“How could you tell how much of it was lies? It might be true that the average human being was better off now than he had been before the Revolution. The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.” – George Orwell, 1984
“It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the world was defined by hope and virtue and light, when the machines were fixed and the crops were harvested. Life wasn’t golden—there were still squabbles and sorrows and even wars—but life was good.
And then the world moved on.
For reasons that no one truly understands, the normal push/pull of decay and renewal turned into a one-way, irreversible process in which everything that crumbled or snapped or burned up couldn’t be repaired or replaced or recovered. Our mysterious ability to beat back entropy (aka the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that things tend toward maximum disorder) has collapsed. In fact, beating it back was an absurdity we probably should have always treated as an aberration. The world has moved on.” – Cory Doctorow, “The World Has Moved On”
“If you lived in an alternate reality without wars or poverty, where everyone had enough and governments did what’s in the interests of the people and the ecosystem, it would never occur to you that there was anything odd about it. It would feel completely normal. Things would be more or less how you’d expect them to be.
You can’t say the same about the present status quo. The whole thing instinctively scans as weird and counterintuitive. The more you learn about the way the world works, the more insane it all looks to you.” – Caitlin Johnstone, “Nothing About this Dystopia Feels Natural”
***
I AM writing this at the end of an extraordinary two-week period, which began with the overwhelming election defeat of Donald Trump’s Christofascist MAGA regime in the US midterm elections on Tuesday, November 3. Since then, a honeypot scandal involving the founder and now-ousted CEO of NVIDIA, the linchpin of the entire AI industry has exploded (you can read my initial thoughts about that in my column in The Manila Times for Sunday, Nov. 15); Microsoft’s enterprise utilities – Outlook, Teams, Copilot, and others – went offline for almost an entire day, putting close half a billion of business, institutional, and individual customers out of action; and the entire US airspace was closed for several hours due to what was said to have been an air traffic control systems problem, but what is increasingly looking like might have been a ham-fisted attempt at a Reichstag Fire-like event on the part of the wounded MAGA regime. And of course, there have been a number of more mundane disasters and affronts to one’s sense of normality, such as Indonesia’s Vice President being forced to resign due to having apparently faked his high school diploma; a spectacular plane crash in Florida; a building collapse in New York; an oil tanker colliding with and sinking a tourist river boat in New Orleans; and of course, the ongoing atrocities being carried out by the Zionist regime of Israel against the Palestinian people, activities that have, somewhat unfortunately, been subsumed into the larger, no-resolution-in-sight war in the Middle East.
What may happen in the next few days and weeks is something to be regarded with trepidation rather than hope, and the fact that almost anyone you talk to feels that way is the real point of all this. The almost-unbelievable, individual events, shocking though they may be in the moment, really do seem like symptoms rather than the whole disease that has afflicted our species.
The truth is, I have been musing – I hesitate to use the word struggling, but maybe the shoe fits – on this topic for a long time, because the concept of “the world is not the way it should be” is difficult to wrap one’s head around. Caitlin Johnstone, who writes on Substack and who I quoted above, has come as close as anyone I’ve read to expressing that sense that “something has gone terribly wrong.” She’s not the only one; besides Johnstone, other authors on my “A List” have nipped around the edges of the same feeling in different ways; Cory Doctorow, Marc Friedman, Robert Reich, Kevin Lester, and a few others. Even some of my nearby colleagues, perhaps unintentionally, have also “felt the vibe,” so to speak; my good friend Stephen CuUnjieng, Marlen Ronquillo, Myrna Velasco.
Look them up on your own; I’m not going to add links to all of them, because when I do, this blog platform gives me a strident warning that “your blog has not been checked for broken links,” because it desperately wants me to subscribe to another service that will do that. That in itself is another small symptom of the human disease that we are all feeling, but can’t quite put our finger on.
And I’m not sure I can put my finger on it, either; part of my hesitation about trying to organize my amorphous thoughts on the matter is that I want to avoid the glib explanations that pass for critical thinking these days – that this is a generational thing (e.g., we Gen X types are simply old and unevolved), or a class thing, or otherwise a race/religion/social group thing. I think everyone, no matter what labels they apply to themselves, is affected by the same fundamental problem, though it manifests in different ways for different people.
