As Western civilization decays, it’s easy to forget that the errors that inaugurated a new dark age were sold as steps toward a shiny, sexy utopia. Progress is essential to the Death Cult’s moral myth much as salvation informs Christian teleology.
The Cult’s brand evangelists prophesied that technological advances like the microchip, the pill, and the internet would help us 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 cosmology that birthed it. The tech and medical establishments’ catastrophic response to what should have been a moderate public health emergency hints at the answer.
The decline in consumer electronics and software illustrates the consequences of divorcing science from Christian metaphysics. Each new generation of smartphones lacks basic features and even removes previous functions. 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, and get ready for chaos.
The action of Mobile Suit Gundam meets the intrigue of Tom Clancy.
