In 2029, the Internet Will Make Us Act Like Medieval Peasants
An EcoChi Vital Abstract
This article was published November 13, 2019 by Max Read, as part of New York Magazine's Future Issue, a collection of predictions about the near future as seen through the recent past.
In late August, a black-sailed ship appeared in the harbor carrying a 16-year-old visionary, a girl who had sailed from the far north across a great sea. A mass of city-dwellers and travelers, enthralled by her prophecies, gathered to welcome her. She had come to speak to the nations of Earth, to castigate us for our vanities and warn us of coming catastrophe. “There were four generations there cheering and chanting that they loved her,” the writer Dean Kissick observed. “When she came ashore, it felt messianic.” For most of my life, the paradigm for imagining the future has been dystopian science fiction: In every photo of a gleaming neon city, in every story of advanced and ruthless cyberwarfare was reflected the ultramodern, hyper-capitalist visions of cyberpunk writers like William Gibson, whose work was so influential it shaped how the early architects of the internet understood their creation. But where would a schoolgirl prophet sailing from the frozen north to confront the kings and queens of a planet fit in to the high-tech noir I had been taught to expect? Which tale of corporate cyber-intrigue contained a visionary leading a child army in marches across the globe? Thanks to ubiquitous smartphones and cellular data, the internet has developed into a kind of supernatural layer set atop everyday life, an easily accessible realm of fearsome power, feverish visions, and apocalyptic spiritual battle. The medievalist Richard Wunderli has described the world of 15th-century peasants as “enchanted” — “bounded by a mere translucent, porous barrier that led to the more powerful realm of spirits, devils, angels, and saints,” which doesn’t sound altogether different from a world in which a literally translucent barrier separates me from trolls and daemons and pop-star icons into whose Twitter mentions and Instagram comments I might make quasi-religious pilgrimage. The structure of the internet is headed toward an arrangement the cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier calls “digital feudalism,” through which the great landlords, platforms like Google and Facebook, “are becoming our feudal lords, and we are becoming their vassals.” We will provide them with the data-fruits of our browsing, in a nominal exchange for vague assurances of their protection from data-breach marauders. Paradoxically, the ephemerality — and sheer volume — of text on social media is re-creating the circumstances of a preliterate society: a world in which information is quickly forgotten and nothing can be easily looked up. All this, of course, will happen against the backdrop of disaster: a ruinous, volatile natural world, alien and unpredictable in its force and violence. Weather is becoming more difficult to forecast, and the effects of climate change have thrown into doubt the exhaustive knowledge that made the world familiar and governable. Nature appears to us in annihilating storms, raging fires, and epic floods, a literal manifestation of our earthly sins. Stuck in a preliterate fugue, ruled by simonists and nepotists, captive to feudal lords, surrounded by magic and ritual — is it any wonder we turn to a teenage visionary to save us from the coming apocalypse?
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