Twitter is like a jousting match, but one where there are no bouts. There are no “turns”, it’s a free-for-all of attack where each response is but another jab. The crazy thing is that everyone – EVERYONE – is aware of the toxicity of social media and the perversion of engagement, everyone shouts about it, calls it out as BAD and EVIL and CORRUPTING – yet few actually back up their stance by changing their behaviour. There’s a bit of a weird analogy that has more recently abounded in societal discourse – you’re either a smart phone-guy or a flip-phone guy (or gal). The implication being that you embrace technology and it forms the very pillar of your core, or you shun it, you’re ultra-woke and proud of your lack of reliance on it, you’re FREE from the shackles of the social engagement sphere and will let everyone know of your enlightenment at any given opportunity. It’s the new VEGAN.
As with EVERYTHING in this superficially shallow world, this distinction is binary. There’s a complete lack of NUANCE, the polarisation of identity politics is so pervasive that nearly all traces of the analogue, the healthy distribution curve of stance and opinion has been raised to such a high power that the boundaries are stark and so well defined that you will cut your personality and public exterior perception if you try to cross or even approach them.
This modus operandi is inherent in nearly all aspects of our society – the inability to have reasoned debate, the REQUIREMENT to adhere 100% with a political or moral view, where even the slightest deviation from the accepted NORM kicks you out of the club and the level of ostracisation you feel is so aggressive and personally focused that it in fact has a real danger to push you fully to the other side of the identity boundary. Never before has the LEFT been so fundamentally important in feeding the RIGHT and vice versa.
Is this split – this FRACTURE – actually a portent of a stealthy apocalypse, one that takes the form of a complete societal and cultural breakdown? We are so academically focused on the physicality of decline and the finality of destruction that are we actually blinding ourselves to the very real and existential threat of an apocalypse of regression and hate? For that’s what society is turning in to, one that is defined by LOVE and HATE, or rather a totalitarian adherence to a binarisation of policies where the modal value exists purely on the extreme.
Maybe this very thing is in fact the answer to the Fermi Paradox – there are no other advanced civilisations out there as there’s a BUG deep within the source code of life itself where, when you encounter it, accelerates the entropic dance towards annihilation so exponentially that no sentient species has every survived. Is this our fate? Is it even possible to break out of this cycle of self annihilation? Only time will tell, although the current outlook is not an encouraging one.
Shout From The Void 