It's June Now - Has the World Already Ended?

It’s been a big year, if you’ve been online. If you haven’t, which is probably not the case if you are reading this, it’s been a perfectly normal year. Let’s look at the normal year first.

The sun came up today. Win! By human standards this is the start to continued existence. With the sun comes the warmth we require and desire, and our food will grow. Gravity hasn’t ended yet, so water still flows down our rivers, and in fact I can hear it from my house, a reassuring shushing sound akin to wind in trees. The sun is up, the water is moving, clouds travel the sky carrying more water, wind, seeds, pollen. Pollen gets so thick in this part of Montana that when the wind blows it can easily be mistaken as smoke. My first year as a fire lookout I called in my first fire only to find out that it was pollen in the mountains. I had never realized just how thick it can be. This morning walking out to my truck to retrieve my laptop that I’d inadvertently left in the back seat over night, there was a fresh layer of green dust all over my windshield. I’d just cleaned it yesterday.

The sun is up, the wind is blowing, the water is moving and circulating and bubbling up in aquifers, and there are countless birds creating a rich bird song across the valley. And look, deer. Tons of deer in our neighborhood. So as far as the world goes, from my window here, everything is going alright.

But then go online. Bloody hell. The world falls apart the second I open my phone and open a social media app. It’s why I open them less and less. And while some of the stories are no doubt true, there are wars happening, there are people going hungry, there are environmental challenges both related and unrelated to human activities, my phone would lead me to believe that the Hoards are at my very door this morning. And I can say with certainty, they are not. I just checked.

Enter Ai. Now we don’t know if what we know is even real. Before we’d see a video of a politician or commentator and think, ok, that guy is is a lying sack of … Or conversely, I’ve always liked that gals commentary, she’s bright, seems honest, and from what I’ve read, seems to nail the points accurately and at least with an honest approach. T

But then over the years of the internet we came to find out that a lot, hell perhaps even most of the people telling stories have been lying. In the mid 20teens a lot of us became very cynical about any major news source. Most of them are captured by profiteers who’d realized the penetrating potential of a 24 hour news cycle on the human brain, and realized that tragedy and outrage capture attention and attention equates to dollars. Read "Stolen Focus" by Johann Hari for an in-depth review of how the system works. That was part of my gateway into realizing just how subversive the structure of the online world could be, and just how diabolic the people behind this new era actually are. Of course when I say diabolic, and cross reference it with the internet it sounds like something new. It’s not. Nothing new under the sun. There have always been people pursuing their greed and power at the expense of those around them, but what is new is the sheer reach, pervasiveness, effectiveness, and potential.

It is only in the last 25 years that we’ve been given a pocket sized device to take our attention away from the world around us and focus it into a small electronic device that literally alters our attention and focus to places that may not even be. Books did and still do this, but not nearly in the same way. A book is a singular voice. A singular story. And our attention is focused either in the book, or outside the book. These new devices changes that. Now we are scattered and distracted. You can go from Montana, to New York riots, to LA oil spill, to Ukrainian war, to Sudanese genocide, all in seconds. These stories, countless stories flash before your eyes in an unending train of tragedy. I remember thinking in my twenties that my parents needed to give up the time they spent watching Fox News. I remember telling them that they were overwhelming themselves with stories that didn’t actually affect them, that in many ways were not actually representative of what was going on. I didn’t have a cell phone in my twenties. I didn’t know what was coming. Holy crap, Fox from 30 years ago was not even an introduction to what was coming, and now it’s not just older people with free time in their retirement that are glued to a fictional news stream… everyone is.

I’m sitting on the porch right now with my laptop typing this. In the last several minutes several people have walked past my house. Several of them were on their phones, even when walking with someone else. Looking down into their phone while they walked. It’s not uncommon. Everyone has access from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep. And that access isn’t just available. It’s addictive. So addictive in fact that I’d venture for many the phone is what they consider their social arena. Which is tragic. But if you are someone that consciously tries to avoid your phone you quickly realize you are a little bit alone in doing so. I’ve noticed it. Luckily for me, I love the presence of my dog and the birds. But the internet is taking over the world, and I’m not optimistic about its effects.

I don’t listen to a lot of political commentary. I like listening to Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi. In their weekly conversations they cover what is going on the world in reference to specific events but always in a broader context. The specific events we are fed are more often than not just chatter, filler, coloring in the lines of a wider narrative that the news is feeding. Their commentary is far more interesting than just the maybe true, maybe not true current events we are fed. But beyond them, I don’t ingest much more outside a little Twitter, a little Instagram, and the writers I follow here, most of whom don’t do current events. But one of the biggest things I like like about Kirn and Taibbi is a feature unique to their commentary. Both are writers, and both are avid readers, and they discuss weekly stories that they have been reading. Just in the last few weeks they have moved into now discussing novels. And both bring a sort of real world academic insight to literature, and discuss the relevance that old stories carry in modern life. I love that. I’m a reader of books. But I am not nearly as insightful in this regard as they are. But coincidentally I read 1984 just a month or so ago, and by luck that is what they are talking about now.

