A New Culture
I'm old and I remember the difference
The Long 20th Century
I'm now at the point where I have to remind myself that times are different and that there has been a cultural shift. The self-reminders are necessary because we live in a ever-present but in the 20th Century, every few years brought dramatic visual changes in clothes, products, and background media.
Since the turn of the century people have noticed how the once frequent visible changes slowed down, as if our physical reality had been perfected while we as a species invested in the consensual hallucination of cyberspace1 - the mental world of the screen. Yes, you can date a TV show by devices - do they even carry one? Oh it's a classic Nokia! Look at the flip phones! And then the black glass rectangles begin to appear.
I remind myself that culture has changed, that the one I was prepared for is obsolete, and what I experience of this new culture is what comes at me through screens. This is the mid-2020s. We're experiencing the 21st Century now and it sometimes seems like what the historians would call “a long 20th Century”. While the pundits are not on the screens talking about something we are “post” of, we already had two or three already - Nine Eleven (which I refuse to write any other way since it's so nominative), the subsequent wars, and the Covid Pandemic. During the lockdowns people spoke of the Before Times but now we've decided to collectively forget that The Pandemic happened. Except for the publicly masked holdouts, who people think are manifestly nuts.
The other manifest nuts are the vocal anti-vaxers and our screen-world shows us the politics of anger and fear driven by the toxic technology invented for the screens twenty years ago called social media. People hate each other now, people want to hate each other rather than get along, and that defines a state of war, rather than of peace.
The argument for the long 20th Century is that everything from then is still playing itself out; Trump has been on TV for 40 years and he was the acolyte of Ray Cohn, a Cold War forged nasty piece of work. The interminable conflict in Israel flared up into a war that itself is a domino chain away from The Second World War.
The argument against the Long 20th Century is that its page was turned long ago, and we’re in our “unprecedented times” mediated by complex computation in a networked society. Every century is supposed to experience “unprecedented times”; were we supposed to live in the precedence of the 1900s and earlier forever?
The Turing Test passed AIs arrived and they’re already being taken for granted. There’s a TV channel called Tik Tok that’s more popular than MTV ever was, but it’s called ‘an app’ and it broadcasts on the pocket screens. People suspect it’s part of an insidious brainwashing plot.
Jackboot Influencers
I tend to cope by telling myself that I live in a time of war. I think it’s like the 17th Century’s Thirty Years War, as something that can only be named later. We live in wartime, and historians will be able to see clearly that it started at such a time and ends at such a place. There have been arguments that we’ve been living in World War III since 2014, when Russia initially invaded Ukraine23. It’s the same argument. We’re in a global war time but since it’s not Hollywood’s nuclear version, we mostly don’t understand it as such.
Wartime hardens hearts, and now people complain about hustle culture and tech bros— things I understand are fascist because they worship power. These strivers aim to become elite so that they can dominate and impose their will on the world. They call one another "humans" instead of “persons” because they see themselves as souless machines. They reductively treat their bodies as Things that can be modified at whim, “maxing” this and that, spreadsheeting their way to greatness.
The 2020s culture coming at me through screens shows young people “chasing their bag” through “influencing,” striving for a post-work lifestyle4. The goal is to make enough money so that money becomes no object. To this end sex-work has been made respectable, and actors are at the pinnacle of admiration, whereas in the past both whores and actors were considered beneath contempt. It’s been a very long time since being an actor was disreputable. For generations they’ve modeled the ultimate post-work rich lifestyle and were the gods of secular society. And now, when everyone has a screen, they have inspired an endless parade of women dancing in their underwear in front of a tripod, imagining an audience in the numbers the apps tell them are watching.
The HBO documentary Fake Famous showed how three people could become influencers by buying followers, which in turn led to marketing agencies hiring them to sell product. A program used to validate their followers said their bought audience were of high quality. The documentary producer said, "either I'm great at buying followers, or the program is a scam too'. Instead of being bewildered at how no-names have over a thousand followers all the time, it is rather that everyone is probably buying them. Social media is dependent on this inflation, which isn't really a fraud or a problem but more like a tire - it needs to be inflated over a certain threshold to work.
Social media has obviously made a lot of people insane. That insanity in turn is partially coming from the fact that human-beings are interacting with algorithms, bots and marketing persona amalgamations of different characteristics blended together to appear generic. Social media is a technological interface between human psychology and computer algorithms creating a cybernetic hybrid. People are damaged by this interface, because the human mind is spiritual, not digital.
