The world is tired. Possessed by a lethargy. A sense of decay, that all is waning.
I think this is especially true for those who speak the loudest about the need for change. When asked to envision what a concrete, holistic vision of the ideal future would be like, they can merely offer vagaries of the imagination. They are firm in their conviction that we must change from what we are now, but they remain somewhat foggy on what we should be changing toward.
This lack of a purposeful future is particularly evident in younger generations today. Youthfulness is traditionally associated with ebullience. Optimism, vigor, and all that. But young adults, adolescents, even children now seem burdened by an assemblage of cares that most only develop later in life. An immense pressure which has led to statistical skyrocketing of many kinds ranging from anxiety to suicide and other usual suspects that indicate that something's not quite right here with kids today.
And yes, the whole "What's wrong with young people these days?" thing is not exactly an underdiscussed question. And I have no pretense that my reply is absolutely novel either. But I do hope this particular evaluation, scribbled down in this form, may be of interest for anyone who stumbles upon this.
So the question becomes: why is this particular kind of tiredness so rampant?
There are many maladies that could be held responsible for choking the Weltgeist. Some degenerative, some veneral, and so on.
But let me take up one sickness in particular, bequeathed to us by Web 2.0 culture. Again, the below is a mere scribbling, not a systematic analysis. I hope that is a sufficient disclaimer.
Neural Circuitry and Media Culture
Many have already noted the parallels between the concept of the "hive mind" and advancements in real world technology. That is nothing new. The renunciation of individuality. A human being converted into yet another appendage of an insect brood. In the movies, this is often accomplished through some cybernetic gadget, gizmo, or blinking chip. Or even without a device, as in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers".
I hope it should be too controversial to say that the bulk of humanity living today virtually exists as part of a decentralized hive mind. We do not need implanted chips for a hive mind to exist for have it incarnate via the smartphone. The hive mind, in its essence, is what we live in today.
And what is this essence?
One possible answer is that is the synchronization of consciousness through shared mental and psychological data between its members. (There are other answers, but for the sake of argument, let's take this ungrounded claim on good faith.)
Human beings, as members of the hive mind, participate through both activity and receptivity.
Passive receptivity is quite obvious. Scroll, swipe, pincer movement. The tools of consumption. Consume content. Audio-visual stimuli of various kinds for various demographics and personalities. Pithy tweets, punchy shorts, longform streams. All are directed to feed our cerebral appetites for novelty. This is the downloading of shared consciousness to the individual member. Participating in the hive mind through voyeurism. The male desire for achievement pacified through watching video game streaming. The female desire for attention projected through influencers. And other dopamine ticklers beyond that, all ultimately grounded in the logic of pornography. We are fed to a point of oversatiation beyond what anybody in the City of Pigs could have hoped for. Never before has newness been so constantly inflicted upon our senses. We share the feelings of those not around us, made close to us exclusively via the spaceless proximity of the Internet.
And we are also actively engaged in the hive mind to the extent that we upload every moment, thought, word, feeling to the Internet in desperate bids for attention. Perhaps this web-post is guilty of the same crime? We submit our consciousness to global scrutiny. We feed media systems all we have to offer, all lived experience is monitored and captured voluntarily through this psychological imperative to share content. The feeling that if you did not take a photo of some experience, it may not have even happened.
The level to which we share this stimuli does lend credence to the idea that we do exist as a hive mind, even if only in embryonic form at this stage.
I do not think it is sufficiently marveled at how speedily billions of individuals have been onboarded onto a hive mind system, of their own free will. The psychological transformation (or transmogrification) accomplished in the past dozen years at such a scale is an unprecedented feat in human history. And with only the faintest parody of resistance. One should expect more obstinate resistance to such developments from older generations, as they resisted the printing press or radio, but in this case the aged have fully embraced such changes. It is a testament to their openness, or their weakness.
The implications of Web 2.0, smartphones, and social media culture are as reticulate as the networks upon which they are built. There are many ways to proceed, but let us not lose track of the matter at hand.
How do these developments induce mass psychological fatigue?
Information overload.
Now to be fair, the smart phone did not invent information overload or media saturation. It had already been a staple motif of postmodern fiction long before Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld San Francisco 2007.
But we do inhabit this ecosystem more now than novels like White Noise or Infinite Jest could have comprehended in the decades they were written.
An endless stream of multisensory stimuli coursing over, around, and inside us. A ruthless, relentless prickling of our dopamine drives. The content, the outrage, the cringe, the envy, the material is endless. It tickles and grips and rapes our brain's thirst for novelty, its lusts, its desire to be affected. We are made subjects of the omnipresent content stream.
