A warning to the identitarian left

 So...after getting done discussing GMS's video about how evangelical Christianity is a deeply racist movement rooted in white supremacy and getting a metric crapton of thoughts out on that, I ended up watching this crap take from Francesca Fiorentini and Emma Vigeland. Basically, it's a half hour long take of them crapping on Ana Kasperian for having relatively moderate and reasonable views on race, while they dunk on her for failing to internalize the proper leftist doctrines. It's annoying, offputting, and alienating to the majority of the broader public.

Which...brings me to another chapter in this current saga of discussing racism and what we need to do with it. Look. White supremacy is not the primary problem. It's a side problem. The core problem of society is the capitalist/imperialist project that reduces the world to wage slaves and sometimes literal slaves. And this affects ALL people and ALL races. As I see it, the vast majority of us have common interests, even if the exact manifestations are different depending on things like location, race, etc., 

Racism was created to establish a form of social hierarchy that keeps these masses fighting amongst themselves. It was created to stop whites and blacks from coming together, and realizing the common problems and common enemies they shared. While it is a problem, rank identitarianism hyper emphasizes it to a point that it's counterproductive. It's basically just the mirror image of the right's racism. The right has racism to justify the existing social hierarchy by turning whites against blacks, giving the white working class the impression of illusory superiority. It gives them someone to look down on themselves, and someone for them to kick around themselves. However, identitarian movements are cynically used by the elites to attempt to get the racial minorities so obsessed with their stuff, that it makes an actual working class movement impossible. That's the true tragedy of 2016. I was a white guy who wanted universal healthcare, I was told to check my privilege and blah blah blah. It's a toxic system. And then they accuse of of being racist because we dont accept their little doctrines. And their little doctrines are doctrines. it's just more religion in a sense. The racism of the past is the original sin, all whites are guilty, they need to feel bad about it, they need to admit to being part of the problem, and only them when they find redemption. The thing is, this is literally brainwashing. They're doing this to you to get power over you. it's like a trojan horse computer virus. You let it in and then it takes control of your mind's firmware. It follows a similar heuristic pattern as Christianity, which is why, as an ex Christian, I'm so able to detect it. It's like "wait, this is a lot like that other thing..." It literally is.

Heck, I'd argue that identitarianism is an adaption of the system to allow the left to keep acting like they're doing something when they're no longer doing something. The "New Left" arose in the 1960s and 1970s as an attempt to move the left away from orthodox marxism. Dont get me wrong, I myself aint a fan of orthodox marxism, but they basically abandoned class analysis for identitarian analysis. And then the democratic party psyopped the left into hyper emphasizing identity at the expense of class and the rest is history. It's a LITERAL psyop. It's intended to distract us from class politics and hyper emphasize identity and race. 

Dont get me wrong, there are some aspects of identitiarianism that are valid. Like the whole history of racism, and the fact that some racist structures still exist today. But again, these are relatively peripheral issues. The CORE issue is that capitalist-imperialist superstructure. And to beat that, you DO need class analysis. That doesnt mean we embrace the solutions of orthodox marxism. I wanna remind people, my own ideology and its offshoots came about in part because former marxists like phillippe van parijs themselves moved away from orthodox marxism and asked "what, if anything can justify capitalism?" And that idea is FREEDOM. Since then, a whole wing of left libertarianism has come about centered around UBI and the idea that it gives people more freedom, while still maintaining the positive elements of capitalism. It itself is a reform based movement that isnt intended to destroy systems as they exist, but reform them. And my own ideas are mostly just a melding of my emerging humanist worldview with THAT. 

I aint saying we entirely ignore race, but it shouldnt be the primary point of the movement, it shouldnt define the morality of the movement, and it shouldnt gatekeep who is and isn't in the movement. TO make a class based movement work, we might have to deal with people who tend to reject these far left weirdo social identitarian dogmas, and who might have relatively regressive views themselves. And yes, you need moderates, like me or Ana Kasperian on your side. 

THe problem with the "max left", as Ana or Cenk of TYT would put it, is that tends to go all in with these unpopular movements that dont unite people and keep the left ineffective and toothless. Again, if we want to win, we need a coalition of 50%+ of the country. I aint sayint we shouldnt have SOME identitiarian stuff, but that should be like, a small fraction of what we do. It cant be the main course, or it'll just fall into the same identity trap that keeps us fighting useless "culture wars" and be a tool used by the elites against the masses to keep them in line and fighting amongst themselves. 

If you push this stuff, you're actively working against a movement that could actually win over a multiracial coalition to solve problems. You're reinforcing the neoliberal corporatist wing of "the left" and giving them power, even if you call yourself a "leftist." Youre also driving people to the right, as a lot of people are so turned off by that stuff, they flip back around to being conservatives. Great if you want to keep the working classes divided, terrible if you want to see some unity around some common causes.

We need to find common ground, identitarianism splits us up into little cliques and niches. It's not helpful. it's actually quite abusive. And it's unsustainable as a coalition. Abandon it. Embrace class politics instead. That's all I'm gonna say on that matter tonight.  

So discussing GMS's video on Christianity being racist more broadly

 So I covered much of what I wanted to say in the article immediately prior to this one, but I wanna discuss the premise that is being discussed here. Video for reference, let's get started.

So...yeah. This has been something I've been slowly realizing itself. but seeing it as stark as I'm seeing it here is a bit shocking. Like...I was a Christian nationalist back in the 2000s. I went to a fundamentalist Christian school, and they did mission trips to like Africa, Asia, Oceania, etc, trying to convert people there. I never got any racist vibes from it at the time. I mean, most seemed interested in just...spreading the word of Jesus to the ends of the earth, believing that all would need to know about Christianity before the end times could begin. 

But...let's face it, when I left the faith, I very quickly started putting some of the pieces together. Religion is the opium of the masses. The wealthy and powerful use it to dumb people down and to act as a sort of "matrix" or "plato's cave" to keep people subservient to them. Religion and its worldview messes with peoples' perceptions of things. It has these old and antiquated answers for why bad things happen to good people, and why suffering exists in the first place. And rather than address the real root causes of problems head on, it keeps people in a circle at sunday school acting like this is all some grand divine mystery and god knows all the answers, when, in reality, no, the causes of poverty and suffering are often mundane, and a lot more human oriented. And when we start ignoring those things, we kinda realize that we can just...solve a lot of problems that would otherwise be givens.

Heck, in my early days as an ex-Christian, I thought that the big problem was ignorance. And that the wealthy controlling everything with religion was just a current thing. I didn't realize how deep these attitudes went and how racist they were, etc. I thought that the problem was just a lack of knowledge, that the median person wasnt that smart, and yeah, some bad actors wanted to use that stuff to their advantage, but that a lot of people were well meaning, and that with people leaving religion, we can begin improving society. Like i looked at it like the enlightenment. Yeah, it made us realize there are scientific reasons for things like disease. That plagues werent afflictions from god, but caused by microbes, which spread in part because of the unsanitary conditions at the time. So instead of seeing like the black plague as something from god, we realize it came from a rat problem and that we need to control the rat population to solve the problem. Like this crap seems common sense for us today (although we're losing that in the days of RFK Jr being our health secretary), but it really was a big deal. And I thought a lot of social problems were like this. We've only realized how screwed up things are relatively recently, and sometimes progress is slow because people are stupid. It wasn't until later I realized these systems were literally DESIGNED to basically enslave us. 

And they are. As I dug into history, primarily to provide an account for how we got from the state of nature to where we are, it seems pretty obvious that since we've settled down and formed "civilization" as we know it, wealthy and powerful interests have used things like religion to enslave and subjugate the masses. 

And a lot of the modern iteration of this from 1500 onward is explicitly racist. There was this idea of cultural superiority among whites, and the need to go out and "civilize" the world, basically by imposing colonialism and later capitalism on them. They need to be taught the "right" way of doing things. Otherwise, they're "savage", we need to "civilize" them, and Christianity was often a tool used to domesticate these people and make them accepting of their servitude. The most successful evil empires in history dont succeed through raw force, they convince the populace that their enslavement is a good thing. And thats what religion does. It makes people submissive and subservient to authority, it dumbs them down, and as the decades and centuries progress, people only realize the world they live in now and believe it came from a fallen state. Christianity offers this huge "plato's cave" or "matrix" style worldview to convince people that their enslavement is a good thing. 

Evangelism in the modern era DOES have colonialist aspirations in it. It's the belief that their "western culture" (keep in mind, the bad, unenlightened version) is superior and that the masses of the world need to learn it for their own good. It's the idea that other peoples and cultures are inferior.

I dont doubt, in some cases, that this could be a thing. I think as progressives, we walk a tightrope on that subject. Go too far in one direction, and you're a sneering imperialist, to make a new vegas reference, go a bit too far in the other and you're just defending barbarism. SOMETIMES native cultures are violent and barbarous. I dont doubt that. Sometimes people do develop cultures with horrible cultural practices like, say, child rape, that shouldnt be acceptable. I'm not gonna defend obviously crude and barbarous practiced by natives. But....at the same time, I'm also not going to say that "western culture" is all that enlightened, especially when those who scream loudest about it are often representing the most barbarous aspects of it. Like on the child rape thing, look at who was in the epstein files, look at who just voted against banning child marriage in Oklahoma, for example. "Muh culture", F U, republicans, F U. 

 And that's the thing. We're not that enlightened either. And often times, and this is where Im very critical of the modern right, but they end up being just as barbarous as the people they criticize a lot of the time. Like take Israel again. When Hamas committed October 7th, I agreed, yeah, this is uncivilized bullcrap that shouldnt fly, and Israel seems more reasonable and civilized. 2.5 years later, here we are, with me condemning Israel for committing a genocide and grossly influencing US politics in a bad faith way. Did MY values change? Did my perception of "western culture" change? No, I've been consistent. What changed was the fact that Israel is flat out betraying that culture and being barbarous themselves. I just believe some accountability should be held there.

