Over the past several weeks, I have been churning out nightmarish post after nightmarish post, and this week I was beginning to wonder about what’s going on — as in: I seem to be having a lot of nightmares on my mind.
I have time and again made comparisons between our own period of information revolution to another period of information revolution — namely Gutenberg’s printing press with movable type. Before Gutenberg’s revolution, similar advances in information technology seem to have been much more gradual. For example, we cannot identify individual years or even something as broad as lifetimes in which natural language or writing systems were invented — at least not as far as I know.
While Gutenberg is attributed with his invention, I bet it did not exactly happen overnight either. Besides, the revolution which followed took not only years or decades, but rather centuries. Note that literacy was still not widespread during the French Revolution. Note also that during the intervening centuries there was actually a lot of war and bloodshed. The establishment powers were actually quite unwilling to relinquish their strangleholds on the people they ruled and governed and lorded over. Large numbers were killed, many in acts of cruel and unusual torture.
Today, we like to think that those days are long gone, as if our so-called “modern” era is no longer plagued with such barbarism and the bygone beliefs which are now virtually impossible.
But that is of course quite certainly not true. If humans were able to learn from history (rather than to repeat it), then we ought to expect that similar hellish times are coming soon … insofar as the establishment powers of today have even more formidable might to annihilate new uprisings in the bud, before they are even able to take hold and begin to grow. What is more: although all establishment powers build on strong foundations, today’s establishment powers have repeatedly evidenced a willingness to liberally cement these powers, and anything or anyone who might get in their way are simply paved over as small specks of collateral damage.
Time and again I find myself vacillating between a hopeful optimism that humanity might have progressed somewhat and a nightmarish pessimistic hunch that the whole world could devolve into widespread death and destruction at the drop of a hat.
The weird and eerie thing about nightmares is that there seems to be no guarding against them. We can neither recognize that they are merely figments of the imagination, nor can we gauge the horrors they lead to before we arrive back in the real world — awoken with a realization that it was all false and fake news, just a bad dream, and we can simply and easily shake it off, completely unscathed.
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