News — At The Edge — 1/5
In light of the growing authoritarian movement here and elsewhere, there is only one article this week — Hyper-normalization — which is one good way to describe the darkness ahead.
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The antidote to civilizational collapse —
““Hype-Normalization” [originally]…about what it was like in…[1980s] Soviet Union…[when] everyone…knew that it wasn’t working…was corrupt [and]…that the politicians had no alternative vision….Everyone knew it was fake…[and] just accepted…as normal….
[Everyone] in America and…Europe knows…the system that they are living under isn’t working…[and] there is a lot of corruption at the top….[A] sense of everything being slightly unreal…[and] those in charge [knowing]…we know that they don’t know what’s going on….[A] pantomime-isation of politics’….
Meanwhile, outside the theatre…problem with a lot of journalism…[is] perpetual, infernal motion system, which is a distraction… [corroding] critical analysis of the world….[Public] feel marginalized and anxious about their future…[absent] control of our own destiny.
[Eventually] politics got…replaced by a technocratic management system…[as] old mass democracies sort of died in the early 90s…when computer networks…could actually manage people as groups by using data to understand how they were behaving in the mass…[yet] thinking that they were individuals….
We’re very similar to each other and computers know that….[It’s] a wonderful way of managing the world…[but] a static world…[without] any vision of the future…[that’s] constantly monitoring…[and] playing back to you…your own behavior…guided and nudged and shaped…[but] never imagine something new….
It’s “Groundhog Day”…because it doesn’t allow mass politics to challenge power, it has allowed corruption to carry on without it really being challenged properly….
[System] doesn’t have the capacity to challenge the rich and the powerful…who use it badly for their own purposes…and we’re beginning to get fed up with it….[So] those on the margins of society to came in and start kicking….
People prefer practically anything to poverty…[yet] it’s those who are in poverty who actually wanted change now ….
Politics gave up saying that it could change the world for the better and…instead that it could stop bad things from happening…[and] build a system to stop them….[2008] massive check to rescue the banks….
[Politicians] on the right…[are] using the story of nationalism. Unless the left actually comes with a stronger story…the right are going to…become even stronger….
The opposite of stability is a politics of imagination….[Incrementalism] has colonized all of politics….People ask why they can’t have a better standard of living…[and] what it’s all about…[to be] part of something that will go on past your own existence….
The central thing in politics is emotion….Politics is about imagining futures and having the power…to make that happen….[Problem] is that myths have washed over the complexity…[so] nationalism is the easiest story….
[As] managerial system colonizes everything…everything atrophies….So what we have now is emotionally unsustainable, people aren’t buying into it anymore….
[Globalization] degraded to a giant scam that allows very big corporations to pay no tax…[while] moral purpose has dropped away….
’No, you can’t control the world because it’s chaos — but there are moments within the chaos that you can use for your own purpose.’ That’s what politics is about….[Today] politics and journalism have become static and repetitive. I know within microseconds what an article is going to say, what a television program is going to be like…[so] lots of people get bored…[and] leads to a degrading of everything….
[I]f you have a dynamic responsive system, there is a sense that you’re going somewhere even if you never get there….[Yet] any voice that asks for change gets immediately tarred….
[But] take the technologies that are emerging and push them much further with investment from the state, and you have a giant Marshall Plan….
There’s enormous power being exercised on us and we have no idea how to challenge it…because certain people have power and they’re exercising it for their own interests and not for us….Politics has gone from being dynamic to being static and…brought in a system of feedback management that’s so seductive that we’re trapped….
[W]e live in this strange world where everything seems very unreal…very static and whatever we do has no consequences…[yet] incredibly dangerous and terribly sad….The political class have given up…[and] being manipulated on a gigantic scale by those whose interest it is to keep them as managers…[and] lead us to somewhere we don’t want to go to….18- and 19-year-olds are interested in…the idea that you can challenge power, rather than just trying to hold things down.…
We’re living in a very pessimistic age where those in power are either pessimistic because they believe it or pessimistic because it’s useful….The idea that we are faced by a giant terrorist threat was not true….[A]n ideologically-driven exaggeration….[but] pessimism happens when dark things run out of control….
We’re all waiting for somebody else to give us something to hope for….[People] were given a button that said ‘fuck off’ and they pressed it because they had been offered no alternatives….They’re frightened…[and] anxious, no one’s responding….
[T]he internet is the HR department for the world…. It identifies bad peoples, swoops in and ejects them. What it never does is question the system and in that way…reflects the corporatism….[Also] reflects our desire for quick justice and our lack of curiosity about the people we disagree with….
[So] very few people saying, ‘Maybe this is to do with the system’… and how it’s become so ruthless or distorted….No one is analyzing that…[but] the anger is genuine….
If you really want to change the world you’ve got to go and connect with people who sometimes aren’t very nice…. But instead, we say they’re terrible and we retreat….waiting for somebody who has the courage to go out and actually connect….
[40%] believe our jobs either make no difference to the world or make it slightly worse…and that because of AI or another recession, there will be some kind of reckoning…[and] our nice middle-class lives are unsustainable….
[It] is all slightly strange and unreal. When China put all its money into dollars, it allowed America to fight the wars…with no real financial consequences…[for] the first time in history…unlike the Vietnam War, where…it caused a financial crisis….Meanwhile, goods come from China and cost nothing….People want to exist for a reason….
The key thing you have to realize about the machines…[is they] look at us in a way that’s outside of time. They take everything that happened from all different times…slap that data together…[for] correlations. It has no narrative to it whatsoever. And we are trapped in that non-nutritive world….[And] journalism doesn’t tell us stories about that, it just repeats opinions…trapped in endless loops from the past….
[It’s] why people feel this…sense of doom. They know that it’s all a bit odd, but no one explains what that oddness is….
Is this really going to go on? Where’s it going? When does this change….
There’s something deep going on in our society….People want a big narrative…[not] rants and columns. They want a story out of which you can draw ideas….People like imagination if they feel that it’s genuinely rooted in fact.” https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/12/06/the-antidote-to-civilizational-collapse
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May you live long and prosper!
Doc Huston