The same goes with MAGA in the US. We love to act like our western culture is so great. Freedom. Democracy. Rule of law. Constitutional rights. Well....MAGA wants to destroy all that to defend THEIR version of "western culture" which is...fundamentalist religion and the protestant work ethic, which just serve to enslave us to the wealthy and powerful. And that's the thing. When I talk western culture and civilized and uncivilized, I dont have this inherent "western countries good, white people good, christianity good" mindset these guys have. Im quite a critic of the west in some ways, not because i wanna destroy it, but because I wanna improve it and make it NOT suck. And on topics like racism, wage slavery, and religious authoritarianism, I flat out condemn that stuff as "uncivilized." What makes us better is those values. Without those values, what are you left with? Just rank tribalism and authoritarianism. But that's the hill MAGA and the right wanna die on. Destroy the good aspects of western culture, the actual high minded ideals that actually DO make us better, and replace them with....the same regressive crap that does the opposite.

Same with slavery. For the amount of white southern Americans who act like the confederacy is "their culture", what are you defending? The institution of slavery? I mean, the south has some nice cultural elements sometimes. Southern hospitality, good food, architecture and music unique to the area, but no, they're not out there defending their country music or right to have BBQ, they're going all in with slavery. No. Those parts of our culture can die out for all I care. It's better that they do. 

But that kinda brings us back to GMS's point. Christianity is part of this underlying capitalist megastructure. The megastructure was designed to enslave the world to a handful of people who hold all of the wealth. Christianity is just part of it. Racism is another. People used the racial hierarchy to keep blacks and whites divided and fighting amongst themselves so that the system would chug on unexpected.

And this is one of the reasons why I despise the democrats today. Sure, the republicans are the party of white supremacy either implicitly or explicitly (it was more implicit during the 6th party system), but the idpol of the left is just...the opposite of that. But we saw how it was executed by centrist democrats to defang the Bernie movement. They literally did all the "OMG T3H BLACK VOTE" stuff to do that. It was by design. They used identity politics, to keep us fighting amongst ourselves. Which is why it's taken me so long to adjust to the new reality in the 2020s where open racism is a thing again that we gotta deal with. Because I honestly didnt wanna have to open up that can of worms. It's not helpful, it's divisive. But honestly, that can of worms being opened has exposed deeper rot in our society where now it seems like all of those GOOD aspects of western culture seem to just be pretenses that the power people dont actually care about and now we got a fascist movement on our hands that wants to throw away the good parts that I and any reasonable people should agree with...to defend the bad parts that should be eliminated.

Again, what do you get with "western values" if you throw away all the high minded stuff about freedom and democracy? You're left with rank authoritarianism and slavery, the exact opposite of that. But that seems to be the part of the culture that the power people really care about. Because they're just like the nobles of old, we've just been living under the pretense that our society is more complex than that and that any leftover elements of that are just strange holdovers of bygone generations? But no, it seems like that stuff is just the main feature, and all the pretenses dont really matter. 

With me, since I left christianity, I went in the opposite direction, where those values ARE what matters, while the more regressive elements should be done away with. Keep in mind, I'm not a revolutionary. I'm a reformist. I look at where we are, and I'm like "let's keep the good and get rid of the bad", the far right is like "let's get rid of the good and keep the bad." All while acting like they have ownership over the idea.

 Racism is bad. Imperialism is bad. Slavery is bad. I think we gotta take a good look at ourselves and think "are we the baddies" right now? Because to some degree we are. Put another way. Christians have a saying "what would Jesus do?" I think, when it comes to looking at the bad, we ask "what would hitler do?" And then we do the EXACT OPPOSITE. Because we can all agree with THAT at least? i thought thats what we thought, post 1945, that hitler was the epitome of all that was evil and we should strive to be the opposite, right? Like authoritarianism bad. Racism bad. Genocide bad. Slavery bad. Those are supposed to be BAD things, right? So why does the modern right look more and more like fascists, if not outright nazis? What the frick is wrong with these people?

Really. We're at a point in our history, where we're gonna have to take a hard look at ourselves, and either go in the good direction or the bad direction. Sadly, because most of society is run by the wealthy and powerful, and they hold all the cards, we're going in the bad direction and descending into fascism. The good is being stamped out. We're being ignored, thrown to the side. Hell, they might even throw those of us who are too educated to believe in their nonsense in camps one day. I literally wouldnt doubt that, given what trump is trying to build here in the good old US of A. 

But yeah. I appreciate the work GMS is doing and it's very good and thought provoking stuff. I just wanted to highlight it and give my own concurring opinion. 

Discussing Christians claiming ownership over the origins of secular morality

 So, Genetically Modified Skeptic had a new video about how "American Christianity is racist on purpose", and I kind of want to discuss a lot of themes in this. I'll probably split them over multiple articles, but in this one, I wanna discuss a theme that the Christians discussed in it, which is the origins of morality, and how they claim ownership over "western culture" and claim that atheists use their moral framework. I have mixed views on this topic.

First of all, morality and culture are evolutionary, not revolutionary. A lot of early moralities are based on religious morality like Christianity. However, that doesn't mean that such ideas need to be explicitly Christian. If anything, I'd argue the Christianness kinda ruins it. Like, the key example used was basically...the Christian duty to charity that gave rise to social safety nets. I dont deny that much of the modern approach to safety nets has origins in Christianity. if anything, I've discussed this AT LENGTH, and it's kind of a huge issue I have with these systems. You see, modern safety nets were designed with two contradictory sentiments in mind: the christian duty to charity, but also the christian duty to work. Safety nets are a form of state forced charity, which, quite frankly, modern evangelical christians dont even accept as legitimate (too much "big government"). They believe in charity, but not state enforced charity. If anything, they place a higher emphasis on free will, morality, and on economics, work ethic, whereas due to secularism I went in the opposite direction, rejecting the work ethic and adopting a more universalist idea of safety nets. if anything, the evolution of my philosophical tradition comes from the likes of Thomas Paine, who saw society as a "system of pulleys" through which the weight of economic misery could be removed. So for me, it's not even charity, if anything I'm anti "charity". I dont like the idea of imposing a moral quandry on individuals and guilting them to "do the good thing" when instead I can just solve the problem so as to not impose such a moral quandry on people anyway, this solving the problem.

With that said, you can kind of see how there's an entirely different set of principles being utilized in my secular approach, whereas the "christian" approach introduces a lot of weird BS into things that make things more complicated. I fully recognize that Christian morality is a hot mess of contradictions and also introduces a lot of moral dilemmas (read: trolley problems) on people in an attempt to force people to be good. but because I dont care about any of that, and just wanna solve problems while imposing as few moral obligations on the populace in the first place, I just have the state....solve the problem. The Christian approach is literally dysfunctional. But morality isn't about good living for christians, it's about obeying god, with regular debates about how much "good works" should play a role in going to heaven.

I admit, a lot of modern secular morality may have originally come from older, more religious frameworks. Even if these frameworks are primarily secular, a lot of Christians like to claim ownership of them. They act like the founding fathers were all Christians who based their views on the Bible (meanwhile, to invoke Thomas Paine again, he was quite frankly as critical of Christianity as I am). When they talk "western culture", they talk "Christian culture." And...based on what I wrote the other day when looking at the culture MAGA is trying to defend, it ends up just being religion and work ethic. But that's a topic for the NEXT discussion on this topic. The fact is, western culture has some ups and has its downs. If anything, Christians seem to be trying to offend the "bad" version of the culture in my eyes, the imperialist ones that subjugates us all and reduces us all to wage slaves. The aspects I try to eradicate from my own interpretation of the culture.

With that said, let me explain my framework toward things. I adopt an attitude of "free thought", I don't value the authoritarian aspects of this so called "Christian culture". I dont care what god said. I dont care if we always did things a certain way. I dont care about that stuff. I care about reason and evidence. When analyzing social structures, i do so sociologically. I look at the functionalist approach and whether ideas contribute positively to human well being and society. I look at the conflict approach to see who benefits from the existing status quo. And...Christianity fails on both fronts. Take the idea above. I pointed out how the Christian approach to "charity" and welfare is actually very self contradictory and dysfunctional. I also would argue that the adoption of the christian work ethic is often used to justify the wealth of the elites and the poverty of the masses. Heck, GMS's video makes a strong argument for a belief superstructure around capitalism that uses Christianity as a way to functionally enslave the masses. And when I lost my faith, and applied the methods above, those beliefs failed.

I mean, don't get me wrong, if I can be convinced, through reason, that certain attitudes are good ones, I'll still accept them. Even capitalism. I'm not some raging leftist because I understand that at the end of the day, we need some sort of system, and I tend to believe capitalism is functional, whereas trying to replace it can introduce all kinds of negative consequences I can avoid. So instead, I focus on reforming capitalism and western culture from within, rather than destroying it.  If the Christians "got us" in the sense that they argue we're using their structure, have at it, but I dont adopt such structures because of Christianity, if anything, explicit religious framing weakens the argument for such things because actual christian morality is outdated and dysfunctional. Rather, I justify them under different frameworks that extend from the free thinking sociological approach.

Christians love to claim liberal democracy as their idea, but in reality, it emerged as a criticism of the religiously authoritarian systems that preceded them. Just like protestantism emerged as a critricism of the catholic church, liberal democracy arose as a powerful criticism of the system of divine rights of kings. And revolutions were fought here, and despite my own "let's not reinvent the wheel" approach, these guys reinvented the wheel. Which brings us to the founding father. The founding fathers were not explicitly christian. They were religiously pluralistic, with the median founder probably being some sort of deist or at most relatively liberal Christian at the time. And they looked at the religious fighting in Europe with the church of england, the catholic church, as well as various groups in America like the puritans and were like "no thanks, we religious liberty and separation of church and state." 

They took locke's natural rights theory, and changed the right of property, something I have MAJOR issues with given my humanist perspective, and changed it to "the right to pursue happiness." Which I think sounds better. And my own morals do reflect this approach too. Except I take them and turn them into the end goals of morality, where when I try to figure out the actual goals we implement morality in the first place, it's to extend life, reduce suffering, protect freedom, and allow people the right to pursue their own happiness. These are just "good ideas" to me. I dont try to justify them from God or anything. I think that weakens them. Because when you invoke god as an explanation, it discourages deeper thought about them. People just accept them as a dogma, and if anything, I'm anti dogmatic. For me, it's like...well if we want a set of goals to guide the morals, these make the most sense. 

