0xen 🎩 pfp
0xen 🎩
@0xen
Watching these old Donahue clips (RIP) and once again depressed about how far our speech has devolved over the last 25 years or so. Even the biggest crackpots and lunatics sound articulate and well spoken compared to so-called thought leaders today.
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Leo pfp
Leo
@lsn
I think part of it is before, you could only succeed if you were rhetorically compelling. I’d argue that’s largely been the case for the entirety of human history. Recently, a route began to open up for some smart people, scientists, philosophers And, since the 1990s, it’s become very easy to make money, friends, and status online, without saying a word PayPal had 200 employees at acquisition. Tiny for a $1b co in 90s He manages/d a board/small group at as an investor/Palantir As such, society assigned less status to rhetoric
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0xen 🎩 pfp
0xen 🎩
@0xen
that’s probably partly true but even when you watch videos of dirt farmers from a hundred years ago they speak with so much more clarity with far fewer vocal tics like ‘like’ and ‘um’
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Leo pfp
Leo
@lsn
It’s actually shocking. But where did they get that from? Probably radio? And probably from doing a lot more talking than we did today
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0xen 🎩 pfp
0xen 🎩
@0xen
man I have no idea, lots of things. we get ‘like’ from Southern California ‘valley speak’ that popped up with the mall set in the 80s. Some kind of linguistic contagion there via California mass media machine maybe. Other stuff? Hard to say, myriad things. The internet made it real easy to dogpile so people hedge more, are more calculated so they need more time to think - how will this not get me in trouble.
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