China’s Youth Are Quitting the Rat Race to ‘Let It Rot’

Yep. There's a lot of Chinese punk, post-punk, goth, New Wave etc etc etc. sadly, outside of China you don't hear much about it because of the old firewall and of course language barriers.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/j_dq-tQuNrA?si=3tEzKqRpgVUlm2yn

https://piped.video/toaZqu_4hMw?si=1XQP0yKpz3rsGTD0

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

Jesse what the fuck are you talking about?

Surely this is sarcasm.

That would be awesome

Got any good examples of this?

I do know that between 1950 and 2000 poverty and starvation dropped like a stone. I havent been watching closely enough to tell for the past couple decades. I don't mean to sound cynical, but it can be hard to tell what's slavery and what's improvement of living standards through the media and on such short timescales

I know theyre installing a ton of solar/wind. Superbundance could happen there and that could be great. I got my fingers crossed.

How's agriculture doing?

I think they're very well positioned with electric cars and are going to take marketshare from everyone else in that industry.

I hope they quit killing the sea and bossing around their neighbors

Their effots in Africa are probably going to benefit them greatly. I hope they arent doing to Africa whatthre US did with South America in early/mid 20th century... with the saddling of unpayable debts, extracting resources and installing viscious dictators

I read recently OPECy folks are openly conspiring to flood Africas market with cheap and shitty fossil fuel power plants and cars to expand the oil market. It'd be rad someone flooded it with cheaper and better electric cars/heatpumps and renewable power. I wish the US/Europe would

Lol! This piss-take xD

Even marxists don't simplify the classes as much as that diagram suggests. It's missing peasants, artisans and the petty bourgeois. It's also never been as simple as capitalist vs working class. Capitalists regularly fight amongst themselves as do the working class. This whole idea of class struggle being the only struggle is so oversimplified it's kinda silly.

I don't think it's honest to frame it in generational language either btw. Though that is a component of it.

This is exactly why the billionaires are dismantling the current social media platforms. Organizing is the only threat they truly fear.

I am of Gen Z. The opposite is true, I would think. Or, rather, the truth is more complicated in both directions. It's not true to say we've "grown up interconnected", by the 2010's, most of the mainstream culture was basically gone. You had maybe the marvel movies, but, you know, social media, the internet, kind of revealed a self-evident truth. That there wasn't a grand a unifying "american culture". At the very least, such a thing had been waning for a long time, but the counter-cultural movements of the 90's could still be considered a unifying culture of gen X, and elder millennials. Lots of people watched MTV. The closest thing zoomers have is stuff like mr beast, or kai cenat, which we might all be tangentially aware of, but we've all become atomized, there's a limited number of zoomers who watch that and that's not "the culture". There is less genuine engagement with a "the culture", and more awareness of a variety of subcultures, of a broadness.

You know, along those lines, there's also a lack of ability to coordinate. We can "coordinate", yes, you can use social media to DM and communicate with other people, but you're doing so at great risk. Basically every social media site now, of the major ones, is a fed honeypot, and you can be banned at any time for any truly revolutionary action or coordination. Your coordination is also easily trackable and visible and thus easily co-opted, corporatized, destroyed. I would've thought that tech literacy would've gone up with Gen-Z, you know, kind of along the same lines as a fish swims in water, but, you know, owing to that same metaphor, what the fuck is water, david foster wallace style. I don't know shit about that guy other than that single joke. The kids have no tech literacy, because everything has been crafted to be easily accessible, and simplified, by the companies that now control the internet.

I think the only shot really is if the tech oligopoly is broken up, and not just in terms of regulation, like what the FTC does, but it has to be bred out. The environment and technology must change in such a way as to no longer allow those sorts of fiefdoms. Tech adoption must happen that eliminates that. Which it kind of can't, because the technology is still subject to all the material conditions and market forces, but then we're kind of encountering a chicken and egg problem. Fediverse is pretty good as a solution but we've seen limited buy-in, partially as a result of the conceit of the thing, and I think, you know, if we don't learn any lessons from the classic internet (we won't), we could just see some fediverse instance, a singular instance, get uber-popular, and then just kind of separate from all the others after they've grown to encompass the whole thing. Migrate away, bam, new monopoly, just as happened in days past.

In any case, the environment must change, tech literacy, media literacy, all the literacies must rise, and then I think we would be primed to flip the chess board. I would say that Gen Alpha might be the ones primed for it, but I think, you know. They're all like, the true Ipad kids, that are condemned to watch youtube kids content, which is the most reprehensible shit imaginable, with the worst of millenial parenting that I've seen. Maybe number blocks and alpha-blocks and bluey will save everyone, but I kind of doubt it somehow, the millenials seem a little bit too fucked up to break the cycle and I kind of don't really want to see what happens when a bunch of Gen Z parents who watch mr beast and can breathe in the polluted water start having kids. You know, I think the reaction is going to be much the same generation to generation, in terms of people who uncritically propagate the same shit, people who are nihilistic and angry at everything and take it out on their kids, and people who do their best to give the best to their kids and end up sheltering their kids in the process. I dunno. I kind of hope I'm wrong.

Also climate change is happening at a really good clip so that's maybe a bigger priority, cause unless that gets stopped, then this is all a moot point.

I would expect nothing of the sort. They're already been misdirected into the blanket "boomers bad" mentality, that all the old people living in poverty are somehow to blame for all their ills.

The ruling class will continue to rule, because they know exactly how to manipulate the plebs.

It’s been that way since the 1960s at least.

