AUGUST 12, 2021 – I used to worry our country would descend into civil war—Dems vs. Reps; haves vs. have nots; people who relied solely on Fox for news vs. those who didn’t. Now, I’m not so sure. Perhaps the outcome is simply . . . a wholesale breakdown of norms; a chaotic unraveling of our social, political, economic, and cultural fabric. In the process maybe we’ll become more tribal than ever, as we descend into a dystopian whirlwind of our own making—the ultimate outcome of hyper-consumption and hyper-production.
We reside within an ever-expanding feedback loop of supply and demand, driven by the lure of lucre. A crowd of suppliers strive not only to fulfill our demands but to amplify them by marketing madness. In the days of yore, that madness was manifest in billboards along the highways and commercials on radio and television. Now the mayhem is infinitely more subtle and insidious, fueled by algorithms and artificial intelligence.
Moreover, news and information have been commandeered by the same sophisticated mechanisms for the same bottom line that supports all other goods and services: pieces of eight in sacks and chests. Or more precisely, financial clout to boost to the next level, the feedback loop of supply and demand, of production and consumption.
Now our insatiable appetites and compulsion to produce threaten our very existence—at least in a way to which we are accustomed. Mother Earth groans and growls under our relentless onslaught. Alongside our abuse of our only home, we’ve opened the doors and windows to the smoke of falsehoods and nonsense, misinformation and disinformation to a point where people trust what they shouldn’t and distrust what’s true.
The pandemic revealed how far we’d fallen. A matter of pure science and statistical math became subjects of pure politics within a governmental framework that is too brittle, too archaic, too fractured to provide rational self-governance.
Unlike Russia in 1917 and China in 1949—vast countries encompassing diverse populations—the U.S. today is fractured by thousands of “news and information” sources across a wide political spectrum. Thanks to the First Amendment, none of these sources is held to agreed-upon standards of accuracy. Anything goes. One person’s informational trash is another’s informational truth. No person, no group, no government, no authority of any kind can control the message—or, in the face of abject denialism, prove its truthfulness.
In our dystopian Age of Information, wildfires, melting glaciers, rising and warming seas, and thousands of reports citing billions of data (evidence)—and carbon emissions readily traceable directly to human activity—can be denied and ignored, not simply by people isolated on islands of unnamed seas but by people operating influentially at the center of society.
From my limited perspective, our current circumstances point to disorder, not consolidation; multi-dimensional chaos, not unifying fascism.
None of us can predict accurately or reliably where all this will lead, but I’m relatively certain about one thing: It’s better to ride with a seatbelt than without one.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