To state it as succinctly as possible, we are, every one of us, simply exhausted, mentally, and maybe in some cases even physically.
From my point of view, and I understand that this is perhaps something not everyone will agree with, but I have yet to learn any other explanation that makes sense, the reason we are all exhausted is that we have all become slaves – willingly, for the most part – to the monster of capitalism. It has been 250 years since Adam Smith’s seminal work; the system it inspired had a good run, but it is now eating itself.
As I said, I think this could provoke heated debate, and I would welcome that; for one thing, I’m never afraid of being proven wrong, because it is more important to learn than to be right, and for another, the act of engaging in debate is an attempt to address humanity’s malaise, even if that is not the intention. In the simplest terms I can muster, I think there are four ways in which we are killing ourselves as a civilization and as species:
Everything is garbage
Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” about 10 years ago to describe the trend of products and services being intentionally created to wear out or become obsolete in a short period of time in order to compel consumers to replace them. We are overwhelmed by constant pressure to consume – the business with the “link-checking service” I mentioned earlier is an example, as is the constant stream of exhortations about special promos for every product and online shop (e.g. Lazada’s “11-11” sale, which is still going on even though today is the 15th; it won’t end until around the 7th or so of December, when they’ll start in on the “12-12” sale).
Apple introduces new iPhone models more quickly than once a year; I know someone who bought a new Model 15-something last year, but the company has already rolled out 17. My own phone (which is a brand that uses Android, because I detest Apple as an entity) is a three-year-old model 35 according to that vendor’s numbering system; that company is already up to number 70, and bombards me with push notifications (which I didn’t ask for) exhorting me to “pre-order” it, and promising me I can save P20,000 and get numerous “freebies” if I do. I know how to save 100 percent on a new phone model, and that is to not buy one at all. But, just to make sure I am a compliant consumer, my current phone has been built in such a way to ensure that the battery has shit longevity just about now, which will force me to buy a new phone soon.
It’s not just phones; everything is like that now. I have a three-year-old refrigerator, which was quite expensive when I bought it (retail price about $1,000, although I got it on sale), which is failing; when I called the factory service to send a technician to look at it, he informed me that it would have be replaced in the coming months, because it could not be repaired – for a relatively simple problem (a clogged receiver-dryer on the coolant loop) that used to be a 15-minute fix. As another example, a two-year-old basic printer I have is about to become obsolete, not because there’s anything wrong with it, but because the internet-connected print cartridges it requires have been updated, and are no longer compatible with my ancient, unsophisticated printer model. And on and on. It’s not just products, but services as well; try to get an actual human to solve a problem with your cellphone service, or website hosting service, or credit card bill, or what have you, and you will be waiting until the heat death of the universe.
The whole world is set up in such a way that every interaction, at least digital ones, is primarily a pitch to try to separate one from one’s money. All of the authors I mentioned above, for instance, who are knowledgeable, credible, and entertaining writers, all must spend almost as much time on actual content as they do in marketing subscriptions to that content. And the sad thing is, from my perspective, is that if I wasn’t fortunate enough to have a mainstream media platform that already pays me for mine, I would be doing the same thing.
We accept “monetization” in everything as a fact of life, without bothering to stop and consider if the product, service, or information attached to it is true to itself in any way, or simply exists for the purpose of carrying out commerce. And it has skewed our perceptions – fatally, in my opinion – of value and utility of anything.
Information overload
Unless we foreswear all social media and online engagement – which, by the judgment of modern society renders one freakishly out-of-touch and defective – we are all subjected to a flood of information that is beyond our capacity to absorb. Thanks to social media and the precept that information (I’m looking at my own business here as a part of the ‘mainstream’ media) must be continuous, 3600 seconds per hour, 24 hours per day, 364.24 hours per year, we are bombarded with ‘content’ (I hate that word, but it does properly define the dreck that fills most of our information streams) constantly, to the point where we are prevented from focusing on whatever is meaningful to us individually – it either disappears because of the all-important ‘algorithm,’ or is styled in such a compelling way (i.e., “clickbait”) that we cannot resist allowing ourselves to become diverted.