I found 1984 to be incredibly interesting but also a little dull. I made myself finish it even though I felt a little bored. But with regards to its relevance to modern life, holy crap. 1984, as Kirn points out in his recent podcast, used to be a book Americans would read and think, “boy, that sure played out in Russia & China.” But now… now it’s the US. And it’s undeniable. It’s a book about more than just censorship.

While censorship has become a front and center line of conversation in certain corners of the internet, I don’t think the broader audience has come to find out the power, control, and capture that has occurred within the internet with regards to censorship. We know the obvious, deliberate, and openly discussed censorship that has occurred in China. To the point that me writing this openly in a Substack post could someday prove problematic if I go travel there, which while I’d love to, probably won’t happen anytime soon. But more subversively, the US in conjunction with the European Union has worked relentlessly in recent year to not only monitor, but control what is and isn’t discussed online. At first it was just an algorithmic thing, in which they’d control what topics were disseminated further, but more recently, especially in Europe, but by rules in part helped created by the US, no doubt with the goal of spreading it here eventually, laws allow for the actually arrest of people over things they say on the internet. Shit is getting wild. This of course was a huge factor in the last US election, but I’m not terribly optimistic that larger forces than politicians are at play and that the tracks have already been laid for this train. This is a story in the internet I follow with keen interest. It’s in many ways more pertinent than single event stories like a bombing in Yemen or a train crash in Ohio, because the implications are truly wide spread and long term.

We are fed temporary candy stories, and in my opinion they are “rage bait” - there is nothing you or I can actually do about them and they do not often actually affect us in any way. But they get our attention which in turn gives advertisers our time and internet powers our data. Again, reference Stolen Focus. Meanwhile the actually stories of power, dominance, and subversive political control go on in the invisible and unmentioned background.

Where am I going with all this hard news? And I’ll admit, I wish I had better advice on how we could all change the system of control that exists in the internet, but I don’t have any real good ideas other than what I know for myself. I look out from my computer, close it, go step off the porch. I take a walk. I bike to work. I do what needs to be done for supporting my family and friends. And I try to embrace hobbies that do not include the internet, though writing and photography both are tied in on many levels. But I garden. I like yard work. I like swimming and biking and running outside. And those very simple things, life away from the internet bring me far more satisfaction and sense of living than anything I do herein. But as someone who has been doing these things since before the internet was broadly scattered and used by everyone, I will say, the world has changed drastically with the internet and the way we interface as humans has likely forever changed. People are not as connected in society, and you can see it and sense it, and it’s sad. Human connection seems to have taken a step in diminishing, often not with close relationships but at a broader level. But that said, one antidote in reducing that perception for me, has been escaping the digital veil.

And while of course AI brings the dreaded possibility of robots that get wildly out of control, there is also another side I see glimpses of that give me a little hope. As we dive further into the unreality of ai, fake videos of fake “influencers” selling fake stories and fake things… I think a lot of people, myself included, are sick of it. Bored. Tired. We are turning it off. I’d rather pick up knitting than waste my time watching a fake person talk about fake things on a screen that gives me a headache.

We crave real life, and that craving may be what saves us, some of us anyways, and those of us that do will find our community and even in part it will be online, but used as a tool for connection, rather than the all encompassing addiction it’s become for so many. Addiction to our phones is wildly possibly and a dreadful slope. I’ve already spent far more hours than I’d ever like to admit to myself or anyone else, on my phone, on the internet. There seems to be no natural off switch for the mind when it comes to the electronic information tube. Our bellies tell us when we are full. Our bodies tell us when we are tired. But the internal signals to tell us to quit inputting information is far more subtle. But it’s there even though many don’t recognize it. It’s boredom. I’ve realized how bored it makes me, and I’m moving on. And while it’s a little lonely out here, I can tell you, it’s decidedly better. As more people get dragged into a synthetic existence online, so dangerous as to make some wonder if their existence is even real… that is a conversation you see frequently online, people questioning whether or not this world is even real, or if it is a simulation, but I can tell you, go sit in a cold creek for ten minutes and you will quickly find reality. But so subversive is the electronic thought regime that it has people questioning gravity itself. It’s wild. But I have hope, at least for some of us.

Humans are natural creatures. We are made to interact with the natural world. We are made to get cold, experience hot, to sweat, to run, to tire, to get dirty, to eat off of bushes and trees, to hunt animals for food, to gather from our gardens, to watch birds and the night sky with wonder. We are made for this world, no matter how many digital voices decry otherwise. It used to be those voices were fringe and infrequent but now they are pervasive, but online in the digital bog. Outside, in my community and in yours are real people, real animals, real trees and grasses. And as much as we are told they are damaged and being harmed, I’m here to tell you, most of the world is not nearly as bad as you are being told. Yes, there are chemicals we all should work to reduce, there are things that are doing us harm, but not at the expense of our basic human experience. None of us will live forever. Even in the “perfect life” our time will be cut short. Our stories will one day end abruptly and without the satisfying end of a good novel, but in the meantime, as I see it, breathing and living is the highest commodity just as our health is more important than wealth.

