Welcome To The Wobblies
Civilizational precipice or a brain hung-over from Twitter?
Hi everyone,
2024 is hurtling towards a close. It’s probably time to reflect on how it went for me and my goals for next year. But that can wait.
I want to instead peer into the overall vibe I am feeling.
This millennium is a runaway roller coaster, hurtling forward faster and faster. First you thought it was the Six Flags but no, it’s one of those jangly, rusty, neon-lit rides someone half heartedly threw together in the town for the circus. The tracks are lubricated by the optimism of humanity but it’s getting very squeaky as time goes by.
A bunch of passengers are screaming around me; some others are white-knuckling it, a few busily stare at the emails on their phones hoping to distract themselves from the all the rattling while a group of deranged anarchists are cackling with happiness. Many have slowly started saying a quiet prayer or two.
Welcome to the Wobblies.
Percolating online culture to offline spouse
Recently, I introduced N to the perhaps now already-dated but peculiar trend of grown-ass men sitting on long-haul flights - motionless, awake, entertainment-less, staring ahead as if the in-flight TV got possessed by Cthulu. It’s called "raw dogging a flight." Ick.
Another notch up in the collective psychosis of humanity.
‘Are you going to be raw-dogging this hospital visit?’
N asked me some days later. I had terrible flu and had to see a doctor. I was amazed that the term was now in our little private lexicon.
I took a book to the hospital.
N and I are the polar opposites in our Internet diet. I am the man who sits with his mind-mouth open, letting the firehose of Internet detritus shoot into it (sorry for the image). N, on the other hand, is an Internet hermit. You could hand count her daily interactions: Five WhatsApp groups, the occasional Goodreads review and plays NYT games. She isn’t on any social media platform (she does silently survey what’s happening in the Facebook realm every once a week).
She doesn’t know (or care) what Bluesky is or what Dark Maga means. She doesn’t know who is cancelled and who isn’t.
I percolate the occasional news, trend, or meme from the Internet wildlands into her quiet life. One of my favourite hobbies is watching these memes or ideas take their own shape in our private bubble, far from their online breeding grounds.
More importantly, I like to hear from someone who isn’t hyper online as me and get an original thought about the whole thing.
It’s invaluable because it’s crazy out there. If you’re online for a week, you’d believe:
A civil war is about to break out in the US.
India is simultaneously the best and the worst country in the world.
China is on the brink of collapse / Ready to take over the world.
AI is going to become conscious by 2025 and kill us by 2030.
World War 3 is about to break out, happening or has already happened.
[Insert any major religion or group] is under threat and needs a revolution.
Every man is tending to Incel.
N is my sanity check. And the source of funny content.
Welcome to the Wobblies.
If I wrote a book about the world, this is what I’d call this current era. Everything’s a bit wobbly. Imagine the global civilization as a top spinning surprisingly steadily for decades. It has now started to wobble quite a bit.
It started in 2016 (perhaps earlier) but most definitely in the 2010s. A few years after Facebook. Trump winning in 2016 was just another symptom, an event but not the cause.
The wobbles have been accelerating.
Speculating about the end of the world appears to be a favourite hobby of mine. I found this 2016 Medium post I had written with a suitably alarmist title: Is Our Era of Peace About To End?
The Wobblies are characterised by the following:
☄️ Climate change went rapidly from something we thought our great-grandchildren needed to worry about all of us being permanently cast in a Roland Emmerich feature film where every disaster is grander than the previous one. Mega floods, monster forest fires, weirdly hot winters, snow in the wrong places, gargantuan tornadoes and tropical rains that never stop are the norm.
🚶🏽♀️ Migration is growing rapidly. This and the increasing anti-migration rhetoric will go hand in hand, and many millions will have a hard time.
🍽️ A real food shortage crisis is happening worldwide thanks to conflicts, extreme weather and economic shocks. It is predicted to get worse.
🙏🏽The world is decidedly moving more conservative. We had several golden decades of capitalism and progressive ideals, but countries are increasingly growing more insular. A lot of people are very scared, pissed, fucked-over by capitalism.
👩🏻💻 Technology looms over us all. Techno-capitalists run the world. Grown men with deficient EQs now lobby governments, fund those in power and sway elections with a desire to completely decimate government and institutions and replace them with their versions of techno-capitalist platforms.
🙅🏼♂️ The men are increasingly radicalised from the US to India to South Korea. The average young man thinks of himself as a victim and not a beneficiary of the patriarchal world he lives in. Radicalised men equal churn and wars.
🗺️ The West doesn’t really exist. Immigrants from all countries and walks of life helped the West grow, but they’ve also radically shifted the definitions of Western society. It’s causing confusion and anxiety.
☭ Socialism is cool again in parts, and this Marxist revolution will be TikTok-ed on iPhones. It’s the new-age moral superiority cult that wants to burn it all down. This is as dystopian as a capitalist takeover.
💣 We have several incessant and destructive wars going on. Large parts of the world have taken strong positions about them, and the chance of them enveloping more of the globe is high.
📉 Countries' populations are dropping drastically. This means lowering productivity and growth, which in turn means governments start becoming more nationalistic, stoking hate and fear instead of hope and prosperity.
🤖 AI is the final spark in this powder keg. It’s starting and will continue to disrupt the economy, relationships, art, information, and innovation. A lot of scared, jobless people will be wondering what the hell happened to their life plans.
Phew!
–
Ask N, and she’ll probably just think the world is weirder now. She doesn’t carry the same alarmist vibe as me. She isn’t as eternally online as I am and is unaware of many of these ideological tugs of war (although John Oliver does a pretty good job keeping her up to date).
It makes me wonder: Is my sense of upheaval purely from being too jacked into the Matrix? Is it a mirage of the world shifting merely coming from endless scrolls and reel plays?
Or is she the ostrich with her head in the sand?
Reality is probably somewhere in between.
But does it even matter?
–
It doesn’t.
That’s the thing. I cannot influence any of the things mentioned above to any significant degree. I could have chosen to dedicate my life to any of those things and still be able to influence them just a tiny bit.
The only answer is to disconnect and go more local. Create a real-world bubble, perhaps. Every time I go local, I only see optimism and hope. Walking around a city (maybe being in Asia helps), I see growth and positive change. When I interact with people, they are often sane and nice. When I talk about silly, mundane things, I realize I have more in common with most people.
You can still have your mental model of the world which you can apply to how you live but taking a stand and fighting for big issues online serves no one but the algorithms.
I am going to find more analog things to do next year.
Consideration set (might pick one or two):
Painting
Learning to play the guitar
A new sport (not pickleball)
Getting a trainer and getting more serious with the workouts
More flaneuring
Making themed photography books
Learn to cook new things
More importantly, I want to be the ape I know I can be: move and grunt, eat fruits and veggies, itch myself to satisfaction, sit on a log amidst some trees, be annoyed by a fly and generally narrow my bubble into the now and here.
And every once in a while, be even more silly here to distract you from the burning world.
Could be Worse,
Tyag
Yes to being less digital and more analog. Also, "AI is going to become conscious by 2025"?! That's a month away.
I was chatting with a friend the other day about the persistent doomsday vibe of social media and the (frankly, what feels like performative) outrage. It's exhausting.