Ask A Genius 718: Things Suck in an Age of Marvels
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/02/11
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How come things suck in an age of Marvels?
Rick Rosner: It’s not how come; it’s that they do it. It sucks that things suck in an age of Marvels. We are nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century, which is a science fiction century. When people were writing science fiction in the 20th century they had so much amazing shit happened in the 21st century and a lot of that shit is actually in process, its happening. We’re not doing great with the exploration of space but we’ll get there eventually but really is that the super exciting thing? The exciting thing is amazing shit with information. The information processing we have that is changing everything and will just keep accelerating and that will change medicine and allow us to bring the average lifespan up to more than a century in developed countries by 2040.
All this great shit is happening but at the same time shit is shitty. America is fucked up right now and democracy hangs in the balance and democracy is under attacked in a bunch of countries and it’s as of consequence at least in part of the fucking miraculous technology we have that that allows bad actors to pump in hundreds of deranging messages a day into the minds of suckers, into the minds of gullible. Bad actors figured out over the past 50 years, as I’ve said dozens of times in our when we talk, figured out that you can go after stupid gullible people and you can manipulate the fuck out of them and turn them into a powerful political force. That’s compounded now by just pervasive and avalanches of bullshit coming over social media and right-wing news channels, so-called news and it sucks that this great 21st century full of Marvels that we could be enjoying is tainted by a not very anticipated aspect of those Marvels.
And then on top of it you have Covid which has cost the world two years. Somebody will eventually calculate how much progress was actually lost to Covid. I mean things still move forward even as we cope with a pandemic but probably not as fast as progress in air, science, or whatever has probably been slowed somewhat by the pandemic and that’s somewhat bad luck but it’s also a consequence of shitty media/social media because our shitty president was able to politicize Covid and make it much worse in America than it had to be. So anyway that’s the point of what I just said that it sucks that shit sucks in what should be a really cool science fiction-y century. We still have 78 years of the century to go so maybe we’ll get our shit together.
[Recording End]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 