it’s true, it’s desperately fucked knowing that these newspapers and institutions started indexes (the democracy index, the press freedom index, the human development index, Gini inequality…) in the 1990s-2000s, and at the time they, and maybe everyone who’s now over the age of 40, had this beautiful optimism that the world would continue to become more free and more equal and more righteous, only to hit this global collapse that we have awesome tools for objectively measuring and no hard or soft power to resist