We can talk about, say, Hobbes and Rousseau for example. Hobbes has a secular argument for law and governments that Christians often use to invoke their morality, that without it, nature is a war against all and its better for people to band together and form governments, even authoritarian ones, than to live in chaos. But again, without the christian elements, it's just a good idea. it holds up under scrutiny. And even in the days before civilization and grand philosophies and social contracts, people just lived in groups of hunter gatherers. If anything, I tend to see the history of civilization more like Rousseau, where we're born free, but then everything's in chains. Our societies were created to enslave us, and I have no doubt about that. And there's been aspects of that in thinkers we tend to view as believers in "western culture" from the get go. It's never been explicitly christian, it's pluralistic. And enlightenment era philosophies did have to deal with the fact that much of society up to that point were literally created to enslave the masses. hell, the version of western culture these christians tout comes from the philosophical traditions that tend to prop up their argument. A lot of strains of western thought DO have explicitly colonialist and imperialist ambitions. A lot of them are pretty racist. And it seems like the aspects of western culture right wing christians seem most keen on defending....are those parts. 

I mean, as I see it, the best aspects of so called "western culture", liberal democracy, comes from ideas like the social contract, like the idea of limited government with rule of law, separation of powers, and constitutional rights, like the idea of freedom. Even economically, the strongest argument I can make for capitalism is that, in theory, it gives people freedom.

But...let's be honest. These ideas also have a dark side, and we can't ignore how imperialist that these systems have been over the years, how they have been and still are racist against those not like them. How they came to be in order to colonize and enslave the third world, including the americas (and hell, even europe). How they use religion to reinforce those systems. This is why I said the other day when it comes to these right wing MAGA idiots defending "western culture", there isn't much to defend. They're defending most staunchly the worst aspects and iterations of the ideas, because the aspects and iterations of the idea that reflect their values ARE those bad versions in my view. 

Which is why I've long held the stance, since leaving religion, that religion offers nothing of value. We dont need it. We literally dont need it. It's kinds like the saying goes, yeah, in a world of the blind, maybe the one eyed man is the one to lead everyone else. But at this point, secular morality has so far surpassed christian morality that christianity often reflects the worst and most backwards aspects of modern culture.

My own take on the link between christianity and western culture is the following. If you take the christianity out of western culture, you strengthen it and make it better. If you take the western culture out of christianity, you go back to the dark ages. Which side of things is actually doing the work, and putting in the work in making society better? This is why, when I left the faith, I started seeing religion as a regressive force on society holding it back, and that without it, we would have a much better world, with much better ways of doing things. Because if we left it all up to the christian fundamentalists, we'd all be living lives in which we just work all the time for rich people, while people are entitled to nothing (while feeling guilty about ineffectively giving to charity to maybe slightly help things), and we'd be living according to bronze age morals that don't actually help people. 

Maybe that stuff was good 3000 years ago. It's not 3000 years ago. It's not even 300 years ago. We live in the year 2026 and I know the right hates "current year" memes because they see their morality as eternal as it comes from god itself, but that's the fricking problem. It never changes, it rejects any positive attempts to change it from progressives, and it holds us back. Cut the cord, be done with the christian aspects of our morality, and let's move on into the future already.  

Some humanist principles for the future of the economy

 So...while I dont actively encourage at this time using my economic models in an explicitly degrowth sort of way, I'm well aware that they're compatible. And I wanna discuss how things should work in relation to the "fertility" discussion in the previous post.

First of all, in a post growth world where we enter a period where we hit or flirt with the hard limits of environmental sustainability, I'll say this, maximum supportable GDP will become fixed. If we can only sustain say, a $50 trillion GDP, well, we can only support a $50 trillion GDP. 

From there, considering the population debate, lower is better. Like there used to be this weird monument in georgia that advocated for the human population to be set at 500 million or something. Why would that be a good thing? Well, more population with a fixed economic ceiling means lower GDP per capita. Lower population means higher GDP per capita. The less people we have, the better we can live, assuming we dont need massive populations to generate massive GDP. Our current economic model is built around more people = more workers = more growth. But again, if that proves to be environmentally disastrous, yeah, you will eventually want fewer people, so each person can live better.

Now, reducing population is tricky. The obvious answer is the bad answer. Ya know...people dying....let's avoid that one. So....how's the best way to reduce our population? Through a reduced birth rate. So is low fertility really bad here? 1.58 kids per woman might not be a bad thing. 

If we have 500 million people in the US at a $50 trillion GDP economy, that's a $100k GDP. But if we only have a replacement rate at 75-80% of the population, well maybe we'll only reach 400 million, and if the economy becomes productive enough to hit $50 trillion GDP a year no matter what, as more automation means doing more with less labor, then we can have future generations at $125k GDP per capita instead. If we drop to 300 million with a $50 trillion GDP ceiling which our economy becomes increasingly easy to hit, that's a $166k GDP per capita. Ya know? Point is, with a fixed economic maximum, fewer people, means higher living standards. 

And once again, perhaps it's better for us to have fewer kids than to run into environmental limits the hard way, as that could lead to more death, rather than more kids not being born. So I say, yeah, if we reproduce below our replacement rate, and if, later this century, we hit an economic crisis that forces us to cut back on our economy to be sustainable (as we very well might some time this century), again, it's better if we reduce our population in a slow and controlled way than to just keep growing until we run out of resources and then we face some disastrous economic collapse. 

I also wanna talk about how UBI plays into this. Like....my own UBI is designed with neutrality toward childbearing. There's been the argument that if we give too much money for having children, that people will have too many kids as we're incentivizing it. I set my UBI at 1/3 of the poverty line for children, because that's around the amount adding a child to a family adds to the poverty line. THe first person is around $16k, but then additional people add around $5500 each, so yeah, my UBI is set around there. This, in theory, means that people won't have tons of kids just to get more money, but I'm not actively punishing people for having more kids. 

If we want to raise or lower the population, we can adjust the financial incentives accordingly. People have talked about raising the fertility rate with "baby bonuses". Yeah that's a good left wing way to do that. More money means more kids. Less money means less kids. And I dont wanna be cruel toward people, hence why I dont wanna actively punish people financially for having kids by not giving children ANY UBI, but you could, theoretically, reduce the benefit to children to disincentivize children. I wouldnt advise going nuts with this mechanism, but it seems like a lot better alternative than either, malthusianism where we actively deprive people resources through NO safety net system at all to punish people for having kids, or taking away rights and freedoms to force people to have kids. Like, it's a much softer incentive structure if we decide to use it. I wont advise going down obviously, to discourage childbearing unless absolutely necessary. But you could make an argument for a higher childrens' UBI to incentivize people having more kids. 

Again I kinda feel weird about this topic given some might think this goes into eugenics territory, but I'm actually trying to head that off here. I look at the trump administration acting like we have this massive "crisis" while pushing a handmaids tale style conservatism and I'm just trying to offer a better approach, I think a more subtle approach of carrots and sticks works better than just taking away womens' rights and turning them into breeding cows ya know? Because if we let the right do it, that's what they wanna do. We looked at their goals in the last article and that crap is DISMAL. I think my approach is better and more compatible with our freedoms and the culture we claim to have that is worth preserving. 

The same is true going forward. It would be better if we had a more managed population decline via fewer births than something that is...cataclysmic like the next great leap forward or something. I mean, we're not there yet, but I suspect we WILL hit a point some time in the next 100 years where the environment FORCES cuts to living standards if we dont voluntarily make cutbacks ourselves. heck, I've seen computer models suggesting it might happen as soon as 2040. That's 14 years from now. We'll see, but yeah. What we're currently doing isn't gonna be sustainable forever, and I'd rather encourage voluntary changes ahead of the time than something that is resolved through authoritarianism or mass death when we hit a major point of no return.

Anyway that's my general approach to these topics. Sorry to get dark. 

Do we ACTUALLY have a "fertility crisis?"

 So....everyone is grilling RFK Jr, the dumbest health secretary to ever exist, for going on a weird rambling about teenagers' sperm yesterday. And...I thought it might be a good topic to discuss what I think about fertility, childbearing, etc. 

To be frank...as a progressive, i DON'T think about it very often. I believe that the choice to have a child is...a choice, and that if we just let people make their own free decisions, the result will be "good enough" where I don't have an issue with it. I don't care if the population grows, i dont care if it shrinks. In general I tend to lean toward shrinking, but as long as remain somewhere around the replacement rate, it's like whatever.

Currently the replacement rate is 2.1, with the typical woman having 1.5 children, so we are below, which requires some immigration. Of course, I'm not opposed to this. I mean, if that's what it takes to keep the population stable, so be it, I really, really, REALLY don't care. I tend to value individual freedom over some weird coercive social conservatism. Of course, the right is the party of...weird coercive social conservatism, so I wanna discuss their perspective.

Discussing the weird obsession with breeding conservatives have

The right wing brain seems....relatively obsessed with this topic, in comparison. Social conservatives, at first, feared people breeding too much. Historically, they've been Malthusian. They're the ones saying we needed to be economically conservative and punitive toward poor people because all they do is screw and have kids, and that if we give them welfare, it encourages bad behavior. All throughout my youth, everything was obsession with teenage pregnancy and weird moralizing about how if you didnt wanna be poor dont have sex before marriage. They'd scream about abortion being this holocaust like evil but then lecture everyone about having sex before marriage and financial stability. They'd go on about how racial minorities don't value the structure of the American family and that's why they deserve to suffer. Really, there was this idea that people will naturally breed out of wedlock like crazy and reproduce at unsustainable rates and that this is bad and we need to be economically austere and impose "personal responsibility" on everyone to offset that. It was a crude and brutish mindset, and out of line with the data. But once you make arguments about how their policies actually seemed to encourage teenage pregnancy, they didn't seem to care, it seemed to be about punishing people for having sex out of the right circumstances. Meanwhile, liberal policies of distributing birth control, allowing abortions, led to more sexual liberalism, yes, but it also led to more stable replacement rates, with women having just short of the replacement rate, generally speaking. And isn't that what we want?

