{"id":61143,"date":"2021-02-16T01:00:31","date_gmt":"2021-02-16T06:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=61143"},"modified":"2022-04-07T09:41:06","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T13:41:06","slug":"qotd-homo-electronicus-and-the-falling-murder-rate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2021\/02\/16\/qotd-homo-electronicus-and-the-falling-murder-rate\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Homo electronicus<\/em> and the falling murder rate"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It should be clear to even the dullest social observer that human software has well and truly outstripped our hardware. We’re not built for the world we’ve built. This has been happening for a long time, of course, but it has really taken off recently. Note how hard it is not to watch tv, for instance. Even if you don’t have one in your home, go to a bar, an airport, hell, go to the grocery store \u2014 there are blinking screens everywhere, and it takes serious effort not to watch them. Our hardware interprets bright flashing things as a threat \u2014 can’t be helped. If you’ve been away from civilization for a few days, like I was recently, you’ll experience fatigue, even nausea when you first come back into town. The low-level-but-constant effort<\/em> it takes to override your hardware when surrounded by blinking screens wears you out.<\/p>\n

If you don’t feel like going all Thoreau, you can test the effect by simply writing your comments to this post out longhand, and then waiting an hour before typing them up. I bet you’ll find it mildly annoying no matter what, but if you’ve really got some thoughts on this matter, by then end of the hour you’ll be something close to furious. You’ve been rewired, comrade. You’re homo electronicus<\/em>. We all are.<\/p>\n

This stuff is recent \u2014 really<\/em> recent. There was a limit to how screen-addled even the infamous “latchkey kids” of the 1980s could be. I had “latchkey kid” buddies, and although we had everything we needed to veg out in front of the tube in the very best Gen Z style \u2014 video games, sugary snacks, cable \u2014 we couldn’t sit and play Atari all day. I don’t mean that we didn’t; we were no smarter than any other boys; we sure as hell didn’t do anything for our health. I mean we couldn’t<\/em>. Playing video games gave us ants in the pants \u2014 my Mom always knew when I’d been over at Steve’s \u2014 and eventually it got to the point where we had to put the joystick down and go throw around a football or something.<\/p>\n

These days, the inability to play Nintendo for hours on end means you’ve got ADHD. Pass the Ritalin.<\/p>\n

Three things made homo electronicus<\/em>:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. modern medicine<\/li>\n
  2. instant communications<\/li>\n
  3. permanent caloric surplus.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Ritalin is actually one of the more benign examples. Back in the days when we were allowed to notice such things, a certain kind of social critic pointed out that falling murder rates have very little to do with crime reduction. Instead, it’s almost all attributable to advances in emergency medicine. It’s much tougher for Shitavious to kill<\/em> D’L’eondrae over a pair of sneakers these days. The ER docs patch the victim up, and so what would’ve been murder one is now mere ADW, which means \u2014 Soros-funded DAs being what they are \u2014 both victim and perp are soon back on the streets, ready for round two. This idiot rapper<\/a>, for instance, survived being shot nine times. That’s not nine separate shootings, mind you, that’s nine slugs in one incident. Granted the slipshod motherfuckers who capped him need to work on their aim, but surviving even nine flesh wounds from modern firearms is one hell of a testimony to the power of modern medicine …<\/p>\n

    … a power that does not, I suggest, conduce to positive eugenic outcomes.<\/p>\n

    Severian, “Recent Evolution”, Rotten Chestnuts<\/em><\/a>, 2020-09-28.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    It should be clear to even the dullest social observer that human software has well and truly outstripped our hardware. We’re not built for the world we’ve built. This has been happening for a long time, of course, but it has really taken off recently. Note how hard it is not to watch tv, for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,66,28,41,13],"tags":[930,343,262,1205,1462,101],"class_list":["post-61143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming","category-health-science","category-media","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-1980s","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-culture","tag-generationx","tag-severian","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-fUb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61143"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61143\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64048,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61143\/revisions\/64048"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}