My interest perked up quickly as soon as we started entering
the kind of “sci-fi dystopia” topics in this class (simulacra, The Uncanny, commercialism),
and I’ve been keeping up with those thoughts quite a bit lately. On the way to
West Monroe, I was listening to the “You Are Not So Smart” podcast, which is
about various topics “in the realm of self-delusion,” and this specific episode
was based on technology and the logical fallacies people make. Basically, as
new technologies are created, if they affect the way we deal with one another,
there become two distinct groups on the topic—people who believe that the new
technology will push everyone into a wonderful utopia where all of our current
problems are nonexistent, and people who believe it will be the end of life as
they know it. It comes down to two logical fallacies—“argumentum noventatis” (the
appeal to novelty) and “argumentum ad antiquitam” (the appeal to tradition).
The former is basically the false belief that something new is inherently
superior and the latter is the opposite, that the traditional ways of the past
are not broken and therefore do not need fixing. All of this to say that,
historically, when people claim that new technology will make everything
perfect or disastrous, they’ve generally been wrong and the effect has been
somewhere in the middle.
So where does that fit in with our doomsday view of
Facebook, commercialism, and commodification? While I’m not particularly fond
of the idea of short-form Tweet-sized messages being the ideal mode of
communication, or of the essence of a human character being boiled down to
which corporations they “like,” I can’t help but think that, generally,
doomsdays don’t happen. Theoretically, the world 20 years from now will be shallower
than it is today or than 20 years ago. It’s obviously reasonable to assume that
there will still be people with the capacity for complex thought who won’t be
constantly feeding into the new Young-Adult blockbuster hype machine. If, on
the other hand, literally all the world becomes engrossed in a shallow,
140-character existence… well, I will probably enjoy it, because I will be as
shallow as anyone else.