How I see it 

As we enter the twenty-first century, yeah, we do have an overpopulation crisis on our hands. Not so much in the first world, where, again, we've kind of stabilized around just short of replacement rate. But the third world? Yikes. Like...all that birth control stuff does lead to a much more stable population. And in an era of climate change, increased resource consumption, infinite growth on a finite planet, I'm fine if the population remains around the same or goes down slowly. If anything, that's a positive change. That's how we ensure long term stability on this planet. We're dangerously close to the maximum populations we can realistically support, and if we really care about sustainability and having a reasonably western living standard, we're already exceeding the population. The whole world can't sustain everything having the existing American living standard as of now. While growth and technological efficiency will allow for us to compensate for this to some degree, which is why the whole economic growth narrative has historically countered the more malthusian narrative, at some point, we're just gonna reach hard limits. 

So...as I see it, if we want to avoid more painful choices that come with such a philosophy in the future, we want to AVOID hitting those hard limits. Seriously. Isn't it better if we voluntarily choose to reduce our population somewhat, than for some economic crisis to precipitate a humanitarian one that leads to severe rationing of resources or starvation? Quite frankly, i think the idea that the modern western lifestyle leads to relatively low fertility rates is a feature, not a bug. In the pre industrial days, sure, maybe families needed people to have 10 kids to tend to the family farm and ensure enough kids survive....the horrors of pre-modern childhood (lots and lots of disease and high mortality), in the modern day of humans living longer and more consistently, it makes more sense for us to reproduce at...something close to the replacement rate. 

So...honestly? Modern lifestyles leading to relatively lower fertility seems like a good thing. like a potential crisis is sorting itself out naturally in a way that isn't dangerous for us. And that's why liberalism works. When people are allowed to make their own decisions, the choices end up leading to outcomes that are in the ballpark of where we wanna be.

The conservative mentality

 The conservative mentality is...very counter to mine. Despite all the malthusian nonsense that seems endemic in their worldview and how we need to be harsh to people who reproduce outside of the proper social contexts, they're actually starting to freak out. They're looking at the modern situation and saying "gee, this ins't good, we're gonna decline in population, people arent reproducing at the rates we WANT them to reproduce at!" And they're framing this as some grand moral crisis. 

Now, I admit, maybe we younger people aren't reproducing at the rate that we should. Maybe it could be a little higher. However, as a liberal, I once again have an answer for that. Sure, while childfree adults are on the rise and I'm one of them, I'm not under the impression the main reason we millennials havent been having kids like we "should" is more economic. See, after being told that we need to be financially stable before having kids and that this is the "right" way to do things and that we should expect a life of poverty and misery if we don't follow the proper life script, many of us...havent had kids. Even those who want to. We delayed marriage, childbirth, and building a life because, hey, guess what, the economy has sucked for us, we've been miserable, we've never had the economic stability that our parents had, and then we get yelled at by the same people now complaining we didnt have enough kids that we were eating too much avocado toast or not working hard enough. These people always have SOMETHING to complain about. But I digress. 

The point is, now they see this as a huge crisis. Why? because their economic model requires infinite growth. We need women to have more babies because more babies mean more future workers. If we dont operate above replacement rate, then that means the population ages on average. This means that, in theory, our social safety nets like social security become more burdensome. Supposedly they need like 2.5ish workers to fund one retiree, and if we're at a 1.5 replacement rate...well...you do the math. 

of course, conservatives hate social security and always advocate for cutting it. And the crisis of social security is completely artificial; people stop contributing taxes above a certain income, like, say, $140k or something. if we taxed the rich more, we could sustain it in perpetuity.

Heck, I'll be honest, in an age of automation and increasing economic efficiency, why do we need so many workers funding things? Modern economics is driven by rank consumerism, not actual necessities. Remember, we've discussed this many times before, but we should be able to, in theory, work a whole lot less and rely on machines a whole lot more. Hell, I advocate for a full on UBI, and reducing the work week. The whole idea that we cant fund a safety net for an aging population has more to do with the structure of said safety net (social insurance....) than on the actual sustainability of actually taking care of much of our population without work. A lot of the calls to raise the retirement age, or cut benefits comes from conservatives who always ignore that hey, we could raise taxes and fund stuff. But they dont want that. They want at most, the safety nets to remain unchanged, if their end goal isnt to shrink them, saying we cant afford them at all and that we need to give the wealthy more money to create jobs. I've seen conservatives argue that we shouldnt even have a concept of retirement and people should just work until they die. It's crazy, but this is how they think. 

So yeah, they're totally out of their depth on that, although, if we heavily value infinite economic growth like they do, i can see where they're coming from. At some point, my theory is we're gonna have to stop growing....in part because of the environmental sustainability ceiling mentioned above. We can only fund a certain GDP lifestyle for a certain number of people in the long term, and ultimately, I once again think it's better for us to voluntarily choose to work less and to address the situation that way, than to deal with say, rationing and resource deprivation. And if we wanna avoid those negative outcomes, it's better we address this NOW while we got some runway to start without crashing into those limits, than later when nature FORCES us to cut back on its terms, not ours. 

Of course, the right is completely ignorant of the realities of that. They think climate change and the idea of environmental sustainability are leftist plots to destroy capitalism, never mind that I believe in them despite being somewhat capitalist, and just think we can grow forever. So they keep insisting that now we have this crisis of not enough babies being born to fuel the economy of tomorrow, when I look at the situation and think that if anything, the ideas I promote would allow us to stave off a crisis that could otherwise kill a whole lot of us and make us miserable. If not make us go full on extinct from radically altering our environment. 

And let's not forget the racism angle...

And let's not forget the racism angle of the far right. They believe in this idea of the "great replacement theory." See, here's a few realities that the "white right" don't like. First, we can address any short term economic sustainability issues by bringing in immigrants. And second, POC tend to reproduce at a faster rate than whites. 

This SCARES the white nationalist types. Because they look at a future of America where white people aren't in charge and they are scared. Omg, they dont share our values, blah blah blah. And I'm gonna be honest, what is "white culture" in this case? It often comes off as like the protestant work ethic and christianity. Things that, IMO aren't worth saving. But yeah, that's why they're freaking out under trump. OMG IF WE DONT DO SOMETHING POC WILL OUTNUMBER WHITES AND WE WONT BE IN CHARGE ANY MORE. Again, given the values these guys are defending, is that a bad thing?

Like, really, back in the 2010s we had this idea of the coalition of the ascendant. It was why I was so overconfident of the future of america and believe that conservatism was dying and the future belonged to the left. It's also why the trumpers are going full authoritarian. Realizing that their "way of life" is under threat from demographic change, they're trying to force the demographics to go back their way. Which is causing them to become a lot more authoritarian on reproduction as a result. While abortion has ALWAYS been a long term goal for them to roll back, they've done it. And now they're claiming we have a problem of people having too few kids. But I bet a lot of these people only want WHITES to have kids. 

And that actually resolves a core contradiction of their movement. Like, we can talk about say, the evolution of the whole malthusian approach of the past generation. It started in the 1960s with the introduction of welfare and civil rights. The welfare queen narrative was always racially skewed. And conservatives tend to get angry about videos of POC women who have tons of kids going on welfare. It's why they always get so angry over that stuff. A lot of the anti welfare arguments came from racism. And there's always been this idea that POCs are like...culturally inferior to white people. Like...whites will only have kids when responsible on average while POC won't. And, I wanna point out, I dont endorse these narratives, but this is likely how a lot of them are thinking. So now they're upset when whites arent having enough kids...because they fear demograpghic change causing them to lose cultural power in the future. 

Me...again, I dont really care. As I see it, if whites have fewer kids, and POC have more, and the end result is close enough to the replacement rate that I dont see it as a major problem, I don't really care. Again, my philosophy is if people are free to make their own decisions, the result should be close enough to where we want that it's not a concern. If that makes america browner in the future, I dont really care. Like really...I DONT CARE. IT'S JUST FRICKING SKIN COLOR. And as far as culture, conservatives aren't really making a convincing case for their culture being so great during the trump era. If anything, it's like they wanna preserve the WORST parts of our culture, like the fetishiziation of hard work, and conservative religion.

In a way it goes full circle, their breeding fixation IS their culture. Like, really, a huge part of conservative culture is this weird religious authoritarianism involving a weird fixation on the family. Their idea of life is just a script. Be born. be a kid. Grow up, go to school, get a job. Get married. Have kids. Rinse and repeat. Everything is just....yep, all of life is just about working and reproducing. It's a really dismal take on life i REALLY dont vibe with. And this is what they defend? Really? This is their culture. A life of hard work, responsibility, and misery.

Meanwhile, my culture? Freedom. DO what you want, enjoy your life, stay out of others' way. If we have to work to live, so be it, but dont live to work. There's more to life than just all being wage slaves and making more wage slaves. We love to act like others are so tyrannical and we're for freedom, but are the conservatives really for freedom? Are they REALLY for freedom? They're just as conservative and authoritarian as the conservative regimes we crap on. Fundamentalist christianity isnt much different than fundamentalist islam when you deal with the extremes. The trump regime's aspirations seem more in line with Putin's Russia than any America I grew up believing in. It's the left, the liberals, who represent the real America. The america that is based on freedom, and doing what you want, as long as you dont harm others. What the right represents these days is closer to fascism. They've become the same people they claim to fear and despise. 

