The Beginning Of The End
Frankly it’s hard to believe that the world isn’t about to end...
I usually caveat “the world ending” by explaining that I really mean “the world as we know it” or “post-industrial society” or “western liberal democracy” but that was back when the most pressing threat was the overwhelming of all the essential structures of our global society by the impact of the novel corona virus, long before the aggression of the world’s most heavily armed nuclear state once again raised the existential stakes to include literally all life on earth except 20% of cockroaches. Anyway, hi, have you missed me?
I’ve missed you. I’m sure you were too busy being ill, depressed or furious about something you saw online to notice, but I’ve been largely silent on social media for a while now. The algorithmically mediated conversations that had coloured my days for some years had degenerated into grim shouting matches. Of course the problem was everyone else failing to listen to me but I figured pointing this out was unhelpful and that I should, you know, be the change I want to see… and shut the fuck up.
And yes, this is a moment for you to acknowledge my digital moral high ground. And yes, I did just invoke Ghandi to explain my lack of facebook posts. Run with it, it’s a vibe.
The online response to the pandemic and Russian disinformation and Trump and Brexit and QAnon and BLM and transphobia and metoo and antizionism and antifa has given algorithms a bad name. We all love a scapegoat and Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen has given us the perfect out. Things have gone to shit because algorithms have twisted our view of reality for the commercial gain of Mark Zuckerberg and the other human Gods that reside across the rainbow bridge in silicon valley. Or if that’s too anti-cap for you, it’s the same same but staring Vladimir Putin’s cybercossacks and their new friends in the Republican party as the ones benefiting from your credulousness.
Either way once upon a time civility and truth were the corner stones of public conversation until mathematics manipulated us and that’s why a man dressed like Jamiroquai broke into Mike Pence’s office. It’s an appealing story because it suggests that if only Jake Angeli and his QAnon and Qadjacent allies were smart enough to turn off youtube and get all that bad mathematics out of their white non-college educated synapses, if only everyone else could do what I did and stop shitposting, then at last we could return to the golden age of Clinton and Blair and the Berlin Wall could fall again which at least felt positive.
It all being the fault of the algorithm is an appealing story, but it’s not true.
Illuminatingly so though, because the algorithms that power social media work because they feed our innate love of appealing stories. Why does a lie get to get halfway round the world before the truth puts on its shoes? Because a lie is a story - it wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t viscerally more appealing than the ugly anarrative complexity of truth. Truth putting on shoes, or other garments, is also a nice metaphor for the act of dressing up reality in story form so that it can be better understood. “The end of the world” isn’t literally accurate and is far more powerful as a result.
Telling stories is what thinking is. It is the essential human act which is why all the things grouped as “humanities”, language, literature, law, history, politics, economics, philosophy, art and religion are all, at root, acts of story telling. And all stories are expressions of a fundamental law of physics, all stories are representations of change.
Change, or death as they call it in the tarot, is an inescapable truth. Society as we know it is a way to generate the boon of relative economic stability through a rapacious, materialistic and individualistic ideology rooted in the false premise of infinite growth within a closed system. This will change. This will end. I’ve no idea where the end of that story will eventually lie on the sliding scale between a non-coercive socialist utopia and a cinder whose radioactive half life remains to transmit a sorrowful message across a void. But I do think that the midpoint between our societies start and its ending is the first real expression of a genuinely global consciousness, as this is the essential prerequisite for both the successful mitigation of the societal consequences of climate change and the dissolution of liberal democratic norms. This now today is not the beginning of the end. It is the middle.
No change comes without a backlash, we dance our way through history, a few steps forward a few back. We did not act as one people in the face of the pandemic and have straight away plunged into a brutal nationalistic war, but despite all this across the past two years the whole of humanity has endured a genuinely shared trauma and been able for the first time to imagine itself as a single collective noun. This is now the midpoint of our societies journey to where-ever our great great grand children will end.
My screenwriting course returns in London next week https://bit.ly/V01c3