Comment by advael

I think half of this is well-reasoned and insightful but it commits a couple of enormous confounds when trying to explain the general sense of stagnation

One is the economic side of things. Like me, this author has a very US-centric view of things, and to be fair, much of the world often seems to. However, a crucial factor in the US economy now is inequality, concentration of power at the high end, and purchasing power and quality of life essentially rotting at the low end. The vast majority of people in the US do not give a single flying fuck about the GDP, and they are correct not to, it's become a useless metric for their purposes. Whatever the economists say about broad aggregates, a lot of people are struggling right now. The job market is chaotic and, for most jobs, less lucrative in real purchasing power. Even relatively educated younger people probably can't afford a house. Life expectancy has declined for the first time since we've been rigorously measuring it. Companies can just permanently and unilaterally raise the price of groceries or TV or crucial medicines because they operate as cartels. Your precarious job also provides your flimsy shield against the absolute nightmare that is ever dealing with the medical system. Even in the 2000s the average person could get bankrupted from a single medical emergency. But now that's still true except that's on top of more baseline precarity. A lot of this got muted by people being mezmerized by the density of the network increasing. Go to any living busy city and you will notice that happy people are not on their phones 24/7, but so many people are. You never meet those people IRL because of course you don't. I've met them. I seem a lot nicer in person. Some of the perma-online aren't as mean in person, but they also can't hold a conversation very well. Their life is online because that's what they can safely afford and do with their time. And as concentration of power has tried to squeeze more blood from a stone, as those goods and services we who touch grass also saw get shittier and more invasive and annoying, this further immiserated people for whom they were and still are more important

Also, destabilization of the world is real. There natural disasters at unprecedented scale every year. There are huge migrant crises that come from people fleeing natural disasters, wars that indirectly result as resources become more scarce, pogroms that follow the wars, and this in turn leads to populist nationalism that stokes bigotry and has significantly destabilized the actual governments of several countries

A lot of misery and paralysis are amplified by network effects as described in this paper. I'd even believe network density accounts for some of it on its own. But also, there is actual misery to be amplified at a pretty catastrophic scale right now for reasons that are not just because the internet. And moving to dense social medias concentrated by enormous corporate information-brokers is not some accident of history, those companies still make decisions that both maintain and exploit those network properties

A good mathematical shiny object is alluring because it's fun to reason about and math seems so powerful and it gets to have unambiguous truths that you can program about and so I think a lot of people find a mathematical model that looks explanatory and it dominates the picture for them. Maybe people are so upset because information propagates so fast and it's all a blur. And like, again I partially buy that. I've felt that. Also, I think some people dark forest because sometimes internet drama escalates and finds their house and sends swat teams there. Maybe we could sparsify our networks, but we are still cranking lots of voltage through lots of nodes and many of the connections are not just missing but badly frayed and kinda sparking out and flopping about on the street