Do you think the rise of new media and the end of old media and the Cold War is leading us into a second Dark Age?
Prior to 1991, there was a real world order. It was often made of scary stuff (- YouTube) but it was an order nonetheless.
After the USSR collapsed people were like “we won”, then they were like “now what?” and since then it’s been “Whatever”. The only virtues that are really valued are tolerance and pluralism yet at the same time America has been projecting its power and bullying other nations. Then we are surprised when those people get pissed off and become more defensive and ideological. Then some of them attack us when we allow a token number of them to live here.
The Internet rather than making us more informed has caused a deluge of amateurs to compromise the verifiability of facts, causing conspiracy theory to flourish. The powers that be have used terrorism as an excuse to take away people’s privacy and liberty causing the masses to become anti government. The economic crisis has caused people to be more stingy with their money and to embrace libertarian ideologies.
I could see a very negative outcome where people reject the government and we end up in a society that’s dominated by poverty and lack of order in the rural areas and by corporate feudalism in the major cities where the strong prevail and the weak are enslaved.
Literacy is already starting to decline in the West (Welcome to Forbes) and I could see a future where the Internet becomes dominated by audio and video and many people no longer can even read what I’m writing on this forum.
Why a dark age? Why not simply address the problem?
Remember when Wikipedia made use of “perfect democracy?” Anyone could post anything, any time? Well, it very quickly was obvious that the data was worthless. So they backed off and started using referees and editors. Now, Wikipedia is much more valuable.
We see – we’re part of! – a similar solution. The Straight Dope (and snopes, and a few others) are serving as gatekeepers. It’s a lot easier for us, as end-users, to examine the gatekeepers for bias, than to track down all the individual facts out there. It’s like finding a good movie reviewer: once you have one whose tastes match yours, listen to him!
Regarding the point about the changing of world orders in 1991:
At the time, it was popular (in some circles) to proclaim: The World Order is fallen! A New World Order has begun! (No, I’m not just talking about the Jehovah’s Witnesses or other end-of-the-world proclaimers, although there were those too. There always are.)
Others pooh-pooh’ed this idea, seemingly arguing that the whole notion was trite, or something.
I felt at the time: The “Cold War” era did qualify (to my mind) as a bona-fide “world order”, and it was indeed finally irreversibly kaput. But I also felt that a “new world order” would only emerge gradually over a period of, say, 20 years or so.
Well, it’s been 20 years or so. I don’t think we have a “new world order” yet, but there seem to be some tentative outlines emerging: The rise of new economic centers of gravity in areas formerly considered “third world” (especially China, India) and decline of the old economic powers; and perhaps the rise of Islam as a world force will be a real thing (or maybe not). It’s still all new and tentative, so maybe it’s going to go all that way or maybe not. But that seems to be the trend, from what we can see today.
What about the fact consumer capitalism has reigned supreme as the global ideology? The EU was created in part to ideologically compete with the US model but is currently failing because of the differential between the poorer and richer member states.
The EU’s model of socialist democracy is still technically capitalism but has a larger commons and safety net. Unfortunately it seems to be falling apart at the seems and I think what will replace it will probably be what else - American style consumerism.
The US economy has stopped growing as well and inequality is getting worse, but people still seem to believe in it. Canada has been emulating our economic system more and movements to create a national healthcare system so far have failed.
It seems like Islam, which is a religion first and an ideology second is the only thing that really seems opposed to American consumerism. Yet even it does not reject the economic ideology of the United States. Places like Dubai are much more capitalist than the USA.
The main ideology I could see challenging American neoliberalism is environmentalism, but people are going to have to suffer a lot before that happens unfortunately.
As in, a repeat of the original (European) Dark Ages? No - since we now have far more access to information (and debate regarding how said information is interpreted) than a couple of decades ago, I wouldn’t see this current era as any kind of neo-dark age. In fact, I’d pretty much describe it as the opposite.
The video portrays a nuclear explosion in an American city. I presume the ‘world order’ you speak of is that of the cold war, and/or that of people fearing an apocalyptic Nuclear World War III. Yeah - I guess that (in a way) the cold-war period had a more tangible sense of ‘world order’ than what we have now; but I don’t see how this fits into your thesis that we might be leading ourselves into another dark age. Is it a problem that nowadays the USSR and the US are not inches away from firing nuclear warheads at each other? Call me naive, but I’d call nowadays a happier time geopolitically speaking than 50-odd years ago (though that is - or should be - undoubtedly the topic of another thread).
There’s a lot going on here, so I’m not really sure where to start…
Sure, the internet has made it easier for conspiracy theorists to do what they do - but it has also made it easier for people to share information, opinion and discussion. I wouldn’t call the net effect of the Net on society negative; au contraire, I would argue that it is/will be the best thing that has happened to humanity in a long time. Naturally, the internet is not all positive, and it is no panacea to all of homo sapiens’ ills - but the overall effect of it on us is (IMHO) beneficial.
