Is it just me or is anyone else noticing that time is moving faster?
I’ve heard it said that as you get older the time seems to accelerate, whereas when you are a child time moves slow.
Time Moves Slow by BadBadNotGood
I’m not actually meaning that. What I mean is that the cacophony of news, disasters, severe f*ck ups by different people in power doing silly things in brazen view of the general public takes our time.
Another thing that makes our time accelerate and disappear is AI.
I’m using the collective ‘we’ here, but I have no idea if it’s a shared experience to be honest. However on a human-to-human basis of shared humanity I really hope that this is the case. Just knowing that others feel this same feeling is deeply comforting to me.
Along with AI is the violent crab-fight by various technology barons wrenching people’s autonomy away from them forcing them to watch inane content instead of understanding the true gravity of what is occuring. This happens incrementally and slowly but it is happening. An erosion of our rights to privacy and autonomy, to dignity without the prying eyes of omnipotent surveillance.
They tell us it is for our own good to ‘catch the bad guys’ but once the genie is out of the bottle there is no returning to an earlier time where you could browse the internet without age verification, or to cash transactions without the knowledge of authorities.
Why is that important and what have you got to hide? they would ask.
Nothing, but that’s entirely besides the point because all people living on this planet deserve dignity and dignity means privacy.
Sometimes in quiet moments I have a surreal and overwhelming sense of uncertainty, unmoored like I’m walking underneath of the ocean.
I have a peaceful life filled with activities I enjoy, work and a lot of laughter and sometimes even adventures and travel.
I can pinpoint my malaise and worry to the state of our world.
The general mainstream trajectory (if one chose such a route through life) in western countries at least was: birth, youth, teenagehood, young adulthood, seeking a partner, committing to that partner, growing one’s career in parallel, buying a property, having some children with said partner, growing older, getting grandchildren. Seeing these successive generations go out and make something of themselves and then dying. The trajectory even for the most mainstream of people is no longer set in stone.
However it seems that today’s world is hostile even to the most mainstream of dreams. Housing and mortgages are unaffordable for most people. Likewise the cost of raising children is prohibitively expensive. The economic prospects for those hypothetical children would not be the same as our own. It is highly likely they would never work due to AI and would therefore be a lot poorer than we are. The world has finite resources that we are burning through quickly and it may be the case that the Halcyon days of plentiful food and water and access to whatever products or services one might need may be coming to an end too.
If it feels like we are on the precipice of a a cyberpunk reality where technology companies are taking over our world and removing our rights to a free and open internet, the right to having our own private lives without knowledge of the state or surveillance companies, then perhaps that’s because this is actually the case.
Sorry for the doomer dump but these are the things that sometimes keep me awake at night. Sometimes as I go off to sleep I think of these things and I solemnly promise myself I’ll get up and write a post about it the next day. Today I actually did.
As for us, PB and I – We chose the road less travelled of being happy together and childfree. We able to live and work on two different continents but it still doesn’t make our world less disconcerting. Even being mobile, agile and skilled in the old world doesn’t guarantee you will be able to survive in the new world.
What that new world looks like is anybody’s guess right now – which is why it’s so worrying. If the might of technology and power manages to silence the rights of billions of people with very little resistance then I’m sorry but we are all so f*cked.
I wish I could organise and rally together people to resist (as I am quite adept at doing activism) but I am myself subject to the same restrictions as others – needing to work, needing to cook, clean and maintain my home, needing to take care of others I love.
Currently as it stands, only the most skilled people who work in technology get to stay employed, everyone else – juniors and interns are no longer employed. Same goes for marketing, graphic design, writing, conveyancing, legal advice, accounting, book-keeping, stockbroking. A lot of white collar professional jobs are on the edge of being gone forever.
I guess if I lose my job permanently I will have a lot more time on my hands to organise and resist.
I wonder if anybody else thinks about all of this, or other flavours and shades of this? I’m not sure what the answer is but it feels much better to let that out!
