Call me a dinosaur if you will, but while I found this an interesting and certainly well-written and stylish bit of prose, at the same time I regard this pretty much the way I have all things internet since the days of Pons and Fleischmann: that it is 99% useless gimmickry.
And, that even though the one percent remaining which might prove useful is fun enough to try and integrate into one’s life, it seems a near-certainty that the tech industry’s rule of planned obsolescence for the sake of sustained sales, as well as its addiction to “innovation” in the opposite direction from being more beneficial to the user for the pure sake of being innovative and little other reason, ultimately will bring an end to a time which may in the future be called some “golden age” like the television of the early sixties came to be, as meanwhile the internet will go on and become much like TV became from the seventies on: annoying, uninformative, aggressively dumbed-down, and driven shamelessly by a combination of hypnotic marketing devices and shifting trends in popular ideology that continue to incentivize self-censorship and an allegiance to versions of non-reality as world views, well beyond what we are already seeing today.
And, if that run-on sentence above which actually does comply with grammatic rules as well as follow a somewhat coherent train of thought, left your attention span behind while trying to read it, there’s my point proven: the internet is producing irritable, impatient and arrogant knowitallism across vast sectors of humanity much faster than it will ever be able to produce some new kind of “sensemaking.” I don’t think people really want to make sense of things nearly as much as they want them just to be predictable whether they make sense or not. The current social media landscape is about as senseless and juvenile an undertaking as I could have ever imagined, but it is addictive just as it is, because for all its chaos, it is predictable chaos.
The net result of net-brained thinking, from the purview of my twentieth century mind, has primarily to do with a vastly decreased tolerance for detail, nuance, paradox or any other form of complexity required to assemble any kind of coherent viewpoint on just about anything. As meanwhile, it rewards in myriad ways the reflex of reacting to emotional cues and following them into pre-arranged groupings of schools of thought.
Where once, for instance, a person who thought for themselves and had little use for large institutions to get by in life may have been called a “maverick” or “iconoclast” just based on the meanings of such adjectives as applied to individuals, now it seems everybody has to shove everybody else into some labeled box, in this case to call such a one a “libertarian.” Whatever that even means. A knowitallistic lexicon of terms bandied about like “cultural marxist” or “classical liberal” or “thought leader” or “life coach” or for that matter, “entrepeneur”, just to name a few utterly elastic terms now that mean whatever the one saying them says they do, isn’t getting anyone closer to making any sense of really anything at all.
To me it all makes less sense than ever, except the one constant that was proven reliable way back during the Y2K marketing hoax even before this morons’ pageant of a century began:
…that when the tech sector issues a hypnotic order to go out and buy new tech, people gang up Black-Friday-like, and go out and buy new god-damn tech.
Whether they need it or not, or can afford it or not (a thousand bucks for a telephone is “progress?” Gimme a break), or even understand or care to about what its capabilities are. Children with new shiny toys get bored with them, today as always, when someone gives them a reason to believe that newer and shinier ones will actually be more fun and that they simply HAVE to have them or be left out, of, you know, something.
Mostly what the new and shiny toys give people a chance to do, is service this simplistic urge to stick labels on things using made-up terms that have entirely fluid definitions if any at all, along with an astonishing degree of bovine willingness to hang on the every word of emergent and self-assigned cults of personality, of the sort that are a dime a dozen on Youtube and more come along every day.
For me this pro-wrestling, Jerry-Springer level of intellectual flaccidity by most of the internetting public sums up the overall effect of this internet age far better than any mythos built around a flying-pig fantasy of some organic species-wide urge to get better at this “sensemaking” thingy.
(whatever that means)
And then there is this term that I seem to run across every day with increasing frequency, and with the increase a parallel one of the word exhibiting less and less actual meaning with every usage: “decentralized.” That chanted mantra gets thrown around today in much the way advertising jingles used terms like “natural” or “high-tech” or “specially formulated” twenty-plus years ago; it seems that by using it at all, those who do expect it to become its own self-made and self-perpetuating miracle, whatever it actually means (and I suspect that this is: nothing at all….)
Is cryptocurrency “decentralized”? If it is, so what? And, for how long, until Russian intelligence or the North Korean hacker/heist army or the Muslim Brotherhood or an alliance of Latin-American drug cartels, or all of them working together as a single super-faction, take full advantage of its vast vulnerabilities and makes the idea of its being “decentralized” into a future punch line about how naive and idiotic its enthusiasts were way back in the Dark Ages of the twenteens…..
But it seems that all one has to do in one of these think-pieces about the future of tech, is drop in a reference or two about “decentralized” this or “distributed” that, and everybody reading it feels (post-hypnotic suggestions in full swing once again) like they are at the cutting edge of some new form of (wait for it) “sensemaking.”
I say the internet and everything it has produced are both over-rated for the time being, and doomed to an eventual total and catastrophic failure putting the entire human community at grave risk. The web may have changed some things about how people think (hardly for the better, IMO) but it can’t just erase some basic and timeless wisdoms that have served the species well all along, such as the one about not putting all one’s eggs into a single basket.
No matter how “decentralized” or “distributed” that basket might feel at the moment, it’s still just one great big basket, and those are an awful lot of eggs in there. What if one fine day, it just doesn’t come on any more, and nobody can figure out why? It is, after all, nothing but a great big appliance, and one that uses a shitload of energy to do its thing.
Machines break down and quit eventually. This one will too.