The elephant in the room: Gen Z

 So...with millennials, I pointed out that while yes, some childfreedom has led to declining birth rates, a lot of it is economic. The economy for millennials has been a crapshow, with a lot of us deferring having kids due to not achieving some level of economic sustainability. This comes after a generation of telling us to keep our legs closed and not to reproduce irresponsibly...while then engaging in the responsibility that our economy allowed. I honestly think millennials would have likely had more kids if the economy didn't suck for them. If we had the economic opportunities our parents did. CONGRATS, GOP, YOU PLAYED YOURSELVES, YOU SHAMED A GENERATION INTO NOT HAVING KIDS AND THEY DIDN'T HAVE KIDS, YOU HAVE MOSTLY YOURSELVES TO BLAME! If we adopted practices like UBI, higher wages, etc, to make life better for the masses, maybe people would have had more kids! 

But...then there's gen Z. Gen Z, especially the tail end, I believe the first half of the generation are just like millennials, but the more tail end now in their teens and early 20s, they...have unique problems. And it actually has a lot to do with culture wars. As we know, the men are becoming increasingly conservative, and wanting to go back to an authoritarian approach in which womens' sexuality is more controlled due to their lack of success with dating, and the women...dont wanna be controlled and have gone in the opposite direction of being radfems. Like....those who grew up in the post 2016 environment which has been particularly divisive and toxic has led to a generation of young people who arent having sex, are distrustful of dating, and who seem to hate the other gender due to political polarization.

Idk how these guys are gonna settle down and create the next generation at this rate. it's like all the problems millennials had, and then ON TOP OF THEM, they got their weird utopia 25 situation going on where the culture is so F-ed up that the men and women aren't pairing off like they should. Some of this is the consequence of the internet and its impact on dating. But a lot of it is just...the culture wars between the far right and far left.

Again, I feel like under a liberal model, freedom will prevail where enough people will have kids that we get an outcome that isnt particularly socially undesirable. Like conservatives will complain the birth rate aint high enough, but my answer: FIX THE FRICKING ECONOMY! Which they dont wanna do. But...when radfems hate the men for being conservative, and the men hate the women for being radfems, well....you're dealing with the illiberal extremes just screwing everything up. Anyway these guys are still young, and maybe they'll straighten out as they age, but that COULD be a problem. Either way, this is a problem with EVERYTHING with our politics post 2016. And I've been condemning that from the start as it's not helpful and just dividing us for no fricking reason at all. Of course, the rich wanted us to fight because otherwise we'd demand concessions for them and....wait...

can't we just say ALL OF THIS IS BECAUSE OF THE WEALTHY NOT ALLOWING THE WEALTH TO TRICKLE DOWN AS WE SHOULD AND INSTEAD DISTRACTING US WITH CULTURE WARS?! Arguably yes. Except now their solution to fix this is rank authoritarianism. Because of course it is. *sigh*, we are in hell, and this is why no one is having kids.

Conclusion

So what can we conclude? Well, largely, i think the "fertility crisis" is largely a made up crisis. Generally speaking left to their own devices people make good enough decisions that im happy with the outcome, and we should encourage them to do so. However, conservatives always seem miserable, always seem to be in culture grievance mode, and always ciomplain, and always make up fake crises to get us distracted. 

And at the end of the day the crisis is arguably their fault in various ways in the process, if it exists at all, because the contradictions of their own ideology cause all the undesirable outcomes in the first place. Of course they're just gonna blame progressives for existing and insist on taking away our reproductive rights in order to force authoritarianism on us, because of course they would, it's all they really know.

Also, a lot of them are really racist and probably only wanna have the "right" (white) people to have babies, so that's probably what all the complaining is about.

Anyway, i dont think it's a crisis mostly. Insofar as it is, it comes down to conservatives in the first place, and if we just practiced liberalism, the problems would resolve themselves naturally and peacefully to some degree.  

Discussing McMorrow's campaign imploding

 So I'm not gonna do a full election update as recent posts still have done a pretty decent job on that, but I do want to discuss a new poll out of Michigan since other people are talking about it. Basically Mcmorrow's campaign has cratered significantly and she's now third place. Somehow she imploded so bad she resurrected Stevens' flailing campaign. So why is this?

Well, it should be obvious. I mean, I'm someone who was right up McMorrow's alley originally. When I knew next to nothing about the candidates other than El Sayed being the medicare for all book guy, I actually trended toward mcmorrow and my first post on the matter actually endorsed her. Why? because I've come to realize I dont always think in lockstep with the progressive movement due to my UBI centric ideal platform and how I need to make compromises on other priorities to keep a full UBI viable. As such, I've become okay with a public option and slightly more incremental solutions. While I love the energy progressives bring, and am on board with fixing the country with real solutions, we disagree somewhat on what those real solutions should be, and I'm fine with voting for someone who is a little more moderate (but still to the left of the centrist wing of the party) in order to get something a bit closer to what I want.

But then I started wading into the toxicity of the primary race itself, and how McMorrow had the brilliant idea of flinging tons of dishonest mud at El Sayed painting him as a radical for daring to appear with Hasan Piker, and it really made me wonder, gee, is McMorrow even genuine? Can i trust her to have my back on these issues in practice? And the answer is no. no, I very obviously cant. Her campaign has the establishment's stink all over it, and she seems to have aligned with some third way interests and hasan derangement syndrome. And again, that makes me wonder...okay, well how well will she stick to her purported interests in office? Or will she just conveniently drop them because the donors say so like Biden/Harris did?

Because we've seen this before. Biden/Harris had a mildly progressive campaign in practice, and then Biden kinda distanced himself from say, the public option, and Harris dropped it from her platform, and honestly, are these guys gonna actually do what they say in office? If you align with third way style interests...I dont trust you. 

She also reminds me of Elizabeth Warren in 2020, who had some major progressive street cred in 2020, but then went all in with knifing Bernie in the back with a hillary-esque campaign claiming he was sexist, and basically splitting his votes by refusing to drop out.  There's a reason we call her a "snake." Because she is. And McMorrow comes off as one too.

Especially when El Sayed's message is basically just "I want to help you people." Granted, he hasnt done a good job outlining exactly what that entails. His platform is vague. But yeah, vibes tend to win elections over policy for many people. And McMorrow just went in a direction that made her extremely unlikeable, whereas El Sayed is literally midwestern zohran mamdani, and he's popular AF in NYC.

now, can El Sayed win the general? That's the big concern. El Sayed polls way worse than McMorrow or Stevens do, and I'm kind of inclined to back McMorrow in the sense that McMorrow has a better shot at actually winning. While recent polling shows all 3 underwater for some reason (which is highly anomalous given all other polling I've seen on 2026), El Sayed does do a good 2-3 points worse than the others on average. Stevens is the only one who in the averages still wins (and its like 0.6 or something). McMorrow is down around 1-2, and El Sayed is down like 3-4, with recent polling showing him at R+5 in the general election matchup. That's...not good. And given winning the senate is important, and even I'm inclined to be "blue no matter who", I really don't like El Sayed's chances. But...I get why McMorrow isnt that popular. She kind of outed herself as a warren like "snake" and is suffering for it in the polls.

Either way, Im not from Michigan. Those who are, vote your conscience. Objectively speaking I still kinda like McMorrow outside of her smear campaign, I just really hate said campaign. And while I love El Sayed's progressive campaign....on policy I'm a bit more mixed, and on electability, I'm just not sure he can pull it off. Do with this information what you will.  

Updated my house model: New forecast (election update: 5/11/26)

 So, against my better judgment I decided to update my house model. 

 So, to discuss it. I went by Cook PVI's house ratings, and included all districts not considered solid/safe. I labeled all districts, TU means tossup according to cook, LR/LD are leans, YR/YD are likelies, and yeah. 

Then I basically looked for obviously gerrymandered districts that go the wrong way, like if something from California or Florida is like lean/likely red/blue and then goes the other way, I flipped them back the way cook had them. This is an measure to compensate for gerrymandering. Since my model takes 2024's districts and shifts them uniformly so many points, and some districts arent even the same any more, I declared a few results invalid and flipped them back. This gives the GOP a net +2 advantage over the raw data, which I included in the results.

With that said, my model has the dems winning at 231-204, with a 96% chance of victory. A bit lower than my 235/98% stats in the old model, but that's why i rebuilt it, to update it considering how districts have changed. This seems like a possible result.  

Do graphics really look better than ~10 years ago? A closer look

 So....I decided to take a closer look at some game series' I enjoy. I won't post videos for all of these, that took a lot of time, and you can look it up yourself, but I decided to do an experiment. Open up two games from the same series in split screen and figure out what I think looks better. I decided to focus onfour series that had had recent game releases, and have older games with similar looking content. With that said, let's begin.

Battlefield

First, I took the video of Battlefield 1 (2016) and compared it to Battlefield 6 (2025) from yesterday's article. Looking at them side by side, BF6 does look better. Environments are more detailed, there was more destruction. The lighting looked gorgeous in BF6. Now...was this worth say, a decade worth of improvements? Eh...in a linear fashion? No. I then went back and looked at BF2142 (2006) and it looks like...hot garbage compared to BF1. With THAT, that was a solid 10 years of improvement. But BF1 vs BF6 was more gradual. 

I also looked at BF5 (2018) vs BF6 (2026) since BF5 was always my benchmark for "best looking game". First I ended up looking at a totally different map and I was like, ya know what, BF5 has a different art style with this more rural map. Let's compare city maps. 

So I went with Amiens from BF1 vs BF6, and it panned out. yeah, BF6 does look significantly better. I also compared Rotterdam from BF5 to BF6 and while the difference was closer, BF6 still had better lighting, more detail, and better destruction. 

Still, to think it took 7 years to fully and unequivocally beat BF5 is just wow. I didnt even bother with 2042 as I know that one looked like crap in practice. It always looked and felt janky, and its art style was part of the problem too. It kinda felt like a BF4 style regression coming off of BF3. Still, even then BF4 did have more detail, it looked worse in practice though due to the art style though. 

But yeah. So...are graphics getting better? Yes. They are. But the differences are a lot more subtle and I literally need to look side by side to notice the difference.

Call of Duty (Black Ops)

 So...I focused exclusively on black ops here as these are the newest, and because COD has much differing art styles. More specifically, I focused on futuristic games given BO7 is a futuristic game. 

