by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
The more I think about it, the more it seems that the source of many of our political problems in the United States is something akin to a Soft Singularity. What I mean by this is if you root around in what the fuck is going wrong with American politics, much of it has to do with how events move at an alarming rate relative to what old farts like me remember.
And when did this particular clusterfuck begin?
The second Obama administration, just as — you guessed it — smartphones began to reach a critical mass.
So, the case could be made that while we’ve not reached a Hard Singularity where we’re uploading our minds into the Cloud and fighting off potential destruction from Hard AI, we do face the destruction of American democracy by some of the symptoms of a Singularity.
The more you think about it, the more sense it makes. Not only do The Youths use technology different than The Olds, but that Always Online element leads them to have different expectations in their media, which we commonly call “being woke.”
Now, as an Old, I am sad that a lot of things we considered fun way back when have been “canceled” by GenZ. We can’t laugh at ourselves the way we used to. We can’t see hot chicks run around in their underwear at the Victoria’s Secret Runway Show. But, I have to admit, the reaction to these changes on the part of reactionary Republicans has got to be worse.
They want to burn everything to the ground, they want to welcome autocracy with open arms simply because they’re afraid, on an abstract basis, of being “canceled” because they say an off color joke in public that goes viral. (And what is “going viral” but something akin to a ping from a Hard Singularity happening in about 20 years.)
In fact, one could say that “going viral” being weaponized by both sides is very much something you might have read about in a scifi novel 20 years ago. Things are moving so fast because of modern technology that our culture and politics don’t know how to keep up.
This, in turn, causes everything to get fucked up and I have to worry about autocracy or civil war around 2024 – 2025.
