The Irreal Era Continues

Heartless, heartbreaking times with chaos as the watermark. Memes and viral underpinnings for charity projects. It's brilliant. Chug a hot coffee, cure cancer – post the vid, go to social media heaven. Drink a venti latte for social justice. Post passive-agressive political screeds on facebook, and again in twelve parts on twitter. Walk at least four dogs at once to solve depression once and for all. Wait, what's that I hear? Is it the ghost of hope? What is it pretending to be today?

The character of hope is changed by digital media into a great big throbbing lump of aspirations and counterpoints. Tell everyone about how you feel about it. It's a singularity of hope and everyone's invited to discuss it impotently on the internet. Your savior and redeemer bathed in LCD glow in a dark room past midnight, this time definitely getting the words right on a screed that will change people's minds forever. No discussion of powerlessness or the futility of washing oneself in concentrated ideology.

Confident consumers. Hollow outrage. Adamantine charity. Lonely people alone in rooms 'connecting' over social media. Right... right. No that makes sense to me, I am not an atavist, thank you. It goes beyond the fears any individual might have, nobody can see the big picture as it is now, and in ten years there will be hundreds of deep thinkers telling us exactly what happened, armed with statistics and the works of others. Until then even the most schizoid collective fears are just whispers in the dark, convoluted night. Truth of the matter is the supposed wise men of the era are either pissing their pants or filling their pockets, or looking greedily askance at something we can't see, but everybody has a pretty good guess what it might be. Most of them are probably the pedigreed descendants of snake oil salesmen.

The pessimists of yesteryear seem insane or quaint. The worryworts of today are just white noise, minor problems crudely blown up to serve as distractions from underlying issues and developing crises. The public announcements of this era are all ugly and sterile constructions meant to convey (mis)information as efficiently as possible (the diametric opposite of the low points of pretentious wankery from 1210 to 2014), which makes everyone a computer with predictable responses to calculated inputs. Of course thought will likewise degrade, but for the great majority of people that's not even something to worry about or consider. As long as the algorithms keep working, right? We don't need to know where they came from. We got everything we need, right now... it's perfectly nihilistic.