You can still listen to the radio while driving, many people still do that, I still do that. I agree though that in essence streaming is a very alienating experience.
Many people do, but I don't get it. The typical station has a tiny playlist that they have had on repeat for a decade now. I haven't turned the radio on in years, and never was a regular listener, but I can still tell you what song will be next if you turn it on (for the stations that are played most often in public)
Yeah, but most current corporate radio sucks. It’s not a human broadcasting and allowing their idiosyncratic tastes to sneak in. Nationwide each station is just shuffling one of three or four playlists of inoffensive songs picked because nobody hates it (but nobody loves it)
> ? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployme
A proletarian revolution would be a good start, not sure what this ideologue writer was on about. History is far from having ended, change can still happen through the union of individual wills.
It's all well and good to say "this collective action would change the bad status quo", but even if you're 100% correct, unless you can point to ways to work toward said collective action, it's still pretty useless. You're not actually helping to change the bad status quo.
> (i.e. loud and busy environments with many strangers, often physically closer than comfortable) is unnatural to begin with.
That's very natural when it comes to life in an urban setting. Love it or hate it, we wouldn't have been here now (I'm talking from a civilizational pov) without us humans moving into the cities.
I think the argument is that the urban setting itself is ancestrally unnatural. Only a tiny proportion of humans lived in areas full of strangers in close proximity until the last hundred or two hundred years, which is not long enough for any related changes to spread widely given generation length.
I would even argue that being surrounded by people is a natural state. Being isolated in a suburban home or an automobile is probably just as unnatural as being “surrounded by strangers”.
Our ancient ancestors probably did all of the following within eyesight and earshot of around 40 people:
Privacy and isolation are a very modern phenomenon. Even in the 19th century social norms around fornication and defecation and the privacy expected are much different than today.
Edit: I’m also deeply fascinated by the ability of historical sociolinguistics to give us insight into cultural attitudes towards different topics. Consider the evolution of and the attitude towards the expletives “fuck” and “Jesus Christ!”
But those 40 people were likely more or less consistent and known to you and you also had direct or implied trust built up with them.
That's fundamentally different from an anonymous mass of people in a city. I've seen and heard much more than 40 people (many of them different every day) before I even reach the office in the morning.
> you also had direct or implied trust built up with them
This part is definitely not true. By all I read about the history, the abusive or hostile "I cant escape" situation was simple fact of life. They get less prevalent when you can leave easily, more prevalent when you are dependent.
> But those 40 people were likely more or less consistent
Not necessarily, people started to organize into larger groups basically whenever they could.
Two extremes, equally unnatural, was simply my point.
Either you have to trick your mind that the people who are going about the same rituals with you shoulder-to-shoulder are part of the same tribe as you: using the same bus, coffee shop, elevator.
Or you have to trick your mind that being completely alone and going hours, sometimes days, without opening your mouth to communicate with someone or exercise the part of your brain that reads facial cues or even smell the hormones of another human (good or bad) is also somehow okay.
Having done both (2 major metros, as well as suburban and WFH life), I’ve found the former to be easier for me, personally. I also find suburban and rural people to be generally more misanthropic than urban people, which of course has some selection bias. Exurban people seem to be the most misanthropic, by far (shout out Dallas-Fort Worth).
But the point is, being surrounded by people day-in and day-out doesn’t seem to me to make people misanthropic on aggregate - otherwise cities would be an even worse place to exist. It’s the humans that make it bearable.
> we wouldn't have been here now (I'm talking from a civilizational pov) without us humans moving into the cities.
What do you have in mind specifically?
Edit: I'm aware that statistically, there's more inventions in metropolitan areas. However I'm not sure how much of that we can really attribute to causal effects that are unique to cities, especially today. Obviously, many universities are in metropolitan areas, but on the other hand, we have many tools for remote collaboration that we didn't have 200 years ago. So I'm not sure if cities are not an outdated concept.
It does save a purpose. For example in the OP's non-clustering example all of the Britain is covered in dots, I'm talking at the highest zoom level, while the Atlas Obscura version, the one that uses clustering, does a better job of providing data by mentioning how many points that general area contains.
In such cases I generally prefer displaying counts of points in defined areas, rather than using clustering (e.g., when zoomed out, show counts per country, and when zoomed in more show counts for states or equivalent sub-national areas).
Then, the dots should be less than 100% opacity, which helps convey density wherever they overlap. It's feasible in overpass turbo with its rather simplistic MapCSS, so it should be possible in proper web mapping libraries.
If you have less than hundreds of thousands of points, you can probably get away with drawing individual dots on the map. Computer screens are high res.
It's technically feasible to just draw all the individual dots but it doesn't necessarily convey the information better.
When individual points are drawn close together, they're hard to discern without zooming right in. Even with additive opacity, they max out quite quickly once a couple of dots overlap.
Some of nerds earned a lot, a lot of money, some of the other nerds they employed also earned a lot of money, and they all decided to screw up the world we all live in. Fuck the nerds! The jocks back in the '70s and the '80s were right, these nerds should have been bullied to hell and back, maybe that way we wouldn't have had today's Musks and Thiels, shitheads that are bringing this world over the edge.
A society that creates bullies and thinks they are right is the same one that big surprise, doesn't give a shit about you. But you're stupid enough to be a cheerleader to bullies out of envy so you deserve whatever you get from it.
You look like the one of the nerds that got bought by the likes of Thiel and Musk, congrats on that. Interesting how you people still have the guts to bring up the “society” you supposedly care so much about, the same society your lot is so happy to fuck over for some extra financial juice. When will you people stop? What it will mage you people stop? Genuine questions, both of them.
I was mesmerised at the author being away from his computer for a short-while and then, when coming back, seeing the AI agent having opened up a browser window. Meanwhile we all have to use the fricking 2FA almost anywhere now, plus the crazier and crazier rules when it comes to passwords. I'm mentioning the latter because these type of people were the same ones who were pushing 2FA down our throats around 2017-2019 (including on forums like this one), and look at them now.
The representative system in the US is all but dead when it comes to high-power politics, this second Trump presidency has vigorously shown that. They weren't of that much use before, also, apart from blocking a few essential things here and there. They're also not at the Caligula's horse in the Senate moment, but they're rapidly going that way.
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