BO3 (2015) vs BO7 (2025)- Oh my god there's a world of difference. To be fair, COD was never a "looker" of a franchise for most of its existence, and the graphics are typically unremarkable and mid for the time, but yeah, BO7 looked quite sharp, with detailed environments, and decent lighting. I guess it just looks mid to me because I hate upscaling and because BF6 looks so much better. But that's a problem COD always had vs battlefield. DICE makes gorgeous games. The COD devs make mediocre looking ones. But yeah, BO3 looks quite dated these days. Even on a similar map.

For BO4 (2018) vs BO7 (2025), the difference was a bit closer in practice. Here, BO7 DID look better, but BO4 didn't look bad. It looked significantly better than BO3 in just a few years time. Of course, after BF1 kicked IW's butt so bad it spawned this hilarious song, Activision and Treyarch actually had to TRY to make something that didnt suck. And BO4 was the beginning of the modernization of the series. So it was one of the first CODs in years that didn't outright suck. It was quickly surpassed by MW19, but yeah I feel like that 3 year jump between BO3 and BO4 was as significant as the jump between BO4 and BO7. 

So again, games ARE getting better, but the differences are, generally speaking, more subtle and gradual in the 2020s than they were in the 2000s or 2010s. 

Actually...just a thought experiment. I was gonna do BO4 vs BO cold war, but just came across the same map from BO1 vs BO4, so let's compare that too.

BO1 (2010) vs BO4 (2018)- While BO4 is better looking, BO1 holds up well. heck, BO1 holds up so well it looks better than BO3 to me. So BO3 was just trash. Janky mid 2010s CODs. No wonder they never held up. But yeah, I'd say that BO1 vs BO4 is about as big of a jump as BO4 vs BO7. Dont get me wrong, the newer ones are better, but again, it seems like if you actually had decent art direction, even 2010 era games can still look decent today.  We'll actually see this trend in the other 2 series I mention.

Doom

 Doom 2016 vs Doom the Dark Ages (2025)- Doom the dark ages does look a bit better, a bit more detailed, but DANG doom 2016 holds up. It's not a huge difference at all. Now, if you put these side by side and said this was almost a decade of difference, I'd be really? like, that's what I'd expect from eternal. Speaking of eternal.

Doom eternal (2020) vs 2016 vs dark ages (2025)- Here, the whole art direction rears its ugly head. Something about eternal just looks off. I kinda always felt this way, but I never really articulated it until putting them side by side. Eternal feels more cartoony. The environments are bright and vibrant which doesnt fit the doom aesthetic at all, and comparing 2016's kadingir sanctum to super gore nest, yeah, 2016 had a MUCH MUCH MUCH better are direction. 2020 was more detailed in some ways but it kinda had that "black ops 3" vibe if you know what I mean, to compare it to the BO series above. The lighting was flat, the art style was just bad. Sometimes art style trumps graphics. This is true here and this is true in COD. 

Would I say that dark ages brings a decade of improvements over 2016? Not really. And if you go back the other way, overshooting the decade by a bit and comparing to Doom 3 (2004), yeah 2016 is much better. Doom 3 does hold up, but comparing that to a more modern game? Yeah I've played enough doom 3 to know its differences are more glaring in person. And of course, Doom 3 (2004) is better than Doom and Doom 2 (1993/1994) by a nearly infinite amount in terms of raw graphics. Like even if Doom and Doom 2 aged reasonably well all things considered given the art style is somewhat timeless, you can't compare a 90s game with an, at the time, ultra realistic looking 2000s game.

All in all, comparing 2016 to dark ages (9 years) vs 2016 to doom 3 (12 years), honestly, the difference is MUCH greater between 2016 and Doom 3. Like, it's not even close. ANd that isnt due to the extra 3 years of time and graphical advancements either. Once again, we're kinda just scraping the bottom of the barrel here in improving things. 2016 already looked so good it was hard to improve on that and 9 years of changes are relatively subtle and marginal. 

The Outer Worlds

 So...this one actually REALLY surprised me. But...I'm gonna say it, comparing the two green starting planets, TOW1 (2018) looks WAY better than TOW2 (2025). it looks more detailed, it looks sharper. TOW2 looks super muddy. it often lacks detail. It feels like it was just thrown together. I mean, neither TOW game is a masterpiece all things considered. Think of them like really really mid space fallout games with a decent story. But idk, I feel like, they tried more with TOW1. TOW2 feels rather lazy in comparison. Like, a lot of detail is super muddy. It doesnt look sharp at all. And this has been my experience with TOW2 too. It just looks...kinda mid. I mean, it's okay, but seeing TOW1 in motion again along side it, it's like, my god what were these devs doing? Like, to be fair, I didnt particularly like TOW2 in general. I did go back recently and finished up my run and did side quests and stuff, and the game just felt so fricking empty. Like I literally had trouble getting invested in it. Mid AF RPG.

I guess TOW2 is the epitome of what I consider to be "modern gaming." Like, it actually IS worse than previous games from years ago. Like, it's the epitome of slop. I won't say dont buy it, but dont pay the $50 i did. It's not worth it. Maybe $20-35. 

Conclusion

So what can we conclude?

Well, I can definitely say this. If you made a beautiful game from the mid 2000s onward with good art direction, it still holds up today. Sure, it's been surpassed, BO1 and Doom 3 look kinda mid compared to newer games from the same series, but they don't look BAD. At the same time, bad art direction can make games look WORSE than previous ones. See Black Ops 3, Doom Eternal, Battlefield 2042, and the Outer Worlds 2. A well crafted game will still hold up 15-20 years later graphically. A poorly designed one thrown together will look bad forever. It'll look dated at launch with people wondering, wtf is wrong with this? Literally looks worse than the last one.

Even then, with eternal at least, it didn't look bad in practice, I played through it, several times. It does look worse than 2016 but it looks pretty good. I'll maintain my stance on the others though.

Finally, do games look better than they did 10 years ago? Yes...but the differences are relatively subtle, and I would literally need to compare them side by side to notice. And even more so, there is some level of difference in practice. I just watched games on YT videos just now. I can tell you, playing them on your own computer, your mileage my vary. A game that looks better than the previous one in marginal subtle ways may look absolutely terrible on low graphics settings with upscalers on. I know BF4 looked significantly worse than BF3 at the time because of that. It might be part of my problem with 2042 although I'll maintain even after upgrading my system that game looks mid, part of it is just art style and general direction. And eternal, yeah, running on low...with upscaling on....yeah...no. I hate that. Same with BO7. Like, that's a "modern gaming" thing. If you buy a $250 GPU today, you're gonna get like low-medium settings with upscaling on half the time. And it just looks atrocious given those subtlely worse 10 year old titles can run on the same rig at max and look beautiful. 

And you gotta keep that in consideration too. Sometimes the cost of progress isn't worth it. Like, Doom the Dark Ages is NOT worth a decade worth of graphical advancements for me. Even at its best, looking at both games on max graphics side by side, the differences between 2016 and dark ages are relatively subtle these days. And I can tell you, when BO7 was trying to make me run it with upscaling on, i was watching the act man play COD4 from 2007 in the other window and i honestly thought THAT looked better despite the obvious lack of detail. Seriously, I like sharp, detailed games. I HATE upscaling with a passion. If I gotta upscale the game, it's like taking my glasses off. It doesn't matter if everything is blurry. That's a problem I actually have in BF6 too sometimes. Like as good as that looks in motion, I can tell you, when you ZOOM IN and youre trying to pick off an enemy with a 4x scope, the models that game shows look blurry AF and it can be hard to see what youre shooting at. I feel like a lot of older shooters never had that problem. You just had less detailed models, but the models looked SHARP for what they were.

Blur is never the solution guys, I'd literally rather have less detail than blur. And I guess that's one of the reasons I hate modern gaming as much as I do. Everything is upscaling, and unless I paid a full $100 more for my GPU for super special DLSS upscaling, the solutions available to me look like garbage. And no, I shouldnt have to rely on upscaling in the first place. And i really dont know how good DLSS is. I mean, I've watched comparison videos on that, and generally prefer native. Unless its TAA, which is atrocious, at which point there isnt a good solution unless fidelityFX CAS is available.

Which is ironically. I'd rather take AMD's ancient pre FSR solution to sharpening/upscaling over their newer stuff. But I stand by that. 

With that said, yeah, graphics are better now, but the differences are far more subtle than they used to be, and honestly, in practice, blur ruins any positive improvements IMO.  Seriously, if youre a developer relying on upscaling to make our stuff work, it's 1 step forward for 2 steps back, which is why im so mixed on graphics in the 2020s. It's like...yeah all of these subtle differences arent worth it if it looks blurry AF. 

But I will admit, yes, there are SOME differences between mid/late 2010s games in most cases and mid 2020s games. Nothing like past decades, nothing is a world of difference, but there is a difference.  

Discussing the history of 3D graphics (and why graphical advancement doesn't matter as much these days)

 So...I decided I wanted to go into this, since as we discussed, back in the day, the transition into 3D gaming with gen 5 was pretty mind blowing. 3D games existed before that. Heck, when looking it up, they kinda expand back to the 1970s. I'm mostly gonna start my focus on the 1990s since that's what I'm aware of, and because that's when 3D went mainstream though. Because keep in mind, even if 3D games existed in the 70s and 80s, they weren't the norm, and most games were rather 2D. I mean, when I got into video games, the big debate was sega vs nintendo, and sonic vs mario. Sega did what nintendidn't with 16 bit blast processing, but then even the super nintendo console had 3D games like star fox, Mariokart, and doom. My own introduction to 3D games came from Doom on the 32x. And yeah, it was pretty mind blowing at the time. With that said, my original start of the 3D genre was gonna focus on 1992 with wolfenstein 3D, as that was doom's direct precursor. So let's start there:

1992

Wolfenstein 3D

Yeah, this kinda looked like that old windows 95 screen saver many of us were obsessed with back in the day. Pretty primitive, but it worked. 

Super Mario Kart

 Posted this above, but this is what games looked like back then. Very primitive, but yeah, kinda interesting. Gotta start somewhere, ya know?

