Climate change is still nebulous. It’s like population decline. Few will face the impact of it with anything practical or human until the negative impact personally stares them in the face.
George Floyd protests and riots happened, in large part, because people were bored, unoccupied, and angsty about the world. Human behavior points rarely happen under the influence of a single variable.
If anything, people are more fed up with their daily world, now, than at the time of Floyd. I think that’s a piece of why people kept reporting a sense of impending doom all year.
Now we’ve hit a point where one guy with everything to lose said “enough” and went after a health care CEO. And we have plenty of people in this nation with nothing to lose. I wouldn’t be surprised if stage 4 cancer people started throwing themselves at CEOs.
The wall of inactivity and learned helplessness has broken with Luigi.
They’re not seeing how this scrubbing of entertainment access will impact the masses going forward? Plenty of people will steer away from action if you just give them free distraction.
But here we are, instead, working hard to scrub all free distraction.
Competition is won by those who extract profit now. Those who refrain from profiting even if they want to preserve the ability to profit in the future for whatever reason lose competition and are removed from making decisions. So only the most shortsighted capitalists remain.
I have that, insomniac Lemmy ramblings aside. I’m making a point. There are many individuals out there without that capacity, financially or otherwise.
Art supplies, sewing supplies, woodworking supplies, metalworking supplies, stained glass supplies, even gardening supplies, and all the tools that go with these activities, these are all things that have become quite expensive across the last decade. More so in the last 5 years. That’s the point. It’s not free.
There’s a reason woodworking tools, art supplies, and sewing notions have been locked behind glass or mesh for a while now.
Writing is free. That said, an industry complaint of the last decade is the number of prospective writers is, proportionally, too large compared to active readers of late. And many of those prospective writers don’t read books to feed their craft. I’m sure you’ve noticed the quality decline in fiction, minus a couple notable exceptions.
The point is, what’s free for people to occupy themselves with?
I mean, before the Internet people spent a hell of a lot more time just hanging around with a small group of friends. You don't need to buy expensive tools or reach a prospective audience to do anything like that. Boredom motivates people to find ways to entertain themselves, which has unfortunately been one of the largest casualties of online 'life.'
I'm not attempting to defend the system as they're trying to build it, but rather to seek understanding of why they take these actions without imagining them as hateful, soulless people.