But their insanity is also a product of living in a system of wartime propaganda. Social media delivers daily psy-ops into the stunfucked population, and has brainwashed a fifth column like Tim Pool (tweet screencap below) who was accused last summer as being the recipient of Russian funds.5 That he didn’t disappear in shame is a measure of how blasé people have become to the new reality.
Survival of the Richest
When money is no object it effectively becomes worthless. How do we get to the Star Trek future without money? Or, for that matter, that world of Iain Banks’ The Culture? The post-scarcity society? By making everyone so rich that no one cares what anything cost anymore.
Influencers are starring in their own movie, but in turn, they're economically participating in fake post-scarcity Abundance Culture. Like a citizen of The Culture in Banks' novels, they spend their time in leisure, document it, and get free stuff in the mail to promote as part of their “lifestyle”, which the lower classes, striving to participate in Abundance Culture, will consume in emulation. (Classic Veblen). That's how it works at this point. In order to get the Internet and pocket computers, the ‘net needed advertisement money. Now that infrastructure is too well established to disappear, the push toward a fake post-scarcity lifestyle continues to need advertisement money to subsidize a leisure class. A simulacrum of abundance tends a society toward revolt. It is usually a measure of decadence when an elite begin to live as if money is no object, because they are being supported by an immiserated majority.
Homes are now priced so high that homeowners feel rich, and cities are antagonistic toward the poor. As a person economically grandfathered into my position in a city, I feel like I'm supposed to move away or die. I'm tolerated for now, but I’m not really welcome because for me money is still an object. Cities are becoming upperclass enclaves that are patiently waiting for the die-off of those making less than six-figures. Young people feel this acutely and have it much worse. The way Ontario is closing the safe injection sites is a type of soft eugenics - obviously they want addicts to overdoes and die to remove themselves from society. Canada has become an international joke in recent years because of the liberalization of MAID. There are news stories about the poor and mentally ill being offered suicide as a solution to their problems. A fascist survival of the fittest encouraging the suicide of the weak in the political sheep’s clothing of benevolence.
Democracy has evidently broken down. North America sclerotically refuses to implement any reforms as the upperclass elites cling wealth and power. America used to invade countries and teach people how to vote, their ink-stained fingers held up to American cameras to impress those on the mainland. Now they're talking about invading us and taking away our right to.
For the recent provincial election I went to my all-candidates meeting (for which the Conservative candidate refused to participate) and it was poorly attended, both in person and online (streamed over Facebook). Yes, we had bad weather while we recovered from our snowstorms, but it seems to me that if democracy were healthy attendance would have been good regardless, and if it were only because of weather, the stream numbers would have been great. Ask yourself what would the end of democracy look like if it became irrelevant and faded away - it would look like exactly what we're experiencing in Canada.
I’ve always voted and continue to do so, but at the turn of the century I was part of the 18-25 “ young people who don't vote” demographic. Now I'm part of the middle-age one. Do the stats reflect an enthusiasm for voting amongst my generation that they acquired later in life? Or was the end of democracy in Canada already there in the numbers back then? As we’ve grown older, have we carried our youthful political apathy with us? ChatGPT tells me yes, but it is a well known liar. Does the hallucinations of a language program matter when everyone lies now casually?
Gaslit Journalism
People exaggerate for effect. The meaning of words is lost, beyond natural semantic shifts, such as “phone” going from a device in a house to a pocket computer. A TV show review calls menopause the "most taboo subject" when by definition the most taboo is unspeakable. Our current taboos are hinted at when Dave Chappelle gets in trouble, and that follows because he flirts with taboos. Menopause is not taboo. They made a TV show about it and they won't make a TV show about ████████.
In the future-set novel Two Tribes by Chris Beckett the narrator speaks of living under the conditions of 23rd Century climate change and censorship:
I’ve heard rumours of an insurrection in Greenland: some of the Inuit people there are said to have risen up against the settlers who outnumber them these days ten or even twenty to one. I’ve seen grainy pictures, taken from planes or satellites, of streets in tropical cities strewn with skeletons, killed not by war or famine or disease but by pulses of heat so intense that the human body can’t endure it for more than an hour or two. I’ve heard that the fine grey dust that falls on London from time to time comes from vast forest fires in the tropical zone. Large areas of the Earth these days are barely habitable, and very little news comes out of them. There are whole nations that are completely silent. But then again, news is carefully filtered for us by the Guiding Body in the interests of social cohesion and psychological health, so we can never be sure that we have the whole picture. This may very well be wise. It reduces the risk of widespread panic. But it also means that the present time is rather a mystery. Chris Beckett, Two Tribes (p. 152). Atlantic Books.