This entire aspect of the modern world is certainly deserving of its own close study and expository explanation, but indulge me to illustrate the problem from my own narrower personal perspective. At The Manila Times, we are keenly aware that last-century print journalism is on the way out, and that in order to survive, we must pivot to being a ‘multimedia’ media company. I think we’ve done a reasonably good job of that, so far, but in doing that, something is lost. In order to be successful (where success is measured in ‘eyeballs’ viewing one’s content) the “on all the time” social media and wider internet-connected audience landscape requires a constant stream of “content.” From a news perspective, this has seriously degraded the quality of information that is passed along to the public; because reporters are now compelled to provide ‘content’ quickly and in great volumes in order to meet the requirements of “24/7/365” news output, reporting becomes very shallow. Most reporters now simply repeat whatever the press release or the titled official says, without nuance or follow-up, because we do not give them time for that. What’s even worse is, we no longer train them to have the skills to ask follow-up questions, and examine stories in greater depth, because that’s now how the world works anymore. The reporters are able to check the box on the two or three stories they are required to submit every day, the media organization is able to check the box on supplying new content hourly to the main website and the social media accounts every hour, but there is no depth to anything. And it doesn’t matter if one is a relatively small outlet such as The Manila Times, or a big one such as Reuters or CNN; the problem is the same, and the main consequence of it is making the public stupider, because they don’t realize what they don’t know about important subjects that may affect them. And because the information flow is so thick and fast, it is extremely difficult, maybe impossible in some cases, for someone who wants to look deeper into the news of the day to actually do that.
Social polarization
In an ideal world, one might be friends with, or at least have a respectful relationship with people who do not hold the same views. One might be a Democrat, but be on friendly (although agreeing to disagree on key political principles) terms with a Republican; one might be an atheist but be able to be friendly with those who are deeply religious; one might be a vegan, but have a cordial relationship with those who believe eating meat is perfectly acceptable. But in the online, algorithm-driven world we have all accepted we must live in, every difference, every nuance between one person or another, becomes a point of conflict. In real life, we might adjust to what we consider another person’s foibles to be, because our relationship with them has more than one dimension. For example, one of my very good friends here is an advocate of nuclear energy (I am not), and believes “climate change” to be seriously overblown, if not entirely a hoax (I believe climate change is a real an immediate problem for the world). Yet we are friends, are happy to rearrange our respective schedules to spend time together, and can talk at length about our views without losing our mutual respect.
That’s rare, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the people with whom I have that sort of relationship. Online, however, there is no opportunity for “appreciation of other points of view,” because of the way the All-Holy Algorithm works; people tend to get pigeonholed into the general perspective that they hold most often. Yes, I am by the definition of most people a liberal, but what I am not is an absolutist; I want to listen to and learn other points of view, because they will either modify my own points of view or reinforce it. Unfortunately, the way social media and even other forms of interaction work now, that goddamned algorithm works to pigeonhole us, out of a shallow calculation of what we find interesting. If I ‘like’ a post by a hyperliberal news outlet or blogger, then my social media feeds will be flooded with similar content. And it’s difficult and tiring to search out alternative points of view. Most people do not bother doing that, so as a result, we all become siloed in very personalized, specific profiles, based on what math thinks is important to us. It’s not always politics, but could be music, the kind of movies or books one likes, or any other interest.
Not only does this isolate within our “own little world,” it also makes us marketing targets for the “constantly be buying something” orientation of the world I mentioned earlier. And the biggest outcome of all of this, though it may take some time for us to individually realize it, is that we become isolated from the greater part of society, and perhaps, despite the old saw about social media’s capacity to “connect people,” actually more lonely than we would be with having a completely online life.
So what now?
Fuck, I don’t know. All I can say to anyone else is, audit your online life – social media, the apps that you use, and anything else tied to the digital world – and decide for yourself if you are satisfied, and feel that you are in control. For my part, mostly because my work requires that I maintain the certain online presence that I have, the problem becomes one of discernment – it takes a few extra steps to determine if what I am looking at is valid, relevant, and credible. And frankly, its exhausting, and I imagine that for anyone who doesn’t happen to be in the information business, it is too exhausting to keep fighting.
We’re not going to make it, are we? Humanity, I mean.
