Television rotted the brains of a good portion of the boomer generation. Ditto for garbage like People magazine. If you watch some old TV ads from the 80s, it’s scary at how bad they are. The variety of content from modern, connected platforms definitely can be harmful but it leaves people less susceptible to manipulation than a dozen TV stations and yellow journalism.

> it leaves people less susceptible to manipulation

less ?

We went from a few selected and hand crafted local propaganda sources to world wide fully automated propaganda machines...

If I had to choose I'd chose the former personally. Information is always opinionated but i'd rather have my local flavor of propaganda over 3 channels and 2 newspapers rather than having foreign propaganda from all around the world drilling in the heads of my neighbours and family members 24/7.

Yet anti-war protests were orders of magnitude stronger in the 1980s, Iran Contra was treated like real scandal [1] and politicians occasionally had to resign for misbehavior. Political awareness was much stronger than now and economic issues had far more screen time.

The legacy media was better though than now, despite obvious missteps like hyping up the second Iraq war.

[1] No one would care these days about old weapons being sold to Iran to finance a coup in, say, Venezuela. Of course one would use a coin scam to generate slush funds nowadays.

What is the argument being made here? That we've done stupid and damaging things to our brains in the past so we just stop worrying and just double down?

Reading this, I have no idea which of the thousands of new media silos you inhabit. But they all tell different mutually exclusive narratives.

So statistically, even if one is purely honest and accurate, most likely you aren’t in that one particular silo.

As dumb as People magazine is/was, it is not algorithmically optimized to hook its readers through constant notifications and rewards. I'd say social media has the edge in terms of its ability to cause sleep deprivation, cognitive fragmentation, and addiction, especially in kids.

Been seeing this argument more and more. Is there a name for it?

“Bad thing X has been happening forever.

AI _guarantees_ X will exponentially get worse, but it lets me do (arguably) good thing Y so it’s okay.”

Past media may have prepped us with some brain rot that's now causing people to prostrate themselves to the tech giants in exchange for not having to work as hard. But that doesn't mean that an acceleration of social media, slop, and loss of transparency on the information we take in isn't going to be extremely worse.

Television rotted the brains of a good portion of the boomer generation.

Don't discount the effect of lead in paint, pipes, gasoline, etc. It's not a surprise that Republicans try to roll back regulations that remove lead.

Exactly. The article should just say “Mass consumption of media causes brain rot” because since 1900 that’s all it’s doing.

Radio programs that caused mass hysteria. TV advertising that caused people to cook plastics into their food. The advertisements for hair loss. For ED. For testosterone, for bunions, warts, insomnia, apnea, eczema, droopy eye, eye bags, teeth, dogs teeth, cats bum, extended car warranty, leasing a car, phones, computers, vbros, and all those TikTok “hacks” which are just mcguyver poor people hacks.

Brain rot comes from watching others live their lives…

Get outside, do something.