How Our Progress Will Spell Our Doom (Can We Still Stop It?)
Media is all around us: in the things we watch, read, and communicate with. In its essence the media is highly tied to the birth of the internet, a quick back story on this:
The Internet was invented in 1983 but became more widely known as the Web after Tim Berners-Lee introduced the WWW in 1989 as a side project. While working at CERN, Tim developed the idea of the web as a form of communication between scientists all over different institutions. Since then, it has become a place for communication, education, and funny cat videos.
The media is known for its trends — everything is forever updating while we, the users, keep refreshing. In a way, we’ve gone beyond space and time by creating an ecosystem where everyone can thrive.
However, the influence of the Internet is much more multifaceted than given credit.
The Good: The internet as a source of discovery
The internet has become a form of global discovery.
People, places, and things are being discovered daily because of the open access of information and technology to all scopes of individuals.
In contrast, look back 100s of years and you’ll notice thousands of individuals who have been lost in the sea of history. Prodigies, in their own right, have been thrown to the curb by their even greater contemporaries.
One of these individuals is Alexander Hamilton, whose legacy was mostly unknown until the famous Broadway show “Hamilton.” Before 2015, the year the show came out, Hamilton was overlooked in the place of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Still, Hamilton was just as influential in his own right. He fought in the Revolutionary War, drafted the Constitution, and served as the first secretary of the Treasury. Not only that but he was admired for his authenticity in the way he responded to accusations related to his extramarital affairs and corruptions of the nation’s finance.
As one example, in a long list of forgotten influences, Hamilton had a large, but overlooked, influence as the architect of the American financial system.
Thankfully, it's easier than ever to become ‘known.’
Social Media Landscaping
Recently, social media has become an entry place for genuine talent.
Anyone can make an account on any social media and start posting, within days they can go ‘viral’ and become the next ‘big thing.’ It's quite a norm, recruiters, themselves, scour through social media looking for the next big talent— it's like a hub of merchants looking for gold. Gone are the days of seclusion.
To add on, the expansion of social media has also allowed for global autonomy. You can say what you want to say, post whatever you want to post and consume whatever you want to consume independent of governance, a prime example being the creation and popularization of Bitcoin. I see this as a privilege that we all take for granted.
Internet’s Influence On Exponential Expansion
Along with social media, the Internet also allows humankind to expand exponentially.
The ‘Personal Computer’ (PC), introduced in the early 1970s, was used only for simple word processing. 50 years later the PC has become a source of endless information, entertainment, and communication that not only allows for global trade (in the form of information) but has sped up discovery absurdly…
For example, take fire which was first discovered 2 million years ago, but only 10 thousand years ago did we think of using it to build sustainable farms to substantially expand our population, or take the transition from swords to guns which took over a millennium of trial and error, while now we’re expanding at surprisingly fast rates: the personal computer was invented in 1974 followed by the internet in 1983 — less than 10 years apart for a discovery that changed society forever.
The Bad: The ease of accessibility to valuable information devalues it
To be a Roman peasant during the rise of the Empire would have meant to live off bread and sometimes, if lucky, cheese. It also meant being at the mercy of the emperor and his senate; if corrupted, they’d make the life of Roman citizens a living hell through extreme taxation, lack of ‘common’ freedoms, and cruel punishments.
Throughout all this, you wouldn’t have the luxury of entertainment, communication, or even basic knowledge of your society. Imagine that!
Thankfully, a lack of information has become a thing of the past with the introduction of YouTube.
YouTube’s Influence On Society
After its founding, YouTube became a major source of information and immediately rose in popularity in the mid-2000s, featuring some of the most highly watched videos like ‘Me at the Zoo’ and ‘Charlie bit my finger.’
Over the past few decades educators, musicians, influencers, industry experts, entertainers, and many others took to creating videos to build their presence and show off their talent.
Being consumers, we can now experience anything our heart desires. At any moment we can watch a podcast from a licensed health expert like Andrew Huberman, watch live entertainment from the UFC, or experience the awes of classical music written by composers such as Beethoven and his contemporaries. We can experience everything in existence, all we could ever wish for, right at our fingertips… what a nightmare (more on this later).
Academics as a Commodity
Self-education is here and here to stay, putting classical academics on the back end.
It’s not such a bad thing, though, seeing where academics is headed. “Colleges and universities have become a marketplace that treats student applicants like consumers,” says Alia Wong in The Atlantic. And in any marketplace there will always be a supply and demand, resulting in the idea that the supply of degrees is increasing faster than the demand can meet.