That's EXACTLY what they do - invest I'm anything that promised to keep things the same, this is our salary.

Im over 35 and I know better than to trust myself!

glares at reflection in mirror

... you do realize lemmy users skew older, and it's not just kids saying "eat the rich", right?

I understand that quote, but these days it's a dumb one. Gone are the days of "settling down" into a bubble once you hit 30.

I don't think anyone think of China as a communist/socialist country for a very long time. Maybe except older generations and tankies.

Ironically, I have met more tankies in six month on lemmy than my 18 years growing up in China. It is truly a wild culture shock that I didn't expect. LOL.

They already have two.

I mean, that was almost a national sport over there, before the CPC.

Fuck the CCP. China is cool.

Will they be planking soon?

This is just a more recent mash up of the “China Bad” and “Nobody Wants To Work Anymore” meme

LOL, spot on.

And reader view doesn’t pick it up… gross

As much as I agree, I've seen plenty of articles that are so damn long it makes me wonder if they actually expect people to read it. Who has time to read an entire 30 min article where half is about a specific person's personal story that's only meant to back up the main points. Just tell me the main point and back it with data (bonus points if you kink every source you reference, imo).

God I hate tech this decade.

I feel this sentiment in my bones. I know it gets overused, but the word of the decade so far really does seem to be enshittification. The only thing that seems to be getting better is self-hosting, which is still a massive pain in the ass for a lot of things.

I mind this less than the stupid video articles.

It's just buzzfeed articles returning from the grave. They'd split a few paragraphs over 20 pages somehow

They're called graphic novels....

Kidding

Is this still true? Damn shame if so

I've always thought the value of quotes (when they have any) is based entirely on their content rather than who spoke them. A smart quote from an awful person is still smart. And a dumb quote from a smart person is still dumb, like that definition of insanity one that often gets attributed to Einstein.

Well, you got me curious.

Seems like the first use was in a life magazine article by someone who didn't want to take explicit credit, so chances are it was something thought of by his students. And then it was repeated by various comedians over the years.

For what it's worth, my quick skim of the author, William Sloane Coffin's wiki makes him seem like a pretty great guy.

What? This illustrates exactly why it’s an important question.

If you’re responsible for hiring are you going to hire someone who has gaps in their resume or someone that’s been consistently working?

The person with gaps on their resume is more likely to quit on you. You aren’t going to hire someone who looks like they will quit.

"well I work for a short time and then just quit and do nothing."

I can see why they might ask the question. I don't expect people to put the business above themselves, but I certainly would be less likely to hire someone if I knew they were just going to quit after a few months because they have no ambition.

It's kinda not really the older generations, though, it's more capitalism. Where does that start and end?

Wait, the problem in your mind with China is that it's not as safe for multinational companies to exploit their populace?

Well it's the same format as Twitch, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. stories

"I am the righteous hand of god, and I am the devil that you forgot." - Poor Man's Poison

Propaganda. Every city has one or two neighborhoods (usually full of working class minorities) where police dump the homeless and addicts from everywhere else. Each of those areas has one or two particularly bad streets that look like shit and make for great fear mongering.

100% propaganda. Since Andrew Callaghan did his good faith SF video, every nut in the country in need of a haircut grabs their camera and shitty mic to go do bad gonzo journalism from skid row in order to dunk on people experiencing hell. Or worse, clout chase off of people experiencing hell.

Hey I just wanted to say thank you for the breakdown. The intricacies of translation are interesting.

Thank you for the commentary. I figured there was some cultural and lingual baggage that was the difference.

The article title sounded like they were letting the system rot, but if they're laying flat then the metaphor is that the people are laying and rotting? Or did I misunderstand

Would "just throw the whole thing away" (as in throw it into the trash) be a more fitting translation for the sentiment than "let it rot" then?

One of the things I learned reading Three Body Problem is that their police problems mirror the US a lot more than either country might realize. One of the characters is a cop who knows he's supposed to act a certain way in investigations, but doesn't give a shit. In other words, there's an expectation that their police respect certain civil liberties, but they often don't. Which is basically what happens in the US.

That book was originally published in 2008, though, and since then, Xi Jinping has been pushing things back to being more explicitly authoritarian. Oh, and the author has made some statements in support of that, so that's great.

Schroedinger's Communist:

The country is ruled by wealthy elite, but still communist. The government is incompetent, but also all powerful.

It's a fascist dictorship, and only as powerful as it's enforcers are loyal.

If things get bad, it can collapse overnight.

Love how y'all hate anti lockdown protesters in USA but cheer them on in China.

It reads like it's a book for middle school students.

F off. They own half my street here and most landlords are in their 20s.

I don't need to read shit from wall street journal

Sigma grind set or virgin for life, no in between

I'm guessing because it's a big carrot with equally dismal prospects and even when it's achieved it's not really so glamorous as advertised.

I'm not connecting it to sex I'm using them as examples of groups that if this was a Chinese forum we might be reading about and thinking they're significant but were we to then ask a random American most wouldn't have even heard of them and those that have would almost universally tell you are meaningless and not taken seriously.

When using one thing as an example of a certain facet of something it's generally understood that the other aspects aren't important - the sun is round like a cricket ball doesn't imply it's the same size or that it's used for sport.

I was thinking of Leary's tune in, drop out kinda thing and Keasy was a big part of that movement.

And the downvoting is probably because they want to belive this is a big thing in China because it would go towards the view they want to be true, but the reality is cccp is hugely popular and the obsessive work ethic is still a driving force.