In the future, when archeologists mine our computer data, they will eventually run across YouTube and when they do, they’re going to come to some interesting conclusions about life in the early 21st century. Here are just a few examples. (In no particular order.)
Half of all Russian drivers had dash cameras and the other half were drunk.
The tattoo industry was basically illiterate.
Our society was obsessed with puppies, kittens and fat people falling over.
Stairs were dangerous, trampolines were dangerous but the most dangerous thing of all were stripper poles.
It was common practice to scare the crap out of people – friends, neighbours, total strangers.
Construction workers were idiots.
Every man on the planet was nailed in the crotch by a ball, a bat, a rock, a pole, a stick, a croquet mallet, a hot beverage, a flying piece of fruit or some other heavy item — at least once.
The number of skateboarders who attempted suicide was astronomical.
Grown men spent their lives looking for mistakes in movies.
Taylor Swift was part of the problem.
Kanye West had only one song.
Millions of people spent millions of hours watching men doing various activities with a variety of balls.
No one could get through an entire day without mentioning Trump.
People made all sorts of things out of used plastic bottles and old toilet rolls – but they were totally useless and looked like they were made out of used plastic bottles and old toilet rolls.
Western religion was based on celebrities and babies.
Bikinis made women stupid. Men started out that way.
People worried about zombies a lot more than they did nutrition.
Accidents, catastrophes and natural disasters were spectator sports.
Marriage proposals were publicly staged and elaborately planned.
Wedding, yearbook and family photos were objects of ridicule.
But actually:
Despite all their research, future archeologists are never going to be able to figure out who was filming all this stuff or why.
One of the problems with observing our modern world is you spend most of your life in fear. This comes from having an opinion and voicing it outside the comfy confines of your own head. It’s a truism in the 21st century that, whenever you say anything about anything, you’re going to piss off somebody. Most people get all free-speech-macho about this, but when push comes to shove, everybody knows that our society is unforgiving around unguarded opinions. More importantly, when the mob turns against you, you’re punished severely. This is why we’ll never produce a contemporary Mark Twain: the consequences of unedited thoughts, in today’s world, are just too dangerous. Far better to be momentarily safe than monumentally sorry. Thus, people with pens tend to stick to the road most travelled. Unfortunately, that road is crowded with dumbass clichés. Future anthropologists who attempt to piece together our society from the mountain of evidence we’re going to leave behind will conclude we had an unholy obsession with heterosexual white men. They are the nominated villains of our time, so naturally the record will read like a bad John Grisham novel. It’s a sorry state, I suppose, but it beats the hell out of our world according to Suzanne Collins and E. L. James!
Actually, there’s no real problem with history recording our time as the shallow end of the intellectual swimming pool. None of us are going to be around to be embarrassed by it anyway. Nor do we have to worry about future chroniclers calling us cultural cowards. They won’t be the slightest bit interested in our existence. After all, you get historical ink from speaking up, not lying down.
The thing that burns the bacon, however, is that having set the table for a vigorous and dynamic dialogue, we’re now scared skinny of the food fight it might create. Just look around: we have a mostly educated public with the information of the ages at their fingertips (literally.) We’ve cracked open the Old Boys’ Club and now have instant access to all manner of ideas from everywhere and everyone. Furthermore, we live in a free society, where (for the most part) the rule of law gives free range to these ideas. Life is good, right? Wrong! The first thing we did with this intellectual banquet was set dietary restrictions. Not to beat the metaphor to death, we’ve populated our world with so many sacred cows that, in the land of intellectual plenty, we’re starving to death.
It used to be that the only thing that governed public discourse was civility. There was decorum in our discussion. For example, we didn’t call each other names – like alt-right asshat and snowflake libtard. Perhaps certain subjects were handled delicately, but there was never any thought that they should be avoided. In fact, it was a matter of honour to shine light into the darker parts of our society – distasteful or not.
These days, those days are over. We have more conversational taboos than a tribe of Borneo headhunters. (No offence, headhunters!) There are a ton of subjects in our world that are simply no longer open for discussion. Some of them I can’t even name in these pages without hollering up a verbal lynch mob. In the past few years, this list has expanded exponentially. Soon the only subjects anyone will feel comfortable commenting on will be Donald Trump’s infidelities and the zombie apocalypse.
People like me, who know enough about history to understand what the mob is capable of, are cowards at heart. It’s one thing to go Vaclav Havel on the powers that be and strike out against censorship and oppression. After all, history shows us that eventually the pen is mightier than the sword. However, it’s quite another to stand alone in front of a self-righteous mob of social media trolls who are gathering the torches for a good old-fashioned Twitter roast.
In these troubled times, I do not fear the endless apparatus of the omnipotent state. It’s the Eagerly Offended anarchy of social media that scares the crap out of me.
Full Disclosure: I originally wrote this is 2013 but had to do some editing because things have gotten a lot worse in 5 years.
OMG, the sky is falling! Citizens, run for your lives! SAVE YOURSELVES!
This moment of panic was brought to you by Mark Zuckerberg and the good folks down at Facebook. Apparently, those fun-loving scamps in Menlo Park, CA have been slackin’ off in the I’ve-Got-Your-Back department and allowed another company, Cambridge Analytica, to harvest personal data from a bunch of unsuspecting Facebook users. Actually, “a bunch” is a bit of an understatement; the real numbers are north of 50 million. Wow! This is a serious no-no, and I have the feeling “my bad!” isn’t going to cover it. (Although it looks like Zuckerberg is giving it the good ol’ Harvard try.)
I’ll grant you that this sordid bit of business looks remarkably like some faceless corporate somebody is peeking in the bedroom window, but let’s not get all lynch mob crazy just yet. There are a few things we have to consider.
One — Unless you’ve been living on one of the moons of Uranus for the last 30 years, you know that the Internet is kinda like Santa Claus:
It sees you when you’re sleeping
It knows when you’re awake
It knows if you’ve been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake!
Cyberspace is not a vacuum, and every computer click that happens there is going somewhere. Only children and the hopelessly uniformed believe the Internet is a private party.
Two — The people who are suddenly swimming in a sea of indignation over their invaded private parts are the same ones who’ve been posting their lives away on social media. Honestly, if you’re telling the entire world everything about yourself — from your college Beer Pong championship to what you had for lunch at Olive Garden — you don’t have a lot of room to complain. There’s such a thing as due diligence.
Three — Right now, Facebook might be the Big Bogeyman (Bogeyperson?) but they’re not the only ones collecting your private information. Literally everything, in the 21st century, is selling you out to Cyberspace — from your Smart phone and its GPS tracker to that Rewards Card in your wallet that offers up your buying habits every time you swipe it. At any given moment, some Internet minion somewhere can probably pull up a profile and tell you what size underwear you’re wearing and where and when you bought it.
But finally —So what? Like it or not, we all know privacy has always been a movable feast. Anybody who grew up in a small town will tell you that. Personally, I’m not too pleased my preference in intimate apparel is getting harvested by 1,001 data management companies across the world, but my alternatives are limited. I can a) sit around and bitch about it or b) pull the plug on my digital world and walk away.
WD Fyfe 