As a casual observer of the former colonies, occasionally I find myself concerned.
India: in fairly good shape, on the up industrially. China: we gave it all back, calm down. And why is my wifi network uploading so much overnight? Australia: I’m enjoying your laws on avenging trees. And then we come to … the Americas. Oh dear.
Honestly, I could do without a Starbucks on every corner in Europe, that’s always been something we’ve done rather well; shady street corners and little local coffee places with nothing much on the agenda apart from sunny, shady courtyards and a good book. No ambition, you know?
But along come Starbucks into every supermarket and fuel stop and they then push out smaller coffee places simply through methods of (1) ‘clever’ tax evasion, and (2) child labour [the coffee itself], with which other coffee places cannot compete (because they actually care about … paying people etc etc). Cool. Same with Uber; wreck your workforce, destroy the existing industry, pocket the difference. Same with Amazon; force producers to offer low prices on your platform, wreck entire economies. Convince thick people they’re ‘saving money’. Same with streaming services, same with fast food chains.
It’s annoying, I’ll be honest. The Enshittification of the internet is sadly not limited to online spaces, it seems. And now AI is used to weaponise selfishness with a new vigour previously only dreamt of in the age of the bots and slave labour.
I don’t blame America for it really, after all it was the UK who invented the internet. Sorry about that. And there are a bunch of countries who do this blind Capitalist thing; enabling the subscription model of utter, utter bullshit with no thought to the slop it creates. Car manufacturers everywhere are climbing over each other to get you to subscribe to your own bloody seat settings and radios. But as a casual observer there does seem to be a commonality of these completely unregulated monopolising brands starting in ‘Merca … it does make me wonder just how united these states must be. The 20 year-old joke of America being the new Rome is getting less and less funny, because it seems to be getting more and more accurate.
My small hope is that the path of such destruction will begin to die with the Orange One. It seems that everything he touches dies, much like Midas but with one subtle difference. The Reflecting Pool. The Whitehouse. A war with Iran?! Fucking hell. My one hope is that his intimate touching of the Republican party will similarly result in some serious rebuilding there, it’s certainly been a long time coming. (And the other party, sure sure. Lots of learning all round. Please. Please, fuck please.)
But it’s not just one incompetent’s fault. We’re all connected. Like the mycelium we ignore beneath us. And if we are connected, as I believe we are, then perhaps the Age of the Individual is slowly coming to an end, one burning meadow and poisoned drinking water source at a time.
And so, broadly, perhaps it’s not a bad thing. As CS Lewis pointed out, after all we do want to live in our kindergartens, we do want to be selfish and pampered, and the one thing that tends to pop us out and into the world of the mature life, is suffering.
So those humans (all of us) in this space who are moving from this inherited culture of individualism and into a place in which we realise how connected we are, how reliant on each other we are … are bound to have a pretty hard time of it.
🥂
