With 2012 looming – both on the election scene and on interlocking wheels of the Mayan calendar – the idea of impending doom permeates our culture. Not only does world-ending disaster make a regular appearance in fiction and at the box office, cable TV is chockablock with specials on our death from environmental degradation, from economic collapse, from exploding super-volcanoes and plunging asteroids.
That we should be in a worldwide fret over the end of days is nothing new. Predictions of the end of the world are featured among the earliest known writings. Within our lifetimes, there have been those who confidently predicted the tumbling of our "Ponzi scheme" markets, the rapturous return of the Lord, the cleaving of the Earth by cosmic forces, and the smoldering horrors of nuclear annihilation. Over a series of articles, we've looked at the threats posed by everything from disease to asteroids, and have concluded that while the danger is real, it's also remote. Yes, there are things out there that could do us in, but most of those large enough to have lasting impact are also extremely unlikely.
Judged against the record of a history rife with end of the world predictions (and singularly lacking in an end of the world) the question has to be: is there really anything to worry about?
The answer is definitively yes.
Though both the Earth and the climate certainly merit study and observation, it's not super-volcanoes or hyper hurricanes that should concern us. It's not even those threats that we generally think of when we consider our own tendency toward careless pollution and casual violence. If the doomsayers seem to have gained a particular hold at the moment, it's because our society is stressed in a way that it hasn't been for more than two hundred years.
Personal mortality often causes people to think that their age is, in some way, a critical moment for mankind. They're almost always right in a personal sense, but every now and then they're right in far more general terms. This is one of those times.
Since the 1960s, we've been telling ourselves that we've made a clean exit of the industrial age and plunged into the information age. Goodbye dirty manufacturing plants, hello Jetsons. However, we've been fooling ourselves. Not only have we failed to put the problems generated by large-scale manufacturing behind us, our use of new technologies has accelerated their environmental and social impact beyond all recognition. Our society has in no way adapted to the primary change we've seen over the last few decades: ubiquitous, overwhelming quantities of information married to obscene quantities of cheap goods.
In 2007, Andrew Keen published a book titled The Cult of the Amateur based on the idea that the Internet was allowing just any old so and so to make a contribution to the public discourse. To Keen, blogs lacked the journalistic integrity of traditional media and Wikipedia was a joke that had neither the careful research staff nor the appropriate sense of proportion reserved to traditional encyclopedias. It was easy to be angry at Keen for his dismissive attitude toward the uninformed hoi polloi and his ceaseless championing of the traditional media, but there was a better reason to be upset at his work than simply attitude. Because Keen missed the mark badly. It wasn't the amateurs who were a threat. It was the professionals.
There are many fine journalists working at many different organizations, but it doesn't matter. It can't matter. Because, we haven't faced up to the biggest issues the information age has created when it comes to all that information we're churning out: inequitable distribution and indecipherable quality. Both of these properties produce a structure where economic and political systems can be "gamed" on an unprecedented scale, and they create a system where all the incentives for accurate information are far outweighed by the incentives to lay a finger on the scales.
The professional, clear-minded journalist working for an organization free of institutional bias may have existed somewhere at sometime. But that's not here and it's not now. For decades, as they cut staff and transformed news programming into entertainment able to turn a clear profit, media organizations have discovered that its far more profitable to be flashy than good, far more important to be first than be accurate, and far easier to discredit your opposition than to demonstration reliability. The result is not only Fox News spending half its time telling you not to trust other sources, it's business journalists proving that, at least when it comes to the advice you get on the markets, Fox is right.
The information age hasn't freed us from the yellow journalism and profit-driven sensationalism of the past; it's only improved the graphics. Low quality information is simply cheaper to manufacture. Why pay for reporters when you can hire faces? Why look up facts when you can foist off opinion? Bad news is good news for the bottom line. Accurate and well-researched information simply can't compete with well-marketed bullshit.
And that's it. That's the real threat to our culture, or civilization, and even our species. It sounds trivial, I know. If we're not going to be taken out by supernovas or a passing black hole, how can simple budget cuts at network news form a serious threat?
It's a threat because the inability of the public to determine the quality of the information they're given leaves us unable to sort the challenges we face. We can't make good decisions, either as individuals, a nation, or a civilization. That other part of the equation several paragraphs back -- the ever-broadening stream of cheap manufactured goods -- it comes because we have an unprecedented ability to extract resources and reshape our environment. We have power, but no understanding. We've created a system where the consequences of ocean acidification are put on a plane with the predictions of Nostradamus, and the threat of global warming is given less consideration than fictional interpretations of Mesoamerican legends. The information age doesn't mean being able to order a case of Yoohoo-lite any time you want. The real information age means a boundless sea of data in which no established authority can act as an arbiter of value. Worse. It's a sea where every authority profits by pushing you away from finding safe harbor. That's a doom staring us right in the face.
Our current system is not equipped to fight it. But somewhere out there is a system that will. There's absolutely no guarantee that we will like that system.
Most of the institutions we depend on are themselves artifacts of the industrial revolution. Public education, well-regulated markets, and even representative democracy are only flimsy artifacts of a different age -- artifacts that have only begun to weather the blows of change. The British Empire played host to the first stirrings of the industrial age, but every advancement of that age saw the empire and all its familiar trappings reduced. Similarly, just because we created the microprocessor and the Internet doesn’t mean that their influence won’t cast us aside.
It won't be something as dramatic as a "paradigm shift" or as techno-spiritually satisfying as the "singularity," but things are changing. Ideas and institutions that we thought would last out ages are going to hit the wall much sooner than we expected, and what's on the other side of that wall is still impossible to say. We are still moving toward the information age, and we have no idea what it will be like when we get there.