The Big Chill, Part II

Iceberg psyches and end games. Teen suicide, anxiety, depression, and loss. The psychology and epistemology of a fracturing world.

teen on the internet anxiety

Hi Everyone,

In the first post in this series, “The Big Chill,” I argued that we’re at the end of a technological revolution that began about fifty years ago. At least one reader offered a different “big bang” date, but no one suggested the too frequent refrain online today, that we’ve just kicked off a new revolution, with foundational models and sure to come scientific breakthroughs. Nope. We’re not on a rocketship of progress, but rather maturing out into the final phases of tech that’s now decades old. Large language models are a wondrous innovation in the field of AI, but they too should be seen in terms of the bigger picture of technology. A chill of one sort or another is inescapable at this point, because we’re at the end of something, not the beginning. In the wide angle shot, we’re wrapping things up. What’s next isn’t what we see around us. It’s something we can’t yet see.

I hope you find this post helpful, and I hope it inspires thought. I’m making this post paid as I did the last, as it represents considerable effort and time on my part. Please consider a paid subscription! I want to keep this going, and I’m grateful for the support I receive. Now, let’s continue….

In “The Big Chill,” I also argued that our worldview has devolved into an absurdity. “Dataism” is an intellectually bankrupt metaphysics that’s more of a capitulation to digital technology and Big Tech than a thoughtful take on us and the world around us. Reductionism isn’t anything new. True. The ancient Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius thought everything was material and that the “uncuttables” (technically Democritus’s term) “swerved” every now and then, imbuing the universe with free will and change. That seems about as likely—actually, more likely given quantum mechanics—then our defacto crappy “dataism.” In thousands of years of thinking, that’s the best we’ve got? Aye.

Not to be too harsh, but here’s an accusation: I think we’re a confused, self-obsessed, and conformist bunch these days (yes, we’ve always been that, but I think we’re more that today). For one, we’re always trumpeting “exponential change” everywhere, apparently still inspired by Moore’s Law (news flash: it’s over), while the web has been “maturing” into a bureaucratic corporatism we call Big Tech—meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And innovation has been slowing for years now, ask anyone still working on self-driving cars. (The media dropped the self-driving car revolution faster than Jussie Smollett. At least Elon Musk had the cojones to admit—where else, on Twitter—that “generalized self-driving is a hard problem. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect.” And his peroration: “Nothing has more degrees of freedom than reality.”) The prestigious scientific publication Nature now insists that patents are becoming “less disruptive.” That’s a red flag. It’s saying, in effect, that we’re collectively less visionary today. (I’ve never been a fan of patents, though I have filed two separate applications—and let them lapse.) Nature found that “progress is slowing in several major fields.” That’s a harbinger of shallow and ineffective innovation, as experts like the Canadian scientist and professor emeritus Vaclav Smil have also documented. Smil’s work should be required reading for—at least—business school undergrads and MBA students. Silicon Valley’s creative class should read him as well.

Maybe we have a flying car or a mission to mars coming before the heat death of the universe, but there’s scant evidence of it in our digital profit-seeking bullshitting world today. The irony today is that the dominant media narrative is all about exponential change and disruption, while our actual circumstances are more like—I want to say something crude here, it ends with “bating.”

To be sure, our aging tech goliath did produce an exponential event: ChatGPT notched 100 million users in the first two months of its release in November 2022, making it the fastest growing internet application ever. That’s impressive. It is. Meanwhile, the rest of the move-fast-and-break-things technology landscape is maturing out and getting, well, old. TikTok is probably the most notable social media “innovation” recently, but it too is getting long in the tooth by web standards—it’s nearly a decade old itself. We’re already at the edges of the chill, and we’re headed for more.

These are the hollow men…

It’s funny for me to say this, I suppose, but today doesn’t seem to be the most interesting or inspiring time to be alive. I’m not pining for bell bottoms and disco, or Reaganomics and drug wars, Friends or Seinfeld or even Grunge (poor, poor Seattle, a shell of its former self. I was there in the 1990s, and it was on fire with new music and new ideas. Where did you go, Seattle?). Zuckerberg’s "it wasn’t me man” testimony to senators on Capitol Hill recently reminded me that dataism and worries about innovation drying up ain’t the whole of it. We’re also unhappy, and distrustful. (We’re probably also killing democracy.) On to the “The Big Chill, Part II.”