Opinon/Editorial
OUR DEPARTURE FROM CIVIL DISCOURSE
Yes, I’m writing about the change in our social communications that all of us are experiencing these days. Personal assignment of responsibility is what I’m writing about. Not long ago, although it seems like longer than it really is, the Internet was born, along with smart cell phones smart televisions and dumber humans. In response to these inventions, all touted to improve human communications, we humans have been and are still headed in the opposite direction.
I mentioned looking at my Prime video feed this morning and wondered aloud about how the choices for streaming all showed photos of old guys with guns. In my family the subject of that portrayal by Amazon was instantly converted to the subject of me. The analytics and bots embedded in Prime’s selection for what I might want to see were discussed as being based upon the shows I watch. “Why do you watch such trash?” became the discussion. At work yesterday I commented upon some silver dollars we’d thrown into a clear area of our nearby lake. The bottom growth was everywhere but the silver coins were pristine because the plants would not grow on them. That discussion with co-workers quickly became one of my inabilities to see properly or understand what the bottom growth might or might be doing because of my lack of credentials in that area. Our communications devices have done this to us. Everyone has begun to assume that the world around us is only about us and that every one of us has an opinion that is just as valid, or more so, than everyone else’s, fact-checked by anonymous machines. And, and this is a big ‘and,’ everything I or you observe and comment upon is not necessarily wrong!
The Internet is not always right, it just appears so. Cell phone calls are not more important than personal discussion between real live humans talking to one another. They are less so, almost invariably. The world around us is not my fault and my flaws do not need to be trotted out by those around me because of one phrase I heard spoken in a coffee shop years ago and then wrote into a Hollywood show script very successfully: “You can be right, and you can be alone.” What we’re doing, in being held accountable for everything by nearly everyone around us all the time, since we can’t hurt friends and family back for such seemingly small transgressions, is withdrawing. We are pulling away from one another to suffer less pain and hurt because of this new ‘anything goes’ type of ‘open’ discussion.
On a T.V. news show the other day the anchors were all agog over how artificial intelligence is finally going to be able to tell when humans are lying. Everyone seemed to think that this development would be wonderful. As an anthropologist of some education, training, teaching and note wants to inform you: if this invention becomes available then it will cause the total destruction of human life as we have come to know it in no time at all. Deception is vital to our social existence. The social withdrawal I am writing about, and nobody is talking about, is taking place because people are not lying to each other as much as they used to. They are speaking up and telling ‘truths’ to and about other people…but not themselves, instead of either going along with some comment or action they know to be wrong (a form of passive lying). We will all end up alone if deceptive communication disappears. Questions lied about all the time will be answered truthfully; things like; “How’s my hair look?” “Do you think I’m good looking?” “Do you care about me or like me?” And so on.
The birth rate is sinking at a frightening rate in developed countries because fewer people are having sex and babies. Duh! As we pull away from one another to keep from being insulted, hurt, ignored or worse, the population will continue to decline in developed nations. The educated intellect of the world will plummet, as the birth rates in poor areas will remain stable or increase. Global warming isn’t even close as a danger to our survival. Our communications are going to kill us long before the weather. There also appears to be no way to stop this slide toward a deep dark waiting sea of loneliness, heartbreak, and expiration. There will be no war, no killing or any of that. We’ll just slowly go away to the point where a remnant of humanity remains, technologically deprived, educational bereft, and mostly silent…very similar to the humans portrayed in the Planet of the Apes series of movies.
We can be right, and we can be alone.