1993

 Doom

 This video looks like it was done with a more modern engine, but yeah, doom was pretty primitive too, but it looked leagues above wolfenstein. Back in the 1990s, tech advanced so fast that a game that looked mind blowing one year looked dated the next. Doom basically obsoleted wolfenstein pretty quickly to the point of it becoming a relative footnote.

Star fox

 Posted this above too, but this is what SNES games looked like in 3D. Nowhere near as good. But again, gotta start somewhere.

1994

Doom II 

Yeah 1994 brought doom II, which was more doom. It worked, but it wasn't a huge graphical enhancement, even if it did expand the sandbox by quite a bit. 

1995

Hexen 

ID software was cooking in the 1990s and in 1995, they brought hexen, which was like doom but more medeval. FUn fact, doom was supposed to be more medieval but a lot of that was cut for the more science fiction theme. We did see doom the dark ages lately 30 years later, but yeah. 

For the most part, games were still 2D during this era. I got my first exposure to doom through the 32x around this time though. 

1996

1996 was the more breakthrough year for 3D to the masses. Again, while PC gaming had stuff like wolfenstein, doom, etc, most gamers were playing mario and sonic during this time on their genesis and SNES. but 1996 marked the transition to gen 5. And yeah, it was mind blowing.

Quake 

 On PC, advancement continued with the release of quake, another medieval style FPS from ID. it kinda bridged the gap between heretic/hexen and doom, although future quake entries had significantly more sci fi settings. 

But yeah, consoles got a huge boost too through the N64 and the PS1.

Super Mario 64

Crash Bandicoot

Obviously, the graphics on the console released trailed quake, but they still arguably beat doom. So it was pretty impressive. Again, keep in mind, like 99% of games most of us played before this point were 2D. Mario went from this to what you see above. Mind blowing. 

1997

 Quake 2

 ID still had it. And I wanna remind you, we're now at the 5 year mark from Wolfenstein 3D. All the change we've seen happened over FIVE YEARS. That's like comparing a 2021 to 2026 game today. Meanwhile we still treat cyberpunk 2077 which is now 6 years old as some sort of holy grail of graphics. Yeah...

 The N64 came out swinging with a lot of good games during this time frame too. Consider the following:

Star Fox 64

And note how blurry it is, I mean, we discussed this the other day, but most N64 games were 240p at the time. Most footage I'm showing has been upscaled significantly from what it looked like back in the day to most. Of course it didnt look that bad on CRTs intended to run at 480p and were able to blur things well enough where it didnt bother us much.

 Mario kart 64

Doom 64

Doom 64 was the REAL doom 3 before we had Doom 3. Or Doom 2.5. But yeah. Again, go back and compare this to Doom 1&2. Again, only a 4 year difference...

 Goldeneye

 So yeah, N64 was cooking. Again, those games never kept up with PC at the time, but it did bring 3D to the mainstream for a lot of us console peasants back in the day. 

1998

And while the N64 and PS1 would plod along for a few more years, we were already breaking boundaries and surpassing that. On PC, we had this:

Half Life

Yeah, this was EVENTUALLY released on the PS2 for us on console. But they had this kinda stuff on PC back in 1998. Again, this is a mere 6 years after Wolfenstein and 5 years after doom, and we were already starting to see the beginnings of gen 6 style graphics. Mind blowing.

And consoles werent doing bad either. Remember the sega dreamcast? Released in 1998 in Japan.  

Sonic Adventure

Keep in mind, just FOUR YEARS BEFORE THIS, we were playing this on our genesises. Again, the 90s were a magical time where graphical advancement was mindblowing. Jensen Huang things ray tracing can do that nowadays, but no...just no. 

1999

 Meanwhile let's look at what PC was cooking up.

Unreal Tournament

Quake III Arena

 Yeah this is where we got into the era of the first true multiplayer games and arena FPS. Q3 and UT99 were the two big ones. And again, this was gen 6 graphics back then. On the low end side of gen 6 for sure, but still. 

2000

Deus Ex 

2000 actually feels like somewhat of a lull. A calm before the storm. Still, the PS2 launched around this time, bringing those nice graphics PC has had since 1998 to consoles finally. A few games from the time:

29 game compilation

2001

This is where gen 6 REALLY took off and we got the game cube and Xbox. A few games from the time:

Halo Combat Evolved

Again, note that console games were 480p at the time so were still rather blurry. And note how badly it looks compared to some other upscaled footage. This is why I crap on DLSS in the modern era. 

More upscaled footage (PC)

Same game, but yeah. Again, devs: we don't want to look at blurry crap. We dont care how good the game looks, if it's blurry, it looks like garbage.

Anyway, another one I wanna include is this:

 007 Agent Under Fire

This was my first PS2 game, and MAN coming just 4 years after goldeneye, yeah it's mindblowing in retrospect. We got THAT much advancement that fast. We're not even at the 10 year mark from wolfenstein 3D. We're at the 5 year mark from super mario 64.

 Meanwhile PC had this:

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

It was a huge jump from Wolfenstein 3D, but honestly, it just felt like more quake 3 to me at the time. 

2002

Battlefield 1942 

Yep, we finally got battlefield, which was pretty insane at the time. Looked amazing too.  

There wasn't a ton ton of advancement through gen 6 on console. But 2002 still had a decent selection of games come out. 

 007 Nightfire

 Super Mario Sunshine

Medal of Honor Frontline

 Yeah, we got a lot of WWII games back in the early 2000s. It was kind of a thing back then...

 2003

Unreal Tournament 2003 

2003 also didn't massively advance graphics a ton. Still, we did see next gen releases of previous gen IP that looked quite good

Legend of Zelda Winwaker

F Zero GX

Mario Kart Double Dash

2004

 Half Life 2

 Doom 3

 Honestly, 2004 is where gen 7 officially started for PC gamers. Sure, console gamers would be stuck at that same 2000sish standard of visuals for another year or two, but yeah things were already advancing on the PC side of things with mindblowing graphics. This is why I always mark the era of "modern gaming" around 2004ish. After a decent period of relative stagnation, yeah, things really advanced here. As far as doom 3 goes, this is a full 11 years after Doom 1. So....yeah. Note how far we came in just a decade. I'd honestly say these 2004 games look closer to modern games 20 years later than games from 10 years prior to this point. 

2005

F.E.A.R.

Quake 4

Call of Duty 2

2005 was really cooking graphically. The 360 launched around this time so some of these games came immediately, and some the next year. But yeah. 2004 walked so 2005 can run. Games around this time started feeling like movies. I'd say this is around where we started hitting diminishing returns with graphics on the whole. 

2006

Gears of War

Prey (2006)

We seemed to hit a plateau around this time visual wise for most games. And honestly, things didn't start improving as a whole until around 2010-2011ish. Still, there was that ONE game that set the bar for visuals...

 2007

 Crysis

 Yeah, this was MINDBLOWING at the time. And it was totally the great PC killer game at the time too. One of the last of its kind. There's a reason the meme used to be "but can it run crysis?" Yeah. I mean, I admit, at this point it does look a bit dated, but it's almost 20 years old, what do you want? Point is, these kinds of games look closer to the modern day than say, the 1990s games from 10-15 years ago. heck, Crysis was just miles above even like half life 2 and doom 3. And keep in mind, Halo combat evolved was just 6 years before this.

Anyway, 2007 was also a banging year for video games in general. Just a few other games that showcase pretty decent visuals from the era.

Unreal Tournament 3

 Halo 3

 Call of Duty 4

 2008

 After 2007, 2008 was a pretty mid year for gaming. Nothing really came close to crysis for another 4 years or so, and the 2007 games above were generally what games at the time looked like through 2012-2013 for the most part. 

 Far Cry 2

 Fallout 3

 Haze

 Yes yes, I know Fallout 3 isnt that good graphically, but it had SCALE like I had never played before at the time while still looking relatively decent. So it deserved an honorable mention. 

2009

 Killzone 2

 FEAR 2

Again, after Crysis, things stagnated, it took YEARS to look better, and we mostly just got more of those 2005-2006 era visuals again and again. To be fair, after they hit that point, I can see where going further took time. At that point, we started seeing clearly diminishing returns. 

2010

Battlefield Bad Company 2

 Metro 2033

Yeah we didn't QUITE hit Crysis 1 visuals, but this is where we started getting close. This is where, just like in 2004 we started seeing the first "gen 7" type games on PC, we started going that way around 2010 on consoles. Most console games were stuck at 2006 era visuals still, but we did start seeing graphics make a jump again. 

2011

 Crysis 2

Battlefield 3

 Yeah this is where I'd say we finally matched/beat Crysis 1. Crysis 2 offered insane visuals, although some would argue Crysis 1 was better, due to Crysis 2 primarily taking place in NYC and urban environments being less impressive than the jungle. Kinda close though. Battlefield 3 also once again set the standard for quite insane visuals. Once again, it would take years for games to fully surpass this level of graphics IMO, even with next gen games coming soon. 

Also, keep in mind, we're about equidistant from 2011 as 2011 is from 1996. Just go back and look at quake and super mario 64 again and compare it to this. YEAH. Again, this is the level at which games used to advance graphically. We dont see anything like this in the modern era IMO. Crysis 2 is closer to, say cyberpunk, than it is to, say, 2002 games.  

2012

Far Cry 3 

After 2011, 2012 was rather uneventful graphically. It was kind of a regression. Far Cry 3 looked pretty solid, but still kind of fell short of even Crysis 1. 

Planetside 2

I included planetside 2 for scale but it was never really a looker. BF3 and even BC2 looked better, but imagine having up to 2000 players fighting on a map the size of like skyrim, it was mindblowing at the time. And it did crush our PCs as well. 

2013

 Crysis 3

 Crysis 3 was, like all Crysis games at the time, rather mindblowing. It beat PS4/Xbox one era graphics AT LAUNCH. 

In comparison I didn't find many PS4/Xbox one style games super impressive at the time. BF4, for example, felt like a regression from BF3 graphically in some ways.  

