As Western civilization crumbles, it’s easy to forget that the errors which have ushered in a new dark age were sold to us as keys to a bright, shiny future. Progress undergirds the Death Cult’s moral myth in a manner similar to how salvation informs Christian teleology.
The Cult’s evangelists prophesied that technological advances like the microchip, the pill, and the internet, would give humanity the tools to build a post-scarcity, post-national, post-Christian world. Poverty, racial divisions, and in time, death itself, would be conquered by the march of science.
Modernism can be thought of as a grand experiment to see if science could survive cut off from the Christian metaphysic that gave rise to it. Government’s and industry’s disastrous response to what should have been a moderate public health emergency hints at the answer.
The declining state of consumer electronics and software brings the consequences of decapitating science home. Each new generation of smartphones lacks basic features and even removes previous functionality. Not that much substantive difference exists between the two kinds of phones besides price.
If any market epitomizes the false choice to which consumer tech has devolved, it’s computer operating systems. Windows users and Mac users once constituted distinct rival markets. Now, the latest version of Windows is a brazen Mac OS ripoff. Home computer users now have as many OS choices as Model T owners had color options.
The lack of variety might not be so bad if anything worked anymore. Instead, search engines spit out sponsored, censored results. Online content consumers are at the mercy of haywire algorithms whose corporate owners couldn’t fix them if they wanted to. Each new software update breaks users’ devices while increasing the extent to which they’re spied on.
Some might feel dismay at this retrogression trend. But others recognize it as an invitation to cleanse their lives of needless, even harmful, junk and embrace simplicity. Pitch the spying device in your pocket. Ditch the AAA mud genre for retro games. Go outside.
Another reason to take heart in the hastening technological decline is that the Death Cult bet all its chips on tech. Their combination of blank slate equalism and promissory idealism isn’t producing the micromanaged world they wanted. It turns out that replacing smart innovators with linear thinking diversity wasn’t the formula for a tech utopia. It was the setup for a Michael Crichton novel.
That’s not to say we’ll get off scot free. The Death Cult’s attempt at a totalitarian system will end like all their predecessors’. They’ll fail, but they’ll take millions down with them trying.
Pray. Prepare for chaos.
Mobile Suit Gundam meets Tom Clancy