News media has been devastated over the past several years so there are less journalists and news sources around. I've noticed that it is harder to understand what is happening in the world. There is a sense that things are being censored and we are being lied to. The popular term is 'gaslighting', which is a word I only learned about a decade ago.
People regularly mock the passive voice of The New York Times, and the New York Time Pitchbot is a popular social media account, parodying how The Gray Lady downplays every alarming thing.
The gaslighting of telling me that the obvious is taboo while tip-toing around the politically incorrect, the promotion of lies as interesting counter-perspectives has firebombed our society and left a desert where the forest used to be. And the fascist weeds have taken root in the ash fertilized soil.
Idiot’s Paradise
This scene of Elon addressing the cabinet while dressed in his baseball cap, underscored for me how through-the-looking-glass we are.
America is in the midst of of an Idiotocratic Revolution which we may later remember as being similar to China's Cultural Revolution of sixty years ago, if we're lucky and American recovers from its fascist phase. That of China was about a decade, between the mid 1960s and the mid 1970s, and when we look back on the past ten years, oof. Have we not already undergone a cultural revolution between the mid 2010s and the mid 2020s? Have we not too had our struggle sessions with our Cancel Culture?
People telling the story of our times in the future will know what comes next for us, and will know how the current nightmare ends. Historians will have a name for this wartime and they’ll probably link it to climate change anxieties.
I now often think of the plotline of the TV show Travelers - time travelers from the future sending their minds back to the 2010s to try and prevent what was coming. By their 25th Century, mass die-off after war and pandemics had reduced humanity to living in shelters built to accommodate 10,000 but overcrowded by housing twice that. Such a shelter suffered a roof collapsed from the weight of glacial ice, because instead of a carbon-caused hot-house the planet experienced a nuclear-winter induced ice age. The story the time travelers told was that climate change drove mass migration and severe overpopulation in cities, which contributed to famine.
The cities are currently concentrating people and the wealthy think they can survive what’s coming. The rest of us are expendable, and the news is lying about what is happening, telling us rising food prices are from anything-else but decreased crop yields due to climate change. The rural and the poor are already being treated as worthless, even though that’s still where food is coming from. The fantasy of a post-scarcity society is being sold to drive the wealthy into believing their money will insulate them from what’s coming, but it also reflects the perceived perfection of the physical environment through the mastery of computation. William Gibson calls what’s coming The Jackpot, implying that to the victors go the spoils.
Even while we're living through an example of The Great Man Theory of history, I'm reminded that history is not teleological, and there's no guarantee that things will recover. Karl Popper promoted that idea in the aftermath of the Nazis. We tell history as a story, with a beginning, middle and and end, and often times the structure of the story makes the happy ending seem inevitable. In 1942 people did not know that Nazis would lose and that two Japanese cities would be annihilated. We don't know yet how much worse it will get before/if it gets better. The Star Trek future where money is no object is just a story, not a destiny. The arc of justice bending toward the good is just a saying. The good guys don't always win - and the past decade highlights how much the unscrupulous have a greased path.
History doesn’t have a built-in arc toward justice, and progress isn’t guaranteed. We’ve inherited a world that still runs on the momentum of the 20th Century and the mechanisms that once drove change now feel stalled or co-opted. We’re trapped in a loop of unresolved conflicts and ideologies while convincing ourselves that we live in an unprecedented future.
The Pandemic was a break in continuity, a moment when the world could have recalibrated. Instead, we chose to forget. In its place, a wartime reality has emerged—not the Hollywood version, but a diffuse, ongoing conflict waged through screens, economic exclusion, and algorithmic propaganda. The divisions aren’t just ideological; they’re structural, embedded in the way cities are built, how money functions, and how people interact with power.
We’re in a culture that values wealth over wisdom, content over truth, dominance over cooperation and these are not the conditions that produce optimism, beauty, and social progress (whatever that has come to mean). If the good guys are going to win, they’ll have to do more than wait for history to bend in their favour. Because history bends toward whoever is willing to shape it.
Phrasing from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, currently being turned into an Apple TV+ show.
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New Indictment Alleges Conservative Media Company Took Millions in Kremlin Cash Anna Merlan, Mother Jones, 2024-09-04
Really good read Tim! I feel like I was taken on a journey. But now I have anxiety.