when we won't be able to get enough food in to maintain cities.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 minutes ago

If we're stupid to the point of fault. Even market pressure would force diversification of clean energy

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

I know, I'm being generous with that 200.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

A “dark age” is really just one where records didn’t survive, not that it was particularly bad. This usually follows a breakdown of power structures but the real loss is that we can’t know what happened.

I’m worried that transitioning so much to fragile digital technology could result in massive amounts of knowledge and culture being inaccessible, like that guy’s hard drive full of Bitcoin.

And it’s not just all of society that will be lost, but family history as well. Photographs and letters survive a long, long time. But without strict preservation and keeping old formats alive my grandkids won’t be able to flip through old photos of my family like I can with an old photo album.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago

Well, with the amount they are attempting to rewrite, if Archive.org goes down, the dark ages shall begin.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

We could lose 99.9% of digital records and what's left would still be far more than the amount of surviving records from any other point in history.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Some kind of dark ages - yes.

I suspect it will be considered the Lunatic Age or the Misinformation Age or the Willfully Ignorant Age or something like that, since its most distinctive characteristic, in retrospect, is likely to be the oddity that the creation of the most efficient and comprehensive information-sharing system the world has yet seen led pretty much directly to a worldwide epidemic of ignorance, stupidity, irrationality, and insanity.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

I've seen "post factual" thrown around the most

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 hours ago

See also: Post-Truth (Wikipedia). I'm depressed that articles like these even exist...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Post modernism way of thinking is inherently subjetivist and in that world every is right if you approach situation from their perspective...

That's where we be now. Really makes it easier for somebody to rule us it seems.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Makes it easier for someone to convince you that they know what's best for you.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I think in a thousand years there won't be any historians to think about it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

... nor much of anything else on Earth, for that matter.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 hours ago

If the dark ages were so called due to the shortage of sources, ours will be called the glare-blind age in contrast.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Depends if you mean dark ages by not a lot of information that survives or economic stagnation.

First one idk but we are fully in an economic stagnation period due to late stage capitalism impeding innovation.

So historians might think that not much happened as in not much that is worth remembering happened.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

Yeah this is exactly what they want. No Voice, Free Exit sounds a lot like no representation and slavery to me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

Once the Internet goes down there's going to be a big dark information hole for sure.