Everything is about to change. I don't just mean the stuff you can ignore because it's somewhere out on the boundary and not close enough to bother with.
I mean, Goodbye globalization, Goodbye venture funding, Goodbye unbridled trade and consumption, and of course, Goodbye predictable weather.
According to global strategist Peter Zeihan, in his ominously titled new book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning, "Mexico will become the new China. China will be the new Japan. The United States, of course, will no longer be the United States." He predicts that "politics will dramatically change over the next decade. By 2032, political parties and ideologies will be unrecognizable from today".
That's the most chilling thing of all. For all our grim foreboding about one kind of pandemic or another, nothing much has really changed this century. In 2022, we are still in the calm before the storm.
We're back to what the German historian Philipp Blom described as The Vertigo Years of the early 20th century, when everything was in flux. In 2022 everything feels unbalanced and driving our Zen-infused longing for "balance." Everything shows signs of being out of sync.
Our collective humanity has been drawn into a vortex from which there's no escape. At least, there's no escape without voluntary and hugely dramatic changes to our lifestyles.
Think of the world like the US healthcare system, the pandemic-infested eye of the post-deregulation American storm. A health system that's so broken, so utterly dysfunctional, that you'd think it simply must change, like, this can't continue, can it? And yet, nobody knows how to even begin fixing the American health system, other than throwing trillions of dollars around and hoping that works.
Technology is generally viewed as the panacea to every problem we've created. But I wonder if social scientists and futurists put the cart before the horse when thinking about tech. Disruptive tech isn't so much our future as its portent, an omen of the likely dystopian change we'll all have a chance to grapple with.
In the first 6 months of 2022, disruptive tech-enabled OneCoin, the multi-billion dollar crypto Ponzi scheme orchestrated by Ruja Ignatova, the Bulgarian-born Oxford-educated "Cryptoqueen," is as much a reflection of our unregulated, unaccountable free-flowing financial system as of so-called disruptive Web3 style technology. Ruja leveraged technology to steal billions of dollars from crypto-idiots and made it look like child's play.
Not suggesting for a moment that all technology is powering fraudulent schemes.
It does feel that we're all in awe of the 21st-century social media disinformation age. A kind of paralysis has infected politicians worldwide, limiting their backbone to deal with technology's destructive impacts. Hard to believe we accept that those who design and control social media platforms set the rules of debate: what may be said, who may say it, and how.
The social platforms laugh at politicians' rhetoric calling for controls and transparency. That's because social media platforms know politicians are addicted to the ability to reach constituents via granular social media targeting algorithms. When Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in his cramped college dorm, he probably never imagined that he might eventually have to regulate the falsehoods of the President of the United States.
So we are all in their thrall, and that won't change. Political advertisements on broadcast television have been subject to robust regulation for over 50 years. Why should social media advertisements on the internet be treated differently?
Looping back to the opening statement: Everything is about to change; and asking, are you getting that feeling too?
Your answer would be based partly on "gut feel" and partly on data.
The climate is no longer predictable. That's a fact.
Democracy everywhere is under threat. That's a fact.
Our food supply chains are unraveling. That's a fact.
Radical autocratic leaders have emerged on every continent. That's a fact.
Technology is now uncontrollable. That's a fact.
Your kids are more and more stressed. That's a fact.
The financial structures of your country are crumbling. That's a fact.
Ethical and moral values you hold dear are being trampled. That's a fact.
The 20th-century world order looks like it will implode. That's a fact.
We're putting far too much faith in technology. It, alone, isn't our savior.
The artificially intelligent defense network known as Skynet in the Terminator movies likely personifies 21st-century technology. The film contemplates how Skynet, created by Cyberdyne Systems, will become self-aware sometime soon and trigger a global nuclear war resulting in the extermination of humans.
We are, after all, a somewhat fragile species.
Peter Zeihan could be right; the end of the world might be the beginning of a whole new story.
Author: Greg Twemlow, Editor, Publishers Studio