I don’t think people are any more anti-government now than they ever were.
I don’t quite see the link. Or, rather, that’s quite a drastic prediction based on what we know so far.
Your link doesn’t work. I am not aware of any studies comprehensively documenting the decline of literacy in the West (I am a linguist, albeit quite a junior one). Indeed, generally the Internet has been credited with *expanding *the way that language is/can be used. I think it is unlikely that Western societies will suddenly devolve into a pre-literate stage where reading and writing are no longer recognised skills.
So, no - I don’t see the post-apocalyptic dystopia that you describe - although perhaps I’m an eternal optimist.
I suppose it’s all in how you define a Dark Age™. If by that you mean ‘unbridled era of world wide communications, an explosion in learning and knowledge and unrivaled period of prosperity for the majority of humans in the history of our species’ as ‘Dark Age’, then yeah…I suppose it is.
And yet, the world today is a more peaceful place, arguably again in the history of our species. Unlike the ACTUAL dark ages, where you had the major powers of their day ACTUALLY bullying and conquering everyone they could, while the minor powers fought and squabbled with each other incessantly, today you have the US backing out of even the relatively minor conflicts we engaged in the Middle East and not exactly coming down as the wrath of a major super power on nations like Syria which might have engaged in the use of WMD, or North Korea who knows they can get away with their idiotic bluster because the US isn’t what you are describing in reality. I can’t think of any time in human history when a super power with pretty much unrivaled military capabilities like the US and the West have ever shown the kinds of restraints the US and Europe and our other allies have. Yeah, Iraq and Afghanistan were mistakes, but lets get serious here.
It allows a forum for folks such as yourself with vague understanding of history to make all sorts of hyperbolic claims…and blowhards like me to respond to you across global distances. This is a true golden age.
I see quite a bit of negative outcome compared to the real world that the rest of us live in, to be honest. You can see how the current levels of mass communication and freedom of expression is eroding places like China and North Korea, how the Middle East is in flux and starting to come to grips with it’s own problems, and how is has changed the US and Europe and the rest of the world. We really ARE in a golden age, you know? Well, you probably don’t, but it’s true. At no time in our species history has there been such levels of prosperity or the exchange of ideas and thoughts at such a global level. Hell, the average starving North Korean citizen has more than the majority of people living in Europe did during the ACTUAL dark age, and North Korea is the poster child for dysfunction.
Even if that were the case, which I doubt…well, so what? It’s the communication of ideas, concepts and thoughts that’s important, not the medium. And consider…let’s say literacy in the US drops by half during this ‘Dark Age’. During the REAL dark ages literacy was the exclusive province of an extremely narrow, privileged few. Not even all nobles were literate during that period. The vast majority of the population…perhaps as much as 90% or more of our entire species…was illiterate during the real dark ages, and that’s counting the large number of literate in the Arab world at that time. And even if every person during the real dark ages WAS literate, they would still not have access to the kinds of communications that the average human does today across the globe. They didn’t have access to be able to exchange thoughts, ideas, concepts, feelings or the rest with someone on the other side of the world…or even with someone on the other side of their country. In most cases, they didn’t even have real communications with someone in the next village 20 miles away.
Americans are now (somewhat) opposed to American consumerism. The 80s are dead. Economists are beginning to point out what we really should have known all along: that our economic growth was unsustainable. Now we’ll have a few decades where the savings rate grows, and the cycle will start all over again.
Yes, there are places that are “more capitalist” than the US, but they’re invariably tiny and generally accidents of geography. The UAE has, in essence, a tax-free economy because oil revenues pay for everything. They also have a massive (relatively) welfare state, and everything will go to hell when the oil runs out (notwithstanding belated efforts to reduce their economic dependence on oil).
Singapore works the same way: it’s a massive transshipping and banking center because they don’t tax anything. It’s also 40 miles across.
Why would American-style consumerism replace it? Virtually everybody in Europe-the conservative and liberal (who in Europe mean mild libertarian or Rockefeller Republican types) parties-support their social safety nets.
Obamacare passed and how is Canada emulating us more?
I will begin to regard movement environmentalists seriously when they accept the reality that nuclear power is a necessity in moving away from fossil fuels.
A really simplistic view could be that the divisiveness we’re seeing in the U.S. (the Senate hopelessly gridlocked, etc.) will lead to the country being “ungovernable” and thus to civil collapse. I don’t believe it for a second; we came through the 60s and 70s without any real collapse, just some hippies and a few terrorists. I don’t expect us to see anything even that bad…and that was, really, fairly trivial.
(The civil disunion of the Adams/Burr/Hamilton/Jefferson era was significantly worse.)
We have access to information, but that doesn’t necessarily mean people are more enlightened. Digital information is also in many ways more superfluous and subject to distortion than written information. I’m not saying we should ban the Internet of course but I think it has so much information on it it’s often difficult to know what’s really true.
