As Douglas Adams and xkcd #1227 have pointed out, the older generations have complained about this sort of thing since Plato. However, I do not believe this observation settles the matter, because it does not seriously contend with the null hypothesis: that we really have been steadily enshittifying the human experience since Plato.

Who has the right of it? Do the new generations simply not know what they are missing. Or is there something in human nature that makes us unavoidably crotchety as we get older and, thus, not to be taken too seriously? In my opinion, it is simply an open mystery.

On the one hand, many tangible, measurable things have improved over the last 2000 years, or, indeed, since the 90's. Steven Pinker has made this point somewhat convincingly by looking at unambiguously positive things like reduced infant mortality.

On the other hand, every single generation can give detailed accounts of how much more real and alive and authentic the world was a few decades ago. The accounts have similarities across the generations, but they are also rooted in specifics. To argue that we're all mis-remembering or failing to appreciate what the new decade has to offer is to insist on a rather fantastic level of self-doubt. If our entire lived experience is this untrustworthy, it kind of makes it impossible to rule on anything - good OR bad. Why should we default to trusting the younger generation?

I think the surrounding technological context of our age has brought this long-simmering matter to a boil. Now that our electronic communication is so sophisticated that we can essentially build "anything", it starts to re-focus our attention from "CAN we build it" to "SHOULD we build it". This question about digital society is complementary to the broader, long-standing civilizational question. Have the trillions of hours the human race has expended shaping our society resulted in _better_ life, or just life with a deeper tech tree?

One novelty of our time is how certain human enterprises play out at 10x speed in cyberspace. This lets us watch the entire lifecycle as they Rise and Fall, over and over. This lends perspective, and allows patterns to emerge. Indeed, this is exactly how Doctorow came to coin the term enshittification. If there's any truth to the life-really-is-getting-worse theory, you'd want to find some causal mechanism - some constant factor that explains why we've been driving things in the wrong direction so consistently. Digital life lets us see enough trials to start building such an account. You can imagine starting to understand the "physics" of why all human affairs eventually lead to an Eternal September. Wherever brief pockets of goodness pop up, they are like arbitrage opportunities: they tautologically attract more and more people trying to harvest the goodness until it's pulverized - a tragedy of the commons. Perhaps some combination of population growth and the inevitable depletion of Earth's natural resources lead to such a framework.

Whatever you think about it, I mostly just wish people would acknowledge that it is an unresolved debate and treat it as such. It is critical to understanding what it is worth spending our time on, and it is the kernel of many comparatively superficial disagreements (e.g. the red-blue culture war in US politics).

> On the other hand, every single generation can give detailed accounts of how much more real and alive and authentic the world was a few decades ago.

I don’t know that this is true, and I doubt it meant the same thing to Plato as it did to us; I read somewhere that in ancient times, nostalgia would have been for the world of the gods, not a specific time and place.

The thirties and fourties’ were probably not more alive and authentic than the 50’s and 60’s. The 1920’s were a cultural peak that retreated until the 1960’s, and prior to the Industrial Revolution, things didn’t change fast enough for like decades to be significant. The original documented example of nostalgia was about soldiers nostalgic for home, not explicitly their youth or another time.

All these feelings, “nostalgia” are going to hit different without shared cultural experiences, and changing technological and aesthetic context,