Solé’s fantastic and extremely recommendable book “Phase Transitions” covers this as well. Quoting Janssen et al.: “even when the group is faced with negative results, members may not suggest abandoning an earlier course of action, since this might break the existing unanimity.”
“More generally, the underlying problem here is why complex societies might fail to adapt […]. Even if there is some social perception of risk, short-term thinking often prevails when facing long-term vulnerabilities. Such undesirable behavior is often favored by a combination of incomplete understanding of the problem, together with the misleading view that all changes are reversible.”

Yeah but it is, though. Plus the psychological pressure from social media/ FOMO, plus enshittification everywhere, plus the constant undercurrent of wages and job opportunities eroding away from us due to inflation and upper-class greed.
People were happy when mobile phones entered the scene and became affordable. It didn’t take long for employers to use them for asking tasks of us during off-time for profit maximization, though. Not to mention the constant feeling of being spied on and experiencing the gathered data being used for being bombarded with creepily targetted ads.
I’m sorry for today’s youth, growing up thinking this is all perfectly normal and nothing can be done about it.

One of my family members paid something like 60 € to see Michael Jackson in the 90s. I still remember how back then, I thought “what an outrageous price tag.”

The timeless art of seduction

Pink elephants and lemonade
Dear Jessie, hear the laughter running through the love parade

Counterpoint: I still vividly remember a guy ripping a fart in class more than 20 years ago. Maybe because we’ve been writing a test and, up until that point, the classroom had been deadly silent before bursting into laughter.
Or maybe because he did it again, a couple of days later.

Marty would go back to 1994 and play smells like teen spirit at the high school dance

That surely would have made for a different vibe…

The late Jim Shepard would have been my recommendation, bit I might be biased.

Surely that took a lot more practice than doing a cucumber. So I was told.

We don’t need no water, let the motherfucker burn

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face by a gorilla.

The Fartisan

I need to sleep I can’t get no sleep

I’ve not bought anything from Amazon for close to 3 years when I was handed a gift card out of the blue. It took me no less than three hours to shop for 5 pretty standard items because on every page I clicked, my screen was entirely filled with ridiculously trashy products, annoyingly unrelated products, upselling BS and useless AI-generated reviews. And then I had to uncheck the fucking subscriptions they snuck in. How does anyone bear with this, I wonder?

♫ It’s true that all the men you knew were dealers who said they were through

being dealers every time you gave them shelter

I know that kind of man, it’s hard to hold the hand of anyone

who’s reaching for the sky just to surrender ♪

(originally by Leonard Cohen, of course)

I have a feeling that a few steps are missing between trololo and Monty Python… right? guys? Geez, I’m getting old.

It’s all in a day’s work for… bicycle repair man. <snort>

That’s just the way it is.

When Reddit was new, it mentioned Digg a lot.
When Digg was new, it mentioned /. a lot.
When /. was new (yes, I was there, too), it mentioned Usenet a lot.

At some points in time, the likes of The WELL, the Facepunch forums and Metafilter got their own mentions, prompting me to check them out.