Drawing a line with humanity.
The medium is not the message, it is a death-cult.
We are born with amnesia, blind to the history of our species, oblivious to the origins of our religions and unfamiliar with the earth beneath our feet. One certainty from the spark of consciousness is to discover that life is bewildering. We enter the fray quite helpless. For nearly two decades, children mostly go along for the ride, following parents, relatives and other influential people into whatever is normal in their particular context. Regardless of the variance in method and quality, water flows, food is delivered and shelter is provided. A human lifetime is largely a process of acquiring and sharing knowledge and resources.
Cooperation among humans is not optional but a matter of survival. Our society is functionally a huge collaborative system: first with the immediate family, for obvious reasons of intimate care, but the interdependence quickly radiates outward to strangers. You likely don’t know who grew the tomatoes in your refrigerator (or who assembled your refrigerator, or who designed its components, or who hired the designer… this is an infinitely regressive trajectory going back to the dawn of time). The system is self-sustaining, too. When one person retires, abdicates or dies, another will fill the gap, ensuring continuity, with progressive changes along the way. Trust is implicit throughout this very complex web of societal arrangements. We all have reasonable expectations about the reliability of airplane engines and bank transfers. Anomalies and mistakes happen, but in the general picture, it works, and we have countless successes as a species to show for it. However, there is a deep, nasty, and shadowy side to our innate altruism.
Humans can largely agree on the nuts and bolts of life, rapidly self-organizing for necessities when there is will and common cause, but in our vivid imaginations, battlegrounds inevitably emerge. Ideas become the great divide as territorial and tribal instincts kick in, transforming neighbors into enemies. Life can be perceived as incompatible between groups of people with different ideas. We can show extraordinary virtue toward those we care about, and normalize astonishing levels of violence against those we disparage. Today, we have manufactured a helluva crisis for ourselves.
Our natural sharing instincts were revolutionized with the invention of the printing press over 500 years ago. In the intervening centuries, books and the knowledge stored within them became increasingly accessible and evolved as the de facto conduit for learning. It would become an inevitable challenge for the seeker of knowledge, who inevitably faced the growing volume of reading material and the finite time to read it. Learning was a slow-burn process, but the depth and breadth of what others contributed to the totality of available knowledge was unprecedented. Printing technologies served us well, if imperfectly. In the profound transformations of our present-day rush towards computerized tech, our natural sharing instincts have been hijacked by technology companies.
I consider it a shameful embarrassment that our children are inheriting a world where the first point of knowledge distribution is social media. Critical thinking will suffer. Every app and digital platform today is designed like an emotional slot-machine doling out addictive rage cycles favoring neither the user not the public at large, but the private, corporate ownership of the billionaire class and their entourage of sycophants. It ain’t a pretty picture. For an interesting read on the topic of declining literacy, I recommend this article, where I read the eye watering estimation that “...on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens”. I don’t believe this is the world we want, but it is the one we have created.
The recent assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk became a dog whistle in this storm of political and sectarian manipulations. I heard the gamut of responses, from barks to litanies – including the thinly veiled glee of virtue signalers, to proclamations of martyrdom, to the petulant snark about the irony of Kirk’s stance on gun violence, and even claims that the entire event was staged. Needless to say, this event took up a lot of oxygen. The attention bonanza was also seized upon by world leaders, notably the Trumpanyahu administration, further entrenching the great divides of our time. All this over one person who, a week before, relatively few people had heard of – I certainly had no idea who he was. On the same day the Kirk debauchery unfolded and the fallout rapidly weaponized, hundreds of civilians were killed by Israel in Gaza and Yemen, and more than two dozen people were killed in Ukraine by Russian attacks. All those deaths were considered unworthy of a modicum of attention by our formidable media institutions.
As the snuff-bait gurgled into my news feed, it landed simultaneously as heartbreaking and infuriating. I felt viscerally hustled by the profiteers of tragedy, from the top of the heap: CEOs, Prime Ministers and Presidents. The appalling corruption, complicity and moral collapse of high-level leadership of every major Western country, as well as absence of any real accountability in the arenas of power – all this is a real wake up call. As the nihilistic narcissists take the reins and shred our common, human values while leading us into forever-wars, brutal occupations and environmental disasters, they are bulldozing our civilization towards a brink no reasonable person ever wished to go. I don’t know what the precise answer is, but things really need to change.
I think many of us are exhausted by the cannibalistic mission creep of invasive tech and the toxicity fomented among us. I deleted a bunch of time-sucking, life-wasting, death-cult apps from my phone, including the three biggest offenders in my orbit: Instagram, Facebook, and Spotify. I never had X or TikTok, but they would have gotten the axe. Plus, I’ll work on detaching myself from other Meta and Google products over time. These are small, but progressive gestures to reclaim headspace, ensure privacy and to use technology with intention.
I advocate for humanity.