Information hoses such as Twitter, image-based imprinters such as Instagram, hostility stimulators such as Facebook, and whatever one dares call YouTube. They feed the mind worms that taste of candy, ramming it endlessly with sensations, and with deft precision hypnotizes us into tapping back to that platform of choice mere hours, even minutes, later.
Such systems of mass control have a sophistication which make even the children's book 1984 Big Brother system seem milquetoast. And somehow such obsequious servitude seems excusable when the denizens of the world enter into it of their own volition.
The consequence of the hive mind is that we are compelled to experience and endure thousands of lifetimes, condensed into mere bytes, on a regular basis. Local catastrophes and scares which, for most of history, were only circulated at a regional level are now universalized. Every heartbeat is grafted onto this global nervous system. When a shooting pricks a nerve in Colorado, Massachusetts and Paris are made to feel it, along with the rest of the online. This is what it is to live in the oxymoron of the "global community". To experience millions of pinpricks with no hope of disconnection.
Each travesty provokes a continual effusion of thoughts and prayers, ranging from the performative to the sincere, the world round. In a world mediated only by media systems, we are exposed to an unprecedented number of dangers, anxieties and events. More disasters than anyone in previous generations could have known about, much less experienced.
It is a well known fact that compassion only increases the suffering of the world. And because media systems are monetized to enhance catastrophe awareness, we participate in a global suffering surveillance system that monitors, broadcasts, and exploits calamity wherever it may be (or sometimes may not be). Through the purported good of awareness, we are made to experience these tragedies every time, even if it be ever so slightly.
When you live in a world of constant emergency, where disasters compound and compile and enforce themselves upon your cognitive space, a few possibilities result.
One, you grow cynical. You begin to respond with ironical bemusement. Media cycles have genres of catastrophes, be they gun violence, climate change, energy crises, the like. The stories follow the same operatic structure. Politicians and pundits perform the same hand-wringing responses. Nothing changes. What is worse, each new broadcast travesty begins to feel like a rerun. Like cop or cooking shows, news events are packaged for television with salacious interest. (Cf. Nightcrawler).
David Foster Wallace illustrates this phenomenon perfectly in his own recollection of 9/11. He records that at the time he did not have a television, so his elderly Christian neighbor lady urgently invited him to come watch with her on her television set.
As the footage captured the plane crashing into the tower, she and other gathered neighbors immediately knelt upon the carpeted floor in fervent prayer (much as my own mother did when we saw it occur), and with the utmost sincerity called from the depths of their hearts for Jesus to protect and save those in New York and across the nation from whatever was happening.
As for DFW, he realizes with mild disgust how unaffected he is by all this. Rather than feeling extreme fear or pity, he could not help but think about how strategically placed the cameras were to capture the plane flying in, almost like an action film. How news media organizations were clearly maximizing the cinematographic nature of 9/11 to boost their earnings. And by this, he felt inoculated against any pity or grief he felt he should have felt as 9/11 occurred.
It is an ironic cynicism for us who can predict down to the headline the rhetorical points journalists will make with each new incident. How they will wrap it in a veneer of sanctimonious urgency and a frantic rhetoric aimed to bludgeon anyone within range. All for the sake of maximizing their "hits". Media of this sort feels like television reruns. Riots and shootings can seem choreographed, like they have been repackaged for Internet or television consumption, and just as predictable and worn-out as the fictional B-plots we occasionally sit down to watch. Ultimately boring, even if hundreds die. And that is frightening to consider.
Nothing seems new, because it is all recycled. Schopenhauer once remarked that any true act of creation is impossible because everything that is possible has already happened. The same can be applied to the media cycle, and not just within the realm of news events. Every tweet, YouTube stunt, bikini selfie, blog post is a mere recirculation of some earlier material. Again and again. None of it ever changes. It is tiring, to be suffocated in sameness all while being told it is new, the latest thing.
Two, you may not go the path of irony. You may not be inclined to see media culture as some engineered capitalistic conspiracy. You still take news events seriously; you still have heart.
But in this case you are led down another equally dark path. There is a familiar study about how crime rates dropped significantly in the 90s, but because of the 24/7 news media cycle, Americans perceived crime as being on the rise. As systems of catastrophe-awareness have grown more sophisticated, and individuals become increasingly hooked into the parasocial networks of the Internet, the vast majority of the population is conditioned into thinking the world is in endless crisis. Agamben's emergency state, if you will.
Fear and anxiety are the sores which sprout from such frequent, such extensive exposure to the hive mind.