What is the measure of a culture nearly drowned in a flood of information they created themselves?
Déluge: a flood.
Après le déluge: a transformation.
It seems to have happened while nobody was looking. The irony, of course, is that everybody was looking. We were all in the middle of it. We were all so swept up in the flood that we didn’t even see it happening. It sent us all tumbling downstream like felled branches caught in rapids, like fallen leaves churned in the waves. In fact, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we were all the progenitors of the flood in the first place.
Sometime in the recent past, society’s collective consciosness transformed from shared conversations that lingered in the air of the public square to ceaseless background chatter about stuff that nobody much remembers past lunch. To be clear, life always has a constant background soundtrack. There are always cognitive encroachments about the dishwasher needing to be repaired, the schools needing to be repaired, our bridges, our healthcare, our politics—all needing to be repaired. There are also less exasperating background vibrations: remarks about a lovely bloom of flowers planted around the mailbox, clear skies, lovers’ sighs, and babies’ cries. From a wider perspective, outside the bounds of our own experiences, the cultural background describes everything you’re not doing at this very moment, which means it changes like a kaleidoscope as you turn the wheel of your day. This is true for all societies, all the time. Since the earliest gatherings of proto-humans on the savannah there have always been stories that influence our lives, even if they all do not directly involve our lives.
In the 1980s a new trickle suggested something about to change. Satellite transmissions carrying twenty-four hour cable stations ushered in voices we might never have encountered before. Those new voices were still being selected by large corporate gatekeepers, so those voices were still carefully selected for relatively homogeneity. Considering that those new broadcast outlets all represented big-ticket enterprises, their messages and their spokespersons were heavily sanded down to blunt most of the sharp edges, but the new trickle nonetheless delivered fresh perspectives to the mainstream conversation. Even heavily scrutinized and sanitized, new voices emerged, and as a result it’s wasn’t random coincidence that a completely new world of print publications suddenly found encouraging ground in which to sprout. (People read things on paper back then.) Many flourished, with nascent audiences discovering new niches where they found kinship.
In the 1990s that initial trickle rapidly swelled into a stream, then a river, then a torrent. The World Wide Web and the ubiquitous rise of personal computers delivered words and pixels, and corporate watchdogs began to lose their stranglehold on distribution. That’s not to say that everything everyone distributed online was worth consuming. (Seriously.) But seemingly overnight, we all became critics and we all became sophisticated consumers. As the saying goes, information wants to be free, and free information means an expansion of ideas. Civil rights bloomed for a minute at least, economic opportunities boomed, and the possibility that an ordinary person might actually carry a battery powered telephone in his or her own shoulder bag seemed like something aspirational.
Everyone got laptops. Everyone replaced their shoulder bags with backpacks. Everyone logged on. Then, as if we had crossed a collective threshold, the dam burst. In just a few short years, we all discovered the secret potential of those phones in our backpacks, then our pockets, then our hands. They didn’t just make phone calls. They didn’t just write emails. They did everything.
And then we started doing everything.
And then we started doing everything all the time.
When a dam bursts, its formerly confined reservoir rushes forward without regulation. The flood crashes into whatever it meets, an onrushing mass of water and accumulated debris, unable to be denied.
It was much the same with the information revolution. All of that sudden power did not confer equivalently sudden aesthetic or philosophical wisdom. Like a lottery winner who use her new financial powers only to spend her days buying dumb stuff and sitting on the couch (albeit a new, snazzy couch), we binged. The number one thing we collectively did with our Promethean information powers was unhinge our jaws and try to swallow as much newly emerging social media as possible—voraciously, absent-mindedly, relentlessly. We became boa constrictors incapacitated by trying to swallow not simply a goat, but an elephant.
The deluge swept through town and we hardly even noticed, because we were too busy scrolling, too busy being swept along in the torrent of our own making. Soon the common cultural touch points of our recent past — books, movies, music, major current events both good and bad—disappeared into endless slack-jawed scrolling for short-lived hits of dopamine. Meme? Move on. New meme? Move on. Really cool or funny meme? Maybe share, then move on. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
People can hardly even watch a movie these days without a second screen in their hands, and it’s not as if the content on their second screens actually matters very much. Considering that even bright, highly motivated students are now seemingly incapable of reading a book, how could we possibly expect that collective culture might share a common conversation, serious or otherwise. It’s as if we were all suddenly too busy to pay anything much attention because we had serious scrolling, heart-ing, thumbs-upping to do. Cultural fragmentation overwhelmed society, a deluge we have unleashed upon ourselves. We’re lost at sea, and we’ve forgotten that we even used to enjoy the feel of grass beneath our feet. What’s more, but it doesn’t appear as if this is a flood that’s about to end any time soon. The dam has given way. The valley lays submerged deep beneath the surface of muddy waters roiling above.
It’s not over. Beware. If you’re thinking of taking a row boat out onto the water’s surface of that flooded valley, determined to cling to the book you’re writing, your movie you’re making, your big idea, and you’re determined to go see if you can find someone—anyone—similarly inclined on the distant shore who wants to talk about what you’re doing doing, check over your shoulder. See that? Beyond the wreckage of the information spillway, where the dam burst and the cacophonous flood rushed in, a larger wall looms. The difference with this wall is that it’s holding back the entirety of an ocean, and the tide is starting to slosh over the top.
This wall is the last revetment of cultural conversation. This is the last chance for us to remember how to value a shared experience or idea that lasts more than a few moments as we collectively scroll, scroll, click-click, and scroll some more. Right now, that protective sea wall looks like it’s about to give way, too.
That’s AI, and most people are greedily eyeing the endless depths like sailors lulled by lethal siren song. Artificial intelligence, the stuff of countless pieces of speculative fiction and philosophical navel gazing, is not simply threatening to burst the sea wall and flood the mainland, but has already delivered catastrophic cracks. It’s here. Weeks? Months? Your little row boat will not survive unless you find a new strategy to float on top of the waves.
Here’s mine. I fight like mad to keep my beacon lit for like minded people out on the water in their own boats. I look for those who want to lash their boats together. I’m always scanning the horizon for smart people who want to capture the flotsam of seeming detritus caught up in the swell, and repurpose it into a shared floating island of sorts. I’m determined to do more than tread water, forever scrolling, scrolling, scrolling like a duck’s feet madly paddling beneath the water’s surface, barely moving the bird above.
I cannot fight the sea. Like the flood, the sea is next, and larger than me in almost every way. But it’s not larger than me in all ways, and it’s in that narrow space where I stake my ground. I do not outsource my writing to AI. I do not outsource my photography to AI. I do not outsource my video editing to AI. Do I use AI? Of course. Do I share things on social media? Sure. You’re reading something now that you likely received through social media. My point is that I commit to not capitulating to the deluge. I commit to listening to books and music and—especially—human conversations as closely as I can. I try to commit to reading things without doing something else at the same time. I try to commit to generating my own thoughts whenever possible without synthetic suggestions served to me on a glowing screen.
The deluge may have flooded the valley, and the sea threaten to flood the world. I commit not only to remember the feel of green grass beneath my feet, but to cultivate a patch of it on whatever dry ground I can find and protect.