The Haunted Present
13th August 2024
ZMan is not optimistic.
At the dawn of the information age, it was assumed that everyone having the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips would unleash human potential in ways that had never been imagined. Instead of vast swaths of information being cloistered in the books of specialists, it would be available to everyone. The democratization of information would not only raise all of humanity but unleash the potential of people who would otherwise be denied access to the information.
A couple generations into it and this has clearly not been the case. Creative output, for example, has grounded to a halt. New movies and television shows are, at best, technically superior, but creatively inferior, remakes of past works. The traditional arts, like painting and sculpture, have been made ridiculous in an attempt to find novelty rather than genuine cultural expression. The creative side of Western culture has reached a nadir as technology has reached its zenith.
The public space, of course, has become so narrow that comparisons to the Soviet era are becoming trite. In the UK, men are being sent to dungeons for the crime of mentioning that foreigners are murdering British school children. In the United States, the secret police is everywhere looking for dissidents to harass. The great democratization of information and the public square has led to a dark age of authoritarian violence and suppression.
Other than that, how was your week?