September 3. There's a line in Revenge of the Nerds, "Would you rather live in the ascendancy of a civilization or during its decline?" I heard that in 1984 and immediately thought "decline". It just seems more interesting, and here we are. It's stranger than I could have imagined, which is cool, but the worst thing is how tight it is. Every supermarket is down to one entrance with a security guard. Every fiddly task requires a password. Rules are always being added, never removed, and it's exhausting. If a solar flare fried all the tech tomorrow, I would probably starve, but it would be such a relief.
Another bit from the book Wilding:
In 2000 the Oxford Junior Dictionary, aimed at seven-year-olds, dropped 'almonds', 'blackberry' and 'crocus' in favour of 'analogue', 'block graph' and 'celebrity'. The 2012 edition continued writing nature out of young minds, replacing 'acorn', 'buttercup' and 'conker' with 'attachment', 'blog' and 'chat room'. Instead of 'catkin', 'cauliflower', 'chestnut' and 'clover' they now have 'cut and paste', 'broadband' and 'analogue'. Heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster and panther have all been deleted.
This is a Tower of Babel moment. We are losing the ability to understand the real world, and each other, as our attention is consumed by kaleidoscopic navel-staring. I don't know how it's going to shake out, but I'm confident that the two most common predictions of the future are wrong: There will be no space colonies, and there will be no human extinction. We're going to keep muddling around on the earth for a very long time, and at some point, they'll think the internet was a myth, and they'll look at our remaining ruins and wonder about the mysterious people who made them.