Tech has given voice to anyone who can log into venues like Twitter, Facebook, or even the Flyer website — myself a case in point. This is where the egalitarian rubber hits the road, whether it’s Arab Spring, the January D.C. insurrection, any number of Kardashians, Greta Thunberg, Donald Trump — or a window curtain brushing over a keyboard.
Once upon a time (by cracky) one had to pass an editor’s desk and the printer’s mama to have an opinion published. Now with a keystroke, your opinion and anyone else’s is sent to infinite outlets to be read by infinite people. The D.C. insurrectionists may be of no more worth than lunchtime porn, but if people are logging in multiple times a day to understand their imagined body politic, then follow the money. Somebody is.
Christopher Elwell | Dreamstime.com
But are all citizens in a free society due equal attention, or at least the right to not be blocked from expressing their opinion? Why don’t we want to know what the guy sitting next to us in traffic is thinking? In the information age, there’s a profit both in cacophony and control. Social media — providing news, opinion, porn, and ads — gave a knee to the head of an already down newspaper business, once an agreed-upon source of information to most of the population, a standard such as it was, a template for debate-like interactions. But who works as a town crier anymore? Today, it’s like every window along the loosened cobblestone streets is opened at once and we are showered with points of view and can no more address one drop of rain as the next. (That’s where all those thumbs up icons come in handy.)
We had provocative pamphlets in the past, but only so much pocket space to contain the news, coupons, notes to self, and things we were too ashamed to drop on the public sidewalk. Oddly enough today, even with a handy delete button, we still keep way more of that shit than we should.
Why do we need to know what everyone else is thinking? Not just opposing opinions (seldom actually) but endless posts agreeing with us, opinions formed in history classes taught by football coaches and their assistants, or by advance-degreed teachers rooted to their 20-year-old dissertations, or by a link that has to be true because it was on that website I like. That guy paused in traffic next to us may be thinking about something really boring to almost any online community, and six months later we could meet at the snack machine at a rest stop and maybe share a Mountain Dew moment.
To this old man, opinion has outpaced thought and we reap the whirlwind. I take no personal blame for this, and profit to a degree, but I had hoped things would hang together longer, at least till I die. I might let myself think that the recent Capitol riots are a harbinger and not the storm, but that would depress the hell out of me. If I were dumber and younger, I might riot myself. So I have given some thought as to how all us pre-techies can survive such rapid change.
My first instinct is to shut the fuck up and lay low. Drive an old truck, live in the country, pay cash at the grocery. Hell, I’ve never felt calmer being able to go out in public wearing a mask and shades. So it’s not all bad news. We could ensconce into our own particular holler, stay offline, and never have to talk to the Hatfields or the McCoys or anyone else.
Or perhaps we can just agree that all this is not going to get any better. There is no YouTube channel to instruct us on how to stem or fix this glut of information. The barbarians are on either side of the gate now, each and every one with a homepage sharing supportive links — some motivated by murders by the state; others by the state forcing them to wear masks. They have met at the gate’s collapse and unwillingly, inevitably mingle. Now what? Like the internet, we may evolve into a species of our worst qualities.
Art Boone lives in Mississippi and has opinions.