Laurens Hofabsolutely wild that the news that dutch gas prices rose by 30% in a single day did not even manage to crack the top 5 most read stories
like, how? how did we fuck up our information ecosystem this badly?
fucking losing my mind
like have we lost our connection with physical reality that much that we cannot even process anymore what a single-day 30% rise in gas prices means?
its so funny that the wider public is always looking for the 'were doomed' stories on any news thats slightly bad, and when things are indeed apocalyptically bad everyone's like 'eh whatever, itll blow over'
im pretty sure this isnt a funny coincidence but actually a structural factor on how epistemology functions and an indicator of how you can know that things are indeed really bad now
absolutely incredible scenes, WTI trading in a 38 dollar range on a single day
if you needed to have further confirmation that the problem here is that we have fully broken our information environment
Ulrike Hahn@laurenshof agreed: I think we fundamentally broke the link between “how impactful is this” and “how much noise does this make” over the last decades. So a formerly reasonable attention-based indicator (how much are people talking about this, responding to this?) has now lost much, if not most, of its diagnostic value….
@laurenshof I’m also inclined to think that online social media has played a big part in this and that it was a consequential step into a negative feedback loop when the news started reporting on “what people are talking about on Twitter right now” - not only is virality on social media not epistemologically grounded in the right way, the growth of social media undermined the advertising model of legacy media, leading to shrinking resources for direct reporting, and ever greater journalistic reliance on what is being said, which in turn….
@UlrikeHahn yeah 100% to both
wakest likes your bugs ⁂@laurenshof all the people writing news about this too busy riding their bikes and taking public transportation to work?
muppeth@liaizon @laurenshof Yeah it is freaking crazy. People totally lost touch with reality and live in simulation.
Leon Overweel@laurenshof luckily consumers are not directly exposed to day-to-day swings of gas prices. If this settles down in the next few weeks, the impact will be limited compared to e.g. the 2022 gas crisis. So I don't think you need to be losing your mind :)
@leonoverweel there is a tiny bit of difference between day-to-day gas price swings vs asian countries are now all hoarding fuel, our main energy supplier in qatar has turned off production completely and around 16% of global energy supply simply disappeared
@laurenshof of course but there’s also a difference between whether that’s the case for two weeks or six months. Since we don’t know that it’ll be the latter, I don’t think the general populace needs to panic.