The American zeitgeist is obsessed with decline and a curious sense of ennui. On the progressive left there is the rolling mortal threat of inequality and the destruction of the middle class. Wages don’t keep up with inflation or, more broadly, the cost of living. On the new MAGA right there is an unfocused rage that builds in part on the angst of hollowed-out rural and post-industrial communities, and then in part on undocumented immigrants as scapegoats and symbolic of lefty lawlessness, and again in part as a tirade against wealthy, coastal elites who control the media, universities, and have pushed the Overton window in incremental lurches towards inclusiveness. The populism is mostly half-baked, certainly, and exploited by cynical conservatives for undermining social support while bolstering commercial interests and reducing taxes for the well-to-do. But half-baked is enough for a sensibility; things fully realized are only afterthoughts.
There are other chthonic rumblings and imputations that filter up. The rise of China’s industrial, military, and scientific power is a growing shadow that some see threatening to engulf the world in its umbra. And with it comes the fear of slowing technological might, despite the domination of the recent technological present by the United States. We might be left behind like unhoused, opioid-addicted, modern peasants. The crumbling of the cities would be just punishment even if their loss only cascades the problems of the heartland.
And so as the future keeps getting harder, we turn to mad kings who promise radical change in the face of hard problems. The change can’t possibly be realized, so it is better to just pretend that there are solutions. Annex Greenland, rename the Gulf of Mexico, incorporate Canada, occupy Panama, reach for Mars, acquire territory, but all the while cocooned by the complex institutional and international realities that mean that acting aggressively and alone is now untenable. Systems of control prevent greatness.
The future keeps getting harder.
Even scientific discovery seems only incremental now. Where is the singular mind of Einstein predicting the atomic bomb or the world-changing Watt who powered all of industrialization? The internet and computers and social media changed only one thing: us. We want more, we feel unmoored, we envy the impossible life unrestrained by all these challenges and obstacles.
I can argue against all of this, and easily. Curing cancer is a galaxy of incremental discoveries and inventions, from the BRCA genes to mRNA training for defeating carcinomas. Survival rates have been steadily rising but it has been slow and hard. That’s the norm with complex problems. The future only looks hard because we compare it to an idealized past. I wrote my master’s thesis thirty years ago on neural networks that were already thirty years old or more at that point. There were limited applications for them during those days. Recurrent networks were research projects from the 1980s, as well. And only now have large-scale, deep learning networks started to bear impactful fruit in self-driving cars, image generation, and helping college kids cheat on essays.
Can we fight our urges for pat solutions to hard problems? Can we overcome this desire to no longer struggle and be like the idealized influencers in the social media multiverse? We might try to be more humble, like the happy Nordic people. We might invent systems that give individuals greater insight and control of their futures using modern technologies as a starting point. We might try to invent a new religious or spiritual system that diverts and refines the perspectives of people. We might lean into old religious traditions that invoke humility and respect. But this grumbling, angry activism about these hard futures is itself a hard problem that has no pat solutions.
Edits and fixes! Apologies to subscribers who got a partially cooked version by accident. Resend is not an option with Jetpack Social.