Spandrell shares an interesting tweet by a Japanese academic about foragers and farmers:
History shows that when humans moved from foraging into farming, this allowed for people who did not need to engage in hunting (bureaucrats, scholars, warriors, etc.), which vastly expanded the range of human activity.
Nowadays we force professionals to do sales, to participate in long meetings, to type their own reports and other paperwork, which is the same as forcing everybody to engage in hunting. We are going backwards.
Amazing how much one can fit into a tweet if you’re using Japanese characters.
So desu ne!
Or, when we moved from foraging to farming it allowed the formation of a chattering class that contributed proportionately less to society as a whole.
That’s of course why Twitter is so popular in Japan (and Weibo in China). You can actually have a conversation.
I really don’t get why Twitter doesn’t double the character limit.