I Tire of The World

I tire of the world.

I think it has been an emotion that has been seething within me for the past decade or so. Before I launch into my rant on why I tire of the world, let me preface it with this comment first:

I know that some of the struggles that I am going to mention here are real to the people who are involved, I acknowledge that your struggle exists. But me talking about my own struggles does not invalidate your struggles---if you cannot see that and have a strong weird sense of a ``if you are not with me you are therefore against me' mentality, then I recommend you go away and read something else somewhere and leave me alone.

With that out of the way, here we go.

The key problem in the world today is two-fold:

1. Humanity has gotten more sectarian in nature; and
2. Hyperconnectedness has caused massive ``echo chambers'' that limit horizons, further contributing to the vicious cycle.

That humanity as a whole is sectarian should not be a surprise to anyone who is used to looking at human history. There were only three main situations where such overt discrimination were set aside among individual groups of people:

1. Existential threat from a third group of people who could be stopped/annihilated only through an alliance of the two (or more) groups of people who were formally discriminative of each other;
2. Commerce in the form of trade with excess resources a group has for resources that the group needs;
3. Hegemonic superiority of the other group either through sheer numbers or the use of technological/economical power.

The first of the lot can be seen through the shifting alliances among the different tribes/nations/countries, the second through the rise of industrialisation and globalisation in the late nineteenth century, and the last more prominently after the second world war.

I claim that humanity has gotten more sectarian now because those three situations are getting quickly ignored by people as being applicable. There are few ``enemies of the world/humanity'' than in the past, making people feel safer to be isolated with their in-groups instead of continuously engaging with their out-groups to maintain their existence; many developed countries have been developed for so long that they have forgotten the long supply chains that bind them to the development of the rest of the world, believing that if they had gone into isolationism (or nativism, to use the trending term now), they would come out ahead; many developed or nearly-developed countries are also benefitting from the world-scale ease of sharing of knowledge through the Internet that they start believing that any previously thought of hegemonic superiority of some other group's technological/economical power is no longer at play now, and with that, start embarking on a journey of overtly challenging the former hegemon.

Are those three observations that many people make correct? Personally, I don't think so. While Heinlein might say that only insects specialise, the fact is that our modern societies have an over reliance of technology-based goods and services that was woven tightly together for over two hundred years. And by ``technology-based goods'', I'm not even talking about computer/information technology, but am referring to things as fundamental as agriculture, and tool manufacturing. Every piece of technology has a supply chain of related technologies behind them, and there are many of these just to support the modern human. Even in the case of developing countries where these things don't seem relevant, they will need basic food, power, shelter, and information infrastructures just so that they can advance into larger and larger groups.

And yes, that is my criteria for advancement of humanity. That the better we are at cooperating, the higher the level of progress. Because it is within the concept of massive cooperation that we can build upon each other's work to achieve higher levels of effectiveness in improving our lives. And life improvement means to do more ``work'' with less ``effort'' so that we can really start living our lives beyond that of mere work.

But back to the point. I think that we are at a very dangerous crossroads for humanity in general, with these errorneous judgements on our supposed individual [group's] strengths and the apparent lack of weaknesses. And it is not being helped by the second big factor, which is the reinforcement of global-scale echo chambers via hyperconnectedness.

To claim that hyperconnectedness creates and maintains global-scale echo chambers isn't wholly correct. There are three parts of this story:

1. Hyperconnectedness increases fatigue and dilution of interest;
2. To combat such fatigue and interest dilution, people drift more towards what they know instead of exploring;
3. Companies that provide such hyperconnectedness further encourage people to gather into fewer ``niched'' groups to maintain minimal [high] levels of activity to stay relevant [and improve potential revenue through advertising].

Part one is something to do with human nature and not the actual communication/information network topology. It takes a certain type of nature to be willing to explore outside of one's comfort zone---this is true even in circumstances like these where there is no need to physically put oneself in danger. One can be quite anonymous on the 'net; usually there is no need to be ``registered'' just to read what others have to say, and it used to be the case where interactions could be relatively pseudonymous, before the concept of the ``social media'' came into play. With the rise of ``social media'', it takes even less effort to head out into the wild ``digital unknown'' to look around.

The unfortunate thing that has been demonstrated over the past decade is that even with a lot of things out there in the Internet, people are still more comfortable with things that they know. For example, maybe I discovered something cool about arbology, but in the end, I am more likely to spend time interacting/reading stuff on computer science than that. Now replace these neutral ``knowledge'' materials with something more socio-political, and we'll start to get the start of the echo chambers that we are seeing now.

Multiply that by the ``platform providers'' who discreetly set up algorithms that show more of the same to people who use their platform and rely on it to provide the ``latest news from things they are interested in'', we get the echo chamber of today.

That's bad because it is a regression from the tolerance that had formed in the Age of Exploration. Then we have irresponsible ``leaders'' who use these echo chambers to further their own agenda through all the echoing and make tolerance itself a bad word.

And then we get the increase in the sectarian nature of humanity all over again.

If you think I'm just talking about the US now, you're not quite right. It is not just the US right now. It is almost impossible these days to do anything without triggering off the self-righteous ``my-way-or-the-highway'' types. There is 2×2 comic of two people and a donkey, and a whole bunch of third party criticisms on whatever the people were doing with the donkey (it can be easily found with the terms I give).

If I write a novel, someone will say ``this is a cis-male written piece of novel---it is too anthro-centric and does not explore the non-binary nature of gender issues''. If I write a piece of music for the flute, someone can say ``this is cultural misappropriation---as a Chinese ethnic person, he should not be misappropriating European culture as it is disrespectful''. If I write a social commentary with evidence backing it up, someone will add ``his points cannot be taken to be valid because he is not intersectional with the group he is talking about---he needs to check his majority privilege as only those who are in the in-group are allowed to provide commentary''.

The previous paragraph is hypothetical for me personally---I'm not high profile nor controversial enough to be a target of such things. But seeing post after post, day after day of people saying things of that nature is draining on my so-called ``faith in humanity''.

``But MT,'' you might say, ``that ain't the whole world.'' And you'd be right, that ain't the whole world. However, perception can be reality some times, and that's what's getting me down.

And that, my friends, is why I turned to scripture and to God. This world isn't good enough for me any more---not that it was to begin with. And I've been shown a different way.