Back in the pre-Internet days (up to about 1994 or so) knowledge was much harder to come by, but the stuff that was available, you could generally be fairly aware of its veracity. Excluding things like political propaganda, but even that is in some ways worse now with things like Fox News.
With the exception of China and a few other fairly small areas of the world, today isn’t any more prosperous than the 1970s were. The Middle East and Africa are in worse shape than they were in 1979, and the west is about the same. Latin America is a mixed bag, the dictatorships feel but it also saw the economic disaster in Argentina and the drug war in Mexico.
I should also note China is paying dearly for their prosperity with pollution and many people are exploited horribly by business there. And their government is still just as totalitarian as they were 24 years ago when they ran those kids over with tanks, despite embracing capitalism.
OK, I think you’re losing the plot a bit here. India is certainly more prosperous than they were in the 1970s. Much of Africa as well. Brazil is almost unrecognizable compared to where it was in the 70s, from what I’ve read. Global poverty is down dramatically. The global literacy rate has gone from 76% in 1990 to 84% in 2010.
I’m with XT - if you want to define a Dark Age as worldwide communication in the palm of your hand, rapid growth in a good number of 3rd (and 2nd) world nations, global peace the likes of which humanity may not have experienced since the Pax Romana (if then)… well, I’ll take it.
It’s easy to mistake GDP for actual affluence. A lot of the supposed increase of wealth is simply things that used to be free such as childcare ending up costing money. Or things like housing costing more money.
Brazil is a success story but keep in mind Argentina is a total mess.
Literacy has increased in much of the third world especially in China but the quality of literacy is actually declining in the western world, at least in the United States. Information is accessible but much of it is actually disinformation and falsehoods.
Africa didn’t have AIDS in the 1970s, but it does now. It’s true that war has declined but keep in mind one of the worst genocides in history took place less than 20 years ago. And a third world war could break out tomorrow if North Korea decides to nuke Seoul and it turns out China is complicit.
I wouldn’t call a war that killed as many as a million people [Iraq] even relatively minor. It wasn’t WW2 no, but come on.
America doesn’t use violence in a large amount to extend its empire simply because technology is more efficient now and cultural colonialism generally works better than force most of the time. Not only that but we don’t want to alienate the rest of our allies. We haven’t attacked North Korea because they pose no threat to us and they don’t have any resources we can use. They are only a threat to South Korea.
I am troubled by the state of scientific literacy these days. Just a day or two ago we were watching some old sci-fi movie on TCM, the introduction to which was a brief documentary-style discourse on the beginning of the universe, moving on to the origin and evolution of life on Earth. The latter was described pretty much as paleontologists’ and other scholars’ theories of the time had it. Today, I’m not sure anyone producing a film for the American mass market would dare to put that in, for fear of offending audiences and exhibitors in the Bible Belt.
ETA: They might put something like that in after all, but in such a way that it could be skipped as required by local sensibilities.
Our whole universe was in a hot dense state…nearly 14 billion years ago expansion started…the Earth began to cool…autotrophs…Neanderthals developed tools…
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With the exception of China and a few other fairly small areas of the world, today isn’t any more prosperous than the 1970s were. The Middle East and Africa are in worse shape than they were in 1979, and the west is about the same. Latin America is a mixed bag, the dictatorships feel but it also saw the economic disaster in Argentina and the drug war in Mexico.
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Horseshit. Do you have a cite for this incredible statement?? World wide, prosperity is MUCH higher in real world purchasing power terms than it was in the 1970’s. ‘fairly small areas’ such as freaking INDIA are much more prosperous today…you know, the China and India who have a large percentage of the world population? THOSE ‘fairly small areas’? The Middle East is more prosperous in real world purchasing terms for the average person than it was in the 70’s as well. Africa was a basket case in the 70’s, and it’s pretty much a basket case today, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in real world terms they were more prosperous today than in the 70’s as well. You are looking at history through rose colored glasses instead of reality.
There was a TED talk that a poster used a few years ago that went over this in real terms using some cool graphics, and it was pretty apparent that the reality is that the average human today is more prosperous in terms of what they can buy, in terms of just basic sustenance than at any time in history. That doesn’t mean that the majority of humans are up to the living standards we enjoy in the west, but in terms of the actual historical conditions they are MUCH better off today than in the past. Oh, there are a few exceptions…North Korea springs to mind, when they were on the Soviet gravy train. The average North Korean was better off when the Soviets were footing the bill than they are today.
They are certainly paying, but their prosperity nearly across the board has increased dramatically. By and large their people don’t have to fear periodic famine or flood as they did in the fairly recent past. They are being exploited, but they are reaping large benefits as well. And the government isn’t nearly as totalitarian as it was even a decade or so ago. While the people of China don’t have free and complete access to the entire world wide web, they have access to their own versions of things like facebook and twitter, and those are making huge inroads in communications and the conveyance of ideas and thoughts…and further eroding their totalitarian system. Seriously, you need to do a bit more research and thinking before going off about Dark Ages if you are going to try and use China as an example.
