“Peter Thiel… remarked that society’s progress has arguably been regressing since the 1970s, and that most technological advancement has been poured into a narrow ‘cone’ of digital tech exclusively, to the great neglect of everything else….
“We’re witnessing a kind of unprecedented decoupling in modernity: as the real world goes to seed around us, the ruling class is forced to shore it up with a Potemkin-like confection to convince us that everything’s fine. But it only leads to a growing feeling of alterity, a kind of surreal disconnectedness, like being in a horrible dream.
“Everything about our current global ruling regime pseudocracy is a phony construct, papering over the bitterly dismal state of things.”
The other day I happened to think about Heinlein’s book Stranger in a Strange Land. I remembered the iconic title, of course, but little else about the book. After all, I’d read it fifty years ago. Half a century. So, try doing that starting from then, 1974, and you’re all the way back to 1924. Sure, I was reading “great” literature from the 1920s in 1974, but they were period pieces, classics (The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises).
A better example would be cars, or popular music. I still drive a 1992 Toyota Corolla station wagon, a classic in its own right, now thirty-two years old. Using that same benchmark of 1974, it would be like driving a 1942 Packard. Not many of those around then… and it would look like it came off a gangster movie set.
Today “classic rock” is still the staple of musak, music jams, FM radio, and restaurant cover bands everywhere: stale fifty-year-old music, still cranking along. Imagine, by contrast, in 1974 when that music was still fresh, listening to the scratchy oldies from the Roaring Twenties. Not even my parents were doing that then.
Which raises the issue of technological as well as cultural change. Interesting to note that in the case of music, there has been a continuous evolution of styles but classic rock still holds the center of gravity. Meanwhile the technology has gone through successive waves of innovation: from gramophones to hi-fi’s, stereos, reel-to-reels and cassette tapes, 8-tracks, CDs, and now digital downloads. In a minute or two all the new music marketed will be “created” by AI: but still no doubt stuck in the classic rock mode, trained on what we’re entrained on.
Is it the fault of having too many Boomers longing for the golden days of free love and illegal drugs? A hedge against a life that’s merged into the fast lane and then gone into hyperdrive?
Somewhere along the line, we all checked into the Hotel California. Where they still serve cereal and milk for breakfast, along with the morning paper for news-weather-and-sports. To keep us “cool” they still play classic jazz along with the classic rock in the elevator. Out back they’re playing Disc Golf or Ultimate, but it’s still just pitching 1957 Frisbees. And in the lounge, it “blows my mind” how everyone’s still dancing in place, doing some variation on the eternal Twist.
Plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose. (The more things change, the more they remain the same.)
Al Gore immortalized the hockey stick graph in his climate cult classic, An Inconvenient Truth, to simulate millions of years of earth history going vertical in today’s (but wasn’t it supposed to be fifteen years ago by now?) global boiling.
For you sports fans still following along, here are the latest scores, with a surprising narrative upset:
Actually Gore’s iconic hyperbolic curve is a pretty good representation of some actual trends such as the growth of population (pre-vax, that is), technology, inflation, and propaganda. Life, ambling along in a horizontal direction for countless millennia, in our era has been hijacked by a rocket heading vertical: HyperLife.
(As it happens, a quarter century ago I dubbed my editing business by this same term, to reflect the trending state of life on earth, as well as the application of editing to writing, and lastly, the hypertext coding language of the Internet, but I digress).
A similar prefix, trans–, conveniently serves also to encompass everything about life today that is being transformed before our very eyes, from transgender to transhuman. Postmodern catches some of the drift too, except now already it’s been transcended by post-postmodern. In short, our culture has been canceled by the simulation of culture. Authentic, organic cultural change has been co-opted by change confined to the technological means of its transmission.
When cultural life has been distilled (and thereby reduced) to digital life (an oxymoron if there ever was one), we have departed life itself and entered a simulation. As the pundits would have it, we have reached the End of History and entered a neoliberal utopia, rebranded lately as a Great Reset. But the glitz and glamor of our Jetsons future is nothing more than a pixelated patina of antisocial media, overlaid on a mashed-up cultural wasteland: decaying suburbs, collapsing cities, abandoned office towers, shuttered shopping districts, and encampments of homeless.
Have we really launched into the next phase of human evolution, the promised land of hyperlife, or is it all just digitally fueled hype? All possible information and communication at our fingertips, but for what purpose? Going vertical, after all, is just another flatline with a cost, life itself. It’s the Devil’s bargain, signed in blood: to win the world, and lose your soul.
See also:
Terrence McKenna and Timewave Zero
WOW!!
Thiel sounds like he might be mistaking the relatively recent investment focus on digital innovations for a decrease of fall-off in underlying (and chronic) rate of human technological innovation. He's part of the investment camp that is largely (entirely?) interested and active in this fashionable industry so it would not be a surprise if he's confused about the matter. I've no doubt that there is quite a backlog of dormant innovations accrued over the last 50 years that are applicable to the very many other avenues of human endeavor just waiting to be dusted off and used once more of us pull our heads back out of our virtual asses.