As we enter this new age in which the internet is going to be further amplified by Ai, it is going to be interesting to see where societies go. Humans have built our structures of existence around growing and hunting, building and developing. Along the way we have slowly accumulated knowledge, deepening the layers of what we know step by step. Cultures around the world took their own steps in development and have always had overlap, but in the last two centuries that overlap has accelerated as rapidly as our technologies. Globalization has always existed in some ways as trade across cultural borders has always occurred, but in the last century we’ve gone from simple trade of knowledge and minor goods to utter reliance on distant lands and complicated forms of infrastructure for our very existence. Basic necessities often come from the other side of the globe.

I’ve always been a skeptic of those that call globalization a panacea for humans. I see international trade as fine and good, but the way globalization has been turned into a political arena and a global power structure is dangerous for some of the obvious reasons, but also reasons more subtle and subject to nuance. In many ways I see it as a form of slow genericification and homogenization. It has become a threat to cultures in every corner of the world, in large part because of the consolidation of power given to a handful of powerful conglomerates. Watching the world slowly all take on the same look is wild.

But the potential dangers of this next step go beyond mere homogenization of cultures. The dangers now include an erasure of all the knowledge we have accumulated over the last several thousand years. In just a few short years we’ve seen that language is getting dumbed down, that while humans can text and use ai to translate, many are losing basic interpersonal skills required for every day living. Our very infrastructures which we’ve continually built upon, improved, and passed on generation to generation now stand to be taken over by a system that potentially precludes any human input or passing down of the background and knowledge of advancement. Ai stands to potentially erase history and tell a story of past knowledge that is based on the bias of just a handful of people that create the algorithm. And as more and more people become dependent on Ai systems for research, we are increasingly vulnerable to the tampering of knowledge.

It’s a bit doom and gloom, and I’m not terribly optimistic about that side of the world. But what hope I do have is that there are still those that will see the Ai as a tool like any other, and not a one stop shop. Those people are plugging into it for the work of human betterment, and in this regard, there are plenty of good potential outcomes. I also simply look outside. I look to books. As the internet world slowly chips away at our ability to focus long term, I see an opportunity in books and in nature, if not for my society, for myself and at least a handful of others I can find through both the physical and digital realm. Look at us here… I think we’re creating a community of people that want more than 5 second knowledge. You can’t learn about advanced systems from TikTok. Maybe you can learn a few fun facts. Maybe you can see a pretty place. But if you want to learn about farming, you have to get your hands in the ground and talk to people who have been doing it for decades. If you want to learn to build a car, you can’t just watch an Instagram reel. Real interests take us into the real world. That is where my hope lies.

For all the advances of Ai and robotics, there is a basic check point I hope people will remember. Life is about doing things, not the avoidance of doing. And while every culture has members who lack the drive and motivation to participate in society, and that role is being made easier by the month, societies are driven and advanced by those that participate in doing… doing the fun things, the hard things, the building, the construction, the feeding, the helping. Doing is what makes us human. I have no desire for a life in which I sit and watch robots perform tasks I enjoy doing. The danger of the internet is that is has given voice to the laziest among us, who tell the unwitting and naive how great it is to do nothing at all, to sit and rely on others, that create an expectation of being provided to by anyone but themselves, but they are wrong. Deeper satisfactions in life come only from our interactions with the world. You can not know the mountains until you have been in them, not just on the beautiful summer alpine meadow, but also in the winter storm. Life is about the highs and the lows. The human experience at its richest, includes all the things, the pain, the push, the drive, the joy. I’m bored of hearing otherwise. I do not crave a life in which I do not do things.

It’s June. The sun is out overhead, but I see and hear a storm thundering over the Rattlesnake Wilderness to my north. It’s a beautiful storm. It looks like it could push in southward and I’ll take it. It’s June, and we’re about half way through this ambiguous year. It’s been a great year so far in this neck of the woods. Beautiful weather. My family is healthy. My dog is happy (though a little under the weather today… what did you eat, boy?… He’s a herder so it’s likely something dreadful.)

It’s June and the while the anonymous voices of the internet are telling us we need to be riled up and in a panic, I don’t think we do. I don’t think I will. I think I’ll close down the electronic gateway for the day and carry on in this outside world, and pretend it’s 1992 in that regard. We can keep accumulating our own experiences, our own knowledge, build upon our own drive to learn things and do things that we are curious about in our own way. We can still learn. We can still advance. We don’t have to let the robots think for us or do the projects we’d like to do. It’s what makes us human. Doing. The world isn’t ending, not yet and very likely we’ll be fine. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the future, but in the big picture it’s important to remember that if you can’t change a thing, there is no reason to get caught in dread. Most of what we as humans worry about never come to fruition. Thinking about possibilities is a good mental game and exercise but always one to be tempered and viewed in light of what is actually going on directly around us, in our actually day to day lives and neighborhood.