13 Americans Get Brutally Honest About The Dystopian Reality Of The U.S. In 2025

9.

“We all have different algorithms and we’re no longer being pulled together with shared values and experiences like we were as late as the mid-2000s (TV shows that the collective watched, allowed us to agree on a shared set of cultural values and now everyone watches different things because of streaming).”

“Essentially, we’ve got a situation where:

We are living in completely different realities, so it’s very difficult to agree even on what’s real, let alone on the cause of a problem, if it’s even a problem at all, or what the correct next step is for solving a problem.

Many of us were never taught basic fact-checking skills, so we’re being propagandized at large. This happens on all sides of the political spectrum, the algorithms encourage it, and even folks who do know how to fact-check get lazy and sometimes share misinformation. People are too attached to their egos to publicly admit when they accidentally shared propaganda, so even when people figure it out, they aren’t usually interested in helping the community at large by correcting the information

As silly as it may sound, we really do need common cultural experiences and media again. Without any type of media that really connects us, we can’t agree on what our values are (and also, we’re just so much more disconnected). The last two times I can remember us having shared media experiences were Tiger King and, before that, Game of Thrones. Both of those were quite a while ago, and they certainly didn’t raise our cultural values, but most people watched them specifically to feel included and like part of something. 

We used to have so much shared music, movies, and television in the ’90s and early 2000s, and, as silly as it may seem, it brought us together; we got to connect over that media, and it helped cement a more cohesive value system among the population.

—u/MsCalendarsPlayaArt