by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It definitely FEELS like we’ve reached the absolute end of one pop culture era and we’re waiting for a new one to arise from the ashes. And, yet, given that we may face a perfect storm of Petite Singularity and The Fourth Turning in late 2024, early 2025, these months leading up that era in time may be nothing more than wasted time.
We may just drift through cultural time without any sort of clear idea of where things stand until we make up our minds about if we’re going to continue to be a democracy or not. And, at the same time, we also have to decide if AI is going to completely and totally take over huge swaths of the human experience or not. I’m very weary about both of these events, given that they’re going to take place at the same time.
So, I don’t know. It could go either way. It could be that we just slide into autocracy and we let AI write and produce all our entertainment and we live in a permanent Black Mirror episode. Or, it could be that we have some sort of sharp, violent political event starting in late 2024, early 2025 and not until that’s settled we make any big decisions about AI.
It just seems like we’re lurching towards Something New in a rather abrupt manner and it will be interesting to see when exactly this happens. I suspect we may continue to be in something of a cultural vacuum for a few more months. We really haven’t reached a tipping point, I don’t think. It’s definitely one of those — you know it when you see it kind of things.
I look forward to what’s next, though. We’ve been suck in the post-911 cultural era for way, way too long.