The most common narrative in our society begins in primary education and ends with a stable job — with secondary, postsecondary, and graduate education coming in between. This common norm, held since the early 10th century, is collapsing now that markets expect more than just a degree.
Self-education is taking its place above academics which I am neither a proponent nor adversary of. I find both academics and self-education have their place. I’ve dabbled in both, and I’ve learned from both — though I tend to find myself, at times, leaning towards self-education.
Self Education as a Whole
The idea of self-education is multifaceted — thereby, you cannot say it’s good or bad.
In its favorable aspects, self-education allows anyone at any level to pursue their interests off a strict deadline. It allows baby boomers to start their academics again without the hassle of being a ‘registered student,’ it's also great for people in third-world countries who lack funds to attend academic institutions.
Most of all, it sheds hope. It has become a movement now that you’re no longer tied to a geographical location or a sect of societal hierarchy and can experience the fortune initially reserved for the more fortunate.
That may be good, but it also has its downsides.
Self-education leads to overindulgence, boredom, lack of critical thinking, lowering attention spans, undecidedness, and an undying pursuit for more. Once valuable things become common, their value forever dissipates.
Classical music, for example, is facing this dilemma. At most, nobles in early modern Europe listened to classical music perhaps a few times in life— lower classes wouldn’t even get this opportunity. That scarcity brought art and information value.
Now you can indulge in anything you’d like, as much as you’d like, whenever you’d like. You can listen to groundbreaking lectures, like Albert Einstein’s, on repeat, reread essays from famous essayists, like George Orwell, or loop Beethoven's Für Elise on YouTube for as long as you want.
It’s amazing but terrible. It's revolutionary but conventional. It's absurd but reasonable. It’s all these things but much more, it's become the way of life. The essence is gone, all that is left is the shell of its former self.
The Ugly: The devaluing of value becomes the catalyst of society toward an endless pursuit
You climb a mountain, and reaching the peak you notice another above you. Then you continue climbing until you reach the top of the world. That’s life.
This analogy is a sign that we’ll never be satisfied. We’ve come to almost conquer all facets of Earth, and now we’re looking to space for our next venture. After space will come another, and then another — though we will never be satisfied. That’s life.
The Risk of Changing
Change is built within us.
We grow, we change. Generations die, and new ones come to replace them. We create, we share. New technologies come into existence almost every day, it’s all part of life.
When we don’t see life change we become bored, and at some point, we force change to happen, just for the sake of it. “Change for the sake of change is a risk — the grass isn’t always greener on the other side,” says Bob Tamsy, the VP of Communications Leaders Legacy. He adds, “The relentless pursuit for ‘better’ can leave us bitter,” — a fantastic play on words that begins to shed some light.
You see, the inventions are not the bad aspect we’re referring to. It is quite the opposite, without inventions we wouldn’t be so open to the ideas of reform that societies thrive on — thankfully, we’re no longer hard stuck on the idea of an ideal world but rather flowing like a fish in a river that maneuver its way through overgrown roots and over protruding rocks. As a result, we’ve become so fluid, allowing us to thrive in environments deemed too harsh for existence like space and sea.
Though invention is good, the speed at which we invent is not.
Society’s Fluidic Races
Working together we’ve made incredible progress in social economics, hard science, and governed infrastructure. We’ve learned from the past, documented the present, and optimized for the future, and that allows us to thrive in our creations but the cycle is moving so fast that we’re unable to reflect on anything.
The Space race is a period in history that supports this. Between the USA and USSR, a chilling climax of failed launches was finally resolved by the USA with Neil Armstrong being the first man on the moon, “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” The competition allowed us to conquer the Moon in 20 years — a mind-blowing feat.
And now that we’ve got to space, we’re going for Mars, while on some other spectrum, companies are creating AI assistants and bringing realism to virtual reality, while also shedding light on morality, existence, and order through a lens of a future ideal where humans are no longer needed for labor.
If you’re as overwhelmed as I am then you’re part of the majority, because this progress, though wonderful, is insane with little to no metaphorical “cages” to sustain its potential drawbacks. And no, this isn’t the end — it’ll only worsen, like learning how to ride a bike, we’ll get faster and smarter. We’ll discover new things quicker, the cycle will continue until we’re satisfied.
Finally, the scariest thing of all, there’s no way to predict where we’ll be. Humans may not be humans, Earth may not be our home, and space might be conquered — who knows for time will always continue moving. But, there is one thing I do know… there will be no certainty, we’ve lost that freedom.
