It's 2am, I am by the fireplace, it's technically the 26th, but it's still for me Christmas Day.
I woke up at 1pm, needing about 11 hours of sleep, at my parents house, having arrived completely run down by life in New York City—having worked harder this year than ever.
My state of mind is strangely polarized: I both feel simultaneously, deeply happy with my personal life, on a small scale, and concerned with the state of the world on a large scale, and with the universe in a sense (I mean I have all sorts of unsettled, unsettling questions about the nature of the soul, and of the planet, and God, or gods, the origins of the human species). I spend parts of my days in moods both materialistic and gnostic in turn, practical and mystical (or eschatological even); I swing between pessimistic, messianic thinking about the next decade of human history, and guarded optimism about unforeseen progress.
I have trouble just being where I am, in other words—in a house or apartment, with a job, paying bills, writing to make or secure my name. I have trouble feeling like it all is for something—like it all couldn’t be wiped away. I have trouble feeling like this ironic, meta, post-history isn’t in fact just an extreme form of History, a very loaded, very potent form of History, preparing to reveal itself.
I've been kept up at night, lately, by the realization or feeling that hyper-connected, a hyper-online, hyper-integrated world is deeply fragile: no one has any practical survival skills; no one knows how to hunt or fish or farm (even the avatars of masculinity you find on Twitter with their ultra-commodifiable gym bodies probably have no idea how to survive in a post-civilization).
What would people do without their supplement deliveries and their creatine shakes? What would I do?
Do young tradwives know anything about midwifery? Do they know how to can goods? Do they know how to milk a cow? How to pick a mushroom? How to graft an apple tree?
We can't go back to 1850 because 1850 has left humanity, and so 2023, the world of 2023 at least in a large swath of the world, will be in really really terrible shape in the case of a global disaster—worse shape even than World War II, I think. At least European peasants still knew to grow extra potatoes under the fields that armies would trample upon; even at the lowest point, people still had things to hide in root cellars, still had some ability to survive, like literal tools of survival, survival skills.
Now, the most I could hope to do is drive on my last tank of gas to Amish country and offer to join a defense militia; the most I could offer is an able body and a willingness to learn if I was lucky enough to make it to a little traditional haven.
Do I think we're entering the world of the stupid-ass new movie Leave the World Behind? No—but that’s not my point… I don't need to necessarily believe that there's an imminent conspiracy among elites to shut down the Internet to understand that all of us are over-dependent on this digital grid and that it's too complex to really be robust, and too global to really not be vulnerable (and by extension—we are too: weak, vulnerable, over-extended).
As we learned during COVID, an interconnected world breaks down quickly, a world where people are flying around constantly means pathogens are going to travel ultra-quickly, at the speed of an airplane, basically, and something similar is going to be true of the internet.
A deep fake like the War of the Worlds radio hoax in the 1930s, would have a much greater impact today, if it were sufficiently convincing; a deep fake could create such instant hysteria that the ensuing chaos would destroy the social fabric before the hoax could be unmasked; it could happen in a few hours.1
Information sickness does make people act erratically and dangerously, it dissolves certain otherwise sturdy social and communal bonds.2 Information actually turns people into social mutants and monsters, even if it does otherwise other good things, or can serve as a public service bulletin in other aspects.