At the end of the 20th century, celebrated Colombian writer Ga briel Garcia Marquez made a seminal observation: “Expect nothing from the 21st century; it is the 21st century that expects everything from us.” Marquez was right. The new century promised glorious sunrise, major advances in human civilisation, innovations, and societal progress from the physical to the abstract, and from the digital to the tangible.
We are in the third decadal journey of the 21st century. With degeneration all around, one doesn’t have even a faint hope in what Victor Hugo believed: “even the darkest night will end, and the sun will rise.” Today, science is slogging, technology is straying into the realm of the unknown and society is in retreat. Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan believes that we are living in a profoundly anti-science moment.
The age of theory is drawing to its end. We have entered a phase of “post-theory science.” How can science flourish when denial, distraction, accusation and lies are part of the new game in town? Doubt is essential for science. We are in the belly of the beast. Technology is helping the believers of neo-science to perpetuate their myths. Thanks to the ‘smartphonification’ of life, we now have more memories in our pockets and less in our heads. We have entered a phase of unreason. We may not have entered the age of anti-Enlightenment. But we see the core values of the Enlightenment fading. Critical thinking, empirical rigour and a spirit of debate and discussion are losing ground. Today, secular values are ridiculed.
The modern world, as Jurgen Habermas had said was “distinguished from the old by the fact that it opened itself to the future.” With barbarians at the gate, modernity has become shambolic. Democracy is on decline. In a large number of countries, there has been a merger of the nation with the state in which the citizen has become a glorified employee. We are moving towards a dystopian future. A tiny tech elite is operating the machinery of civilisation while the rest is becoming a mute spectator. Internet has given us a wealth of information but the majority suffers from information poverty. Collapse of public debate is the result of digital distraction.
As an analyst argues, instead of following Rene Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”, we tend to adhere to “someone else thinks for me, therefore he/she is.” Digitisation has transformed governance in India. We are now the third largest digitised country in the world behind US and China. But India’s problems lie elsewhere. Tagore’s rebuke remains relevant today. He said that the imposing “tower of misery” which rests in the “heart of India” has its sole foundation “in the absence of education.” Humanity faces major challenges. Yuval Noah Harari talks of 21 lessons that we must wrestle with including nuclear war, climate challenge and technological-biological disruption.
He also poses the question how we stay relevant in an AIdriven world. Big data is threatening the foundations of liberty and privacy. Harari also foresees “digital dictatorships” where governments track and control people using AI, stopping dissent. The Dark Age began with barbarians driving Roman civilisation from Europe. The label “Dark Ages” was more a figure of speech than a fair judgement, which showed a desire to distance from the medieval past and was repeated over time until it became part of public thinking. Today, the age of reason is in danger of shifting backwards.
The deluge of information is making us anything but smarter. It is ushering us into a new Dark Age of superficiality and narcissism. Universities are under attack. Our romance with books has faded. With so much stuff on the internet, we are destined to become a species of technological scavenging. The 21st century is fast becoming a “New Dark Age.” Canadian author George Case describes the new dark age as “the age of cacophonous technology, of information overload, of toxic clamour and attention-fuelled barbarism.” We are losing trust in science but there is a growing trust in tech emperors. It is a new romantics wonder! Big tech Czars have their own agendas.
The new plutocrats of Silicon Valley are like predatory wolves. Innovation is not always progressive. It is often at the service of the plutocrats. Another worry is the geopolitics of big tech. High tech has come to signify high politics, too. Today, digital and tech advancements are geopolitical issues of the highest order. As British writer James Bridle writes, “We know more and more about the world, while being less and less able to do anything about it.” Let us not allow technology to magically fix everything. Social media and news cycles have taken away our ability to reflect and think deeply about what is actually happening.
Through the attention economy, our mind is being fracked. In an attention economy, our attention is constantly demanded. In fact, our attention itself has become a commodity. Attention, not money, is the fuel of politics. In this economy, the worst victims are the Gen-Zers who face what American journalist David Brooks calls “rejection after rejection.” Our leaders get, demand and control our attention. Both politics and commerce now grab and seduce our attention. If our attention is a transaction in the world’s most valuable currency, our political leaders keep us distracted from real problems and undermine our worldviews and our understanding of the world and politics. Politics itself has become a spectacle. We have so much access to information and yet we are getting impoverished.
The thuggish financial systems, algorithms of all kinds, AI, state secrecy and mass surveillance regimes darken our horizons. Data may be new oil for the rich and the powerful, citizens are blind and deaf in the middle of a freeway. Who benefits when we remain glued to our screens, our every scroll, click, like and share? We are facing what Bridle calls “a cloud of the unknown”? A New Dark Age has dawned. And it has its own barbarians ~ big tech plutocrats, the new robber barons.
(The writer comments on global affairs)