Technology, complexity, anxiety, catastrophe
#تکنولوژی...You try to eat the right kind of food for lunch. It is very unclear what the right kind of food is. It seems to be more unclear with each passing day. After work, or, well, after you leave the office, you try to do the right kind of workout, but, well, yes, again. Scientists have so much data these days, more than ever before, and, it seems, so few conclusions.
On the way to see your friends you check your usual online news sources again, as you’ve been doing all day, of course, in breaks between bouts of work. Violence in Berkeley. A civil war in the Middle East. Catastrophe in the Caribbean. Pollution in China. Breakthrough in AI. So much happening so fast, too fast to really make any sense of it, to put it in context, to construct a coherent narrative. Sometimes it feels like someone jammed a heavy thumb on the world’s fast-forward button, and smeared the voice of the zeitgeist into high-pitched gibberish...
Your friends are doing well, or seem to be, but they all seem a little uncertain about their jobs, their homes, their family, their future. A few seem to have too many possibilities to choose from. Most seem to be stagnating while watching possibilities slowly wither away. Those tend to be the ones with the most beautiful, enviable, carefully curated Instagram feeds.
You lament the political situation with your friends. Of course you do. What’s not to lament? Other people don’t understand the problems your nation, and the world as a whole, faces. They can’t grasp the nuance, the complexity; they can’t distinguish between what is and isn’t important; they confuse trivialities with disasters about to smash through our door, and vice versa. They turn their back on the future technology is bringing to us in favor of the ridiculous idealized failures of the past. They’d rather ruin themselves, and via democracy everyone else, than ever begin to question their own kindergarten mindset.
As you head home the pain in your gut is back. You want to watch something good, but between Netflix and YouTube and Amazon and iTunes there are far too many choices, so you end up watching a Marvel movie instead, even though you’ve already seen it. It’s reassuring. Heroes and villains. Right and wrong. Then you go to bed, put your phone down, try to sleep, give up, and pick your phone up again, as you do every night. Your late-night people are upset. Something has happened.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/10/technology-complexity-anxiety-catastrophe/