/rant on
New Year’s Day (or just prior) is the annual cue for fools full of loose talk to provide unasked their year-in-review and “best of” articles summarizing the previous calendar year. I don’t go in for such clichéd forms of curation but certainly recognize an appetite among Web denizens for predigested content that tells them where to park their attention and what or how to think rather than thinking for themselves. Considering how mis- and under-educated the public has grown to be since the steady slippage destruction of educational standards and curricula began in the 1970s (says me), I suppose that appetite might be better characterized as need in much the same way children needs guidance and rules enforced by wizened authorities beginning with parents yet never truly ending, only shifting over to various institutions that inform and restrain society as a whole. I continue to be flabbergasted by the failure of parents (and teachers) to curb the awful effects of electronic media. I also find it impossible not to characterize social media and other hyperstimuli as gateways into the minds of impressionable youth (and permanent adult children) very much like certain drugs (e.g., nicotine, alcohol, and cannabis) are characterized as gateways to even worse drugs. No doubt everyone must work out a relationship with these unavoidable, ubiquitous influences, but that’s not equivalent to throwing wide open the gate for everything imaginable to parade right in, as many do.
Hard to assess whether foundations below American institutions (to limit my focus) were allowed to decay through neglect and inattention or were actively undermined. Either way, their corruption and now inter-generational inability to function effectively put everyone in a wildly precarious position. The know-how, ambition, and moral focus needed to do anything other than game sclerotic systems for personal profit and acquisition of power are eroding so quickly that operations requiring widespread subscription by the public (such as English literacy) or taking more than the push of a button or click of a mouse to initiate preprogrammed commands are entering failure mode. Like the accidental horror film Idiocracy, the point will come when too few possess the knowledge and skills anymore to get things done but can only indulge in crass spectacle with their undeveloped minds. Because this is a date-related blog post, I point out that Idiocracy depicts results of cultural decay 500 years hence. It won’t take nearly that long. Just one miserable example is the fascist, censorious mood — a style of curation — that has swept through government agencies and Silicon Valley offices intent on installing unchallenged orthodoxies, or for that matter, news junkies and social media platform users content to accept coerced thinking. Religions of old ran that gambit but no need to wait for a new Inquisition to arise. Heretics are already persecuted via cancel culture, which includes excommunication social expulsion, suspension and/or cancellation of media accounts, and confiscation of bank deposits.
A similar point can be made about the climate emergency. Fools point to weather rather than climate to dispel urgency. Reports extrapolating trends often focus on the year 2100, well after almost all of us now alive will have departed this Earth, as a bogus target date for eventualities like disappearance of sea and glacial ice, sea level rise, unrecoverable greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, pH imbalance in the oceans, and other runaway, self-reinforcing consequences of roughly 300 years of industrial activity that succeeded unwittingly in terraforming the planet, along the way making it fundamentally uninhabitable for most species. The masses labor in 2023 under the false impression that everyone is safely distanced from those outcomes or indeed any of the consequences of institutional failure that don’t take geological time to manifest fully. Such notions are like assurances offered to children who seek to understand their own mortality: no need to worry about that now, that’s a long, long way off. Besides, right now there are hangovers to nurse, gifts to return for cash, snow to shovel, and Super Bowl parties to plan. Those are right now or at least imminent. Sorry to say, so is the full-on collapse of institutions that sustain and protect everyone. The past three years have already demonstrated just how precarious modern living arrangements are, yet most mental models can’t or won’t contemplate the wholesale disappearance of this way of life, and if one has learned of others pointing to this understanding, well, no need to worry about that just yet, that’s a long, long way off. However, the slide down the opposite side of all those energy, population, and wealth curves won’t take nearly as long as it took to climb up them.
/rant off
The Spiral Staircase 