"Is this the end of the world?" asks this essay by the Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland. Mercifully it's less literal and more philosophical than the header might make you believe. The end of the world lies somewhere in the future, but what space does it occupy in our consciousness.
And there's a crystal-clear passage.
The thing is, in the Seventies, the end of the world seemed much nearer than it does right now. Nothing worked back then, and everything was fading and imploding and being smothered in oil and soot. The Seventies with an internet would have been an utter pit of despair. Which reminds me: I was in Toronto in 2003 during SARS Classic, which had a 16% kill rate and, to be honest, the city didn’t feel even remotely as doomy as it does now during Covid, which has a pathetic kill rate of, what, 0.3%? That’s what happens with an internet everywhere around you: it’s this sleepless beast that roams everywhere, poking shit with a stick all along the way, and waking up every conceivable sleeping dog it finds with a clanging pair of concert cymbals.
Obvious facts, but not put together all that often. Of course the SARS virus of 2003 was objectively scarier than the COVID bug that came 16 or 17 years later. And obviously it didn't have the same kind of impact. SARS made it into some panicked headlines and gallows humor jokes, but national stay-at-home orders and universal masking that extends into the next year? No one was even thinking about it.
Yet Coupland is a little off. There was, of course, an Internet in 2003. I know, because I was on it. Different, more primitive and at the same time more variegated, but it was definitely there.
People had cell phones at the time as well. Maybe not quite as many. But that's not the real difference. 2003 was still the flip phone era. If you had a cell phone, you used it for phone calls and not much else. Now millennials and zoomers have become acclimated to an etiquette where making a phone call when you don't absolutely have to is a faux pas.
Somewhere along the line phones became wired so that you could easily reach the Internet from them. For some it was more convenient. But that's the problem. When you can plug into the infosphere from anywhere you happen to be, then the Internet and all the people on it become the "it all" that you can't or won't get away from. That's how problems get blown up into 800 lb. gorillas.
2 comments:
Having read this one a couple of days ago too my first thought at the time was the fact I have no memory of the 70s being particularly horrible or scary. I guess I wasn't paying attention. Apparently there was a major epidemic in 69-70 when all I recall from that time was Woodstock and all the other music festivals and fairs celebrated then. For that matter, the epidemic of 2003 didn't attract my attention either and I was working in a large hospital/medical school at the time.
His remark about there being no Internet in 2003 was pretty noticeable - not only was there Internet but the Web in all its early html glory had been there since 1995. sheesh. You're right that when you can be plugged into the Web wherever you are then it's next to impossible not to click your way up multiple wrong pathways.
There have been any number of apocalyptic scenarios posited over the years that haven't lived up to their predictions. Here are a few examples.
Still, there are some valid concerns about the changes human industry is visiting on our only known home in the cosmos. It's a fact the people who are loudest in their insistence that something has to be done about climate change have been the ones whose lifestyles disproportionately cause climate change. What they've been touting this past few years is that everyone else gives up the comforts of a middle class lifestyle by staying at home while they continue to tootle around the world in their private jets, yachts etc. while the rest of us are supposed to be content to sit at home envying them on our computers and smartphones. Nevertheless, “Do as I say, not as I do” has a very poor track record as a political strategy.
I think Coupland was just a little too flippant about how we worry about things that probably won't happen. Just a quick look through that list shows the Arctic did indeed melt even though it took a bit longer than was predicted decades ago. Coupland is, after all, well set in the comfortable class. No matter what he purports to believe about the future it can't be ignored that over the course of the past few hundred years we have chopped down the forests, sucked most of the oil out of the ground, chopped the tops off mountains to access coal, and so much more. Meanwhile, whether the current climate chaos is a natural effect of the solar cycle or not, we continue to spew out massive amounts of pollution. I'm sure we'll continue to be here, most of us, far into the future but it looks to me like it won't be the technological paradise some people like to imagine.
Some people seem to remember the 1970s as being more frightening than others. I mean, I'm not surprised that you weren't freaking out too much, as that's not who you are. Doing archival research it seems that there was a lot of anxious thinking being done, but mostly in the forms of written articles that people could take in a balanced perspective. The 24-hour news cycle and media that follow you wherever you go have changed a lot. Which is of course one reason that COVID, even past its peak, is still casting a longer shadow than the 2003 epidemic did.
It's interesting to trace the development of the internet from the very first attempts to network computers with ARPAnet in 1969 to the high imperial World Wide Web. As both connectivity and graphic technology has improved the whole project has gotten a lot more ambitious, which is not entirely a good thing.
Some of those apocalypse ideas are more out there than others. A new Ice Age any time in the near future would be a huge surprise. Not to say it absolutely couldn't happen, but it would have to be caused by something completely outside our current vision.
That the ruling classes have continued to insist on their own specialness in a time of relative scarcity is unsurprising, although the blatancy of it is rather mindboggling. Of course the press--in all its media forms--wants to stay on their good side and in some cases directly works for them, which has an effect.
I'm guessing that you have something like this essay by John Michael Greer in mind. The idea of cyclical history is very relevant in Buddhism and the East of course, and even in the West, Plato spoke of how certain patterns played out in a time before human memory. I think it's plausible that we're in for a period of what we'd at least define as decline. On the other hand the current global mood of terror and misery is something we can and should get past.
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