I don’t have their numbers, but this isn’t the first place I’ve seen similar quoted. First one I found through some friends’ discussion was this, which puts us, at a quick glance, at around a third of last year’s total(still plenty bad).
To your first point, the nature of communicating right now, particularly on the internet, means there is no room to have two different voices:
You can’t have an “inside voice” (communicating to those who already agree with you and reinforcing micro-cultural support) and an “outside voice” (communicating with everyone else, potentially finding or convincing new supporters); every statement is heard by everyone and is, de facto, outside voice.
And that’s only for people who would otherwise care to differentiate— the overall culture views conflict as a virtue, and so rewards people who “tell it like it is,” ignoring the fact that you can tell it like it is in ways that don’t maximize belligerence and alienation.
I think this is ignoring the seas of dross that have fallen away in the past. There have always been bad movies, and unoriginal movies, some of them doing quite well at the box office(used as a metric to show that people were showing up to see them). We don’t hold a lot of them in popular memory because we don’t watch them anymore, and what’s left from those eras are the movies of sufficient quality or resonance that we continue to watch them.
The system has a number of issues that are well trod, and certain pitfalls which are inherent, but hanging a lack of quality or unoriginality entirely on capitalism is overselling it.
I would posit that a lack of moderation, or a form of monomania is a bigger culprit here. Too much focus on the business side can stifle creativity, but too much focus on the creative side can result in sprawling, unfinished messes. With too much focus on safety we can be stigmatised from action, but with too much focus on action we can lose our humanity in favor of feeding the gears of progress.
This accounts for the bean counters, but doesn’t grant them the power of being the one true reason for everything being bad.
A lot of the internet survives by pattern and habit. Pattern, habit, and the hope, founded or not, that things might get better with a site you’ve been using for years.
With a fair cohort moving here to escape the creep of corporate internet, it doesn’t seem, on the face of it, like they’re looking for drama. Saying they are is a handy way of dismissing them out of hand, though.
That went from zero to apocalypse very quickly.
I think you’ve been chasing the news dragon too long and too hard. Past a point, it doesn’t make you more informed, just… sadder. More given to misanthropy and despair.
We’re here, and we’re not all bad. Most of us want the same things: health, happiness, love, and camaraderie. We want those things for the people we care about— sometimes more than for ourselves.
The vast, vast majority of us are just people. We get caught up in things, and we forget it sometimes, but that’s a people thing too. And so is helping— when tragedy strikes, or those times we create tragedy, people are also the ones running toward the danger and uncertainty to help save those who cannot save themselves.