 Battlefield 4

GTA V

GTA 5 was actually a PS3/360 game. I know it was very quickly remastered and brought to next gen consoles and PC, but it was originally created for last gen hardware.

It was the year where "Crysis" style visuals went mainstream, but yeah. As you can tell, we've had that on PC for quite a while at this point. It's just that most games were stuck in the mid 2000s because of the hardware.

2014

Metro Last Light 

Wolfenstein: The New Order

Far Cry 4

Titanfall 

Once again, we finally got that crysis 1 style visuals being pretty standard at the time. Actually better because the textures on new games could be pretty insane with 2 GB cards being standard and games using up to 4 GB on high end cards. 

2015

 Star Wars Battlefront

 EA did it again, bringing amazing graphics at the time to home consoles. I mean, it looks A LITTLE dated now. But keep in mind, 2026 is just as far away as the original Star Wars Battlefront II was back in 2004. 

 Have graphics advanced THAT much in the past 11 years? Not really. 

 Witcher 3

Fallout 4

 And a lot of peopel gave Fallout 4 crap for graphics but I thought it looked pretty good. And comparing it to fallout 3, yeah, a huge quantum leap in just 5-7 years. 

2016

 Doom 2016

 This is where gen 8 REALLY got going with insane titles like Doom 2016 as well as stuff like Battlefield 1. Again, it goes to show it was still possible to push boundaries. 

 Battlefield 1

 Once again, amazing. Still looks amazing today. Comparing this to like 2005-2006 titles, yeah, we still advanced in 10 years. Maybe not as much as the previous 10, but yeah. 

2017

 Star Wars Battlefront II

 While kind of a mid game, no one can deny that the star wars battlefront EA games looked fricking beautiful. And honestly, the graphics still largely hold up to this day in my view. 

 Wolfenstein: The New Colossus

2018

 Battlefield 5

 I still think this is one of the best games ever made in terms of sheer graphics and visuals. 

 Red Dead Redemption 2

 Not my thing but a lot of people loved the detail of Red Dead Redemption 2. 

 Far Cry 5

 Far Cry 5 also looked pretty good.

Atomic Heart 

 Atomic Heart also released in 2018. I played the demo of this one but never bought the full game. I still might in the future, but it does look amazing for its time as well.

 As we can kinda tell visuals for gen 8 kinda leveled off after 2015-2016 or so though. Id say the only one of those that looked significantly better was BF5 and even then....compared to BF1 and battlefront 2? It was better, but not worlds better. Still, BF5 has been my "this is the best looking game ever" game for a while even after 2018.

2019

 Metro Exodus

 Metro exodus also looked pretty mind blowing at the time. Once again, I kinda feel like since 2016 it's kind of just diminishing returns. 

 2020

 Cyberpunk 2077

 It's kinda sad but 6 years later, this is still considered the best game ever made graphically. It's the one game that made ray tracing really stand out, but it's one of the only ones to have done so IMO, and it still looks beautiful even without ray tracing.

 Doom Eternal

 Does eternal look that much better than 2016? A bit, but not mindblowingly so. Either way cyberpunk clearly won this year. 

 2021

 Most games after 2020 never matched cyberpunk's visuals. Halo infinite is probably the best from that year in my view. 

Halo infinite

Battlefield 2042

 BF2042 was like a downgrade from BF5. BUT...it still looks better than bad company 2 and BF3 arguably (the map in the video is a BC2 map). 

This game popped up when I looked for the best looking games. Never played it but it looks nice.

Bright memory infinite

2022

 Callisto protocol

 Kind of a mid game but popped up as one of the best looking ones. i got this free with my current GPU. I found it rather mid though. Looked great though. 

 2023

Alan Wake 2 

 Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

Starfield 

Alan wake 2 looks pretty impressive. Frontiers of pandora looks okay. Not too amazing.   Starfield looks okay.

 2024

Black Myth Wukong

So this is the ONE game from 2024 of the ones recommended that I really felt stood out. I never played the full game but did mess with the benchmark a while back. It was pretty impressive. 

Still, for the most part other games look kinda mid.

 Star Wars Outlaws

 Looks only a bit better than Battlefront II.

 Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

 Visuals remind me of metro exodus or battlefield 5

 I mean, thats the thing. We started getting these kinds of visuals late last gen. You could argue these newer ones look a little better, but still, outside of wukong I dont think any of them are a decent leap from the likes of say, BF5, or Cyberpunk. Most games kinda plateaued in my view.

 2025

 Doom the Dark Ages

 Right now doom the dark ages is considered the best looking game out there. It does look great at max settings, but keep in mind this requires beefy hardware to pull off. On like a RX 6650 XT im running on low, with FSR on, and using sharpening to compensate. It looks good even on that, but is it really that appreciable of a boost over 2016 or eternal? Arguably not really. There IS improvement, dont get me wrong. But we're also seeing the costs required to get it. The price of hardware to pull off improved visuals is going up, while GPUs have barely advanced per dollar for the past 3 years by this point. 

Battlefield 6 

Does look impressive, but I can tell you in practice this game has significant issues with blur at long range that makes spotting enemies hard. Looks great at a cursory glance but in practice some aspects of the visuals are just...bleh.

 Anyway I wont do 2026 since the whole year hasnt happened yet and the best examples (resident evil reqiuem and crimson desert REALLY don't look that good in practice. 

Conclusion

With that said, what can I conclude? 

Well, to some degree I advise people to look for themselves, but as I see it:

1990s- regular, rapid improvements.

2000s- slower but significant improvements that happened in bursts. The mid 2000s from 2004-2006 were the most mindblowing. 2010-2011 saw the next jump but that was the 2010s.

2010s- Once again, graphics seemed to improve in a five year cadence. 2010-2011 were amazing, but we didnt see another jump like it until around 2016. And then Cyberpunk in 2020 was a pretty huge jump that still holds up today.

2020s- To be fair I focused on the games that were allegedly the best on the market. And they do look good, but very few of them are truly mind blowing to me. Many of them look about as good as late 2010s titles to me, and I feel like we've reached a level of stagnation here. 

A lot of games use FSR or DLSS on more modest hardware that makes the visuals worse. As I said, I dont care how good Doom the dark ages looks if it's blurry AF. We saw this even with old games. Like, a lot of those games look way better than they did at the time because again, 240-480p in practice. 

 And even then, I would advise people. Look at say, a mid 90s game and compare it with a mid 2000s one. NIGHT AND DAY difference. Compare a mid 2000s one with a mid 2010s one. Also a pretty big difference. Not AS big but big.

Compare say, BF1 in 2016 to BF6 in 2025 and....not gonna lie, I actually think BF1 looks better in practice. Maybe the visuals of BF6 are technically better, but again, I dont feel like things meaningfully advanced a ton since then. The same can be said of doom 2016 vs doom the dark ages. I actually kinda like 2016 in practice better, not gonna lie. I know the newer one is supposed to be better, but it's not worlds better.

 On the other hand, compare GTA V to cyberpunk and its a pretty big difference. Still, despite 7 years we're talking 2 generations of console differences there, a late gen 7 vs an early gen 9 game. 

if hard pressed, yes, 2020s games at the high end of the spectrum do look better. I just understand that for the most part, those games 1) are few and far between with the average game having more late gen 8 era visuals, and 2) require supercomputers to properly run with all the eye candy on. Consoles tend to get a stripped down experience, and my own PC probably gets roughly base PS5 tier visuals. So...idk. 

Here's the thing, to make the kinds of advancements we've seen over time work, each console typically is 6-10x more powerful than the previous gen. It used to be possible to generate that level of performance uplift in the past. Nowadays, things have stagnated. 2020 era hardware has gone UP in price and is still rather mainstream. The same 3060 and 6600 tier cards that were common back then are still go tos now, with now the 5060 and 9060 xt being favorites. Even then, they're quickly going up into the whole $300-400 zone, or $400+ for 16 GB RAM. So again, things are stalling out. 

I admit, even at the time, a lot of these games didnt feel worth it either. If you played say, fear on low it looked last gen. So did quake 4, etc. And sometimes you didnt get to properly max the games out for years after. But idk, I felt like the visual impacts were a lot heavier back in the day, and a lot more noticeable. Nowadays, it literally takes me around 5 years to notice a game looks dated. And again, given im not particularly playing the best of the game games listed for the most part, games from 7-10 years ago still look beautiful to me. Like I can play those 2016-2019 era games and still consider them relatively modern. It really comes down to me not particularly playing the most CGI looking 2020s games that much. And trust me, outside of those selected few games, most look...rather mid and more like late gen 8 games to me. 

So are graphics still advancing even in the 2020s? yes. Are they advancing as fast as they used to? No. Are the advancements particularly accessible to average gamers? Not particularly given 3060/4060/6600/7600 tier hardware is about average and most games dont push things that much. And yeah. This is why I'd rather developers focus less on raw graphics and more on performance and accessibility. Even smartphones can pull off 2005-2010 era graphics decently now. The top end ones are probably closer to around 2010-2015 era graphics. The steam deck and switch 2 are around PS4/PS4 pro level respectively. Consoles have kind of plateaued, and pushing next gen ones next year isnt likely to net anything close to a 8x power increase. CPU wise might do a 2-3x increase AT BEST, probably closer to 1.5-2x given the power envelope. And I think PS6 specs leaked out are 2x PS5 specs. Things arent advancing like they used to.

This isn't to say there isnt room to improve. Modern games still look quite good even compared to stuff from 10 years ago on the average (keep in mind I cherrypicked the BEST 2016 games, the average ones were a bit more modest, probably closer to 2013 era visuals, whereas average games today are closer to like 2018-2019 era visuals). But yeah, the ceiling isnt as high.

Anyway, I just wanted to share that to give my perspective of why I aint super impressed with modern games. I didnt even touch game play but game play wise a lot of them are pretty mid. Visually, things are improving, but not as far as they used to. I'd say we're likely not gonna see something greatly beat cyberpunk until 2030ish. kinda sad how a 6 year old game is still considered the most impressive, by now even crysis's graphics were pretty mainstream by 2013.