Oh, how the nations rage!
Weird dreams and fragments of thoughts
Many people foretold 2025 as a time of turbulent change. As the prophecy unfolds, some rejoice in it and others despair. I happen to be privy to both climates and experience a curious sense of guilt over my own detachment. I might lose my salary, and I feel no uneasiness about being penniless, but I ought to be more empathetic toward those who stand to lose much more. I attribute my sense of detachment to a feeling of un-realness which I have often experienced in times of change. For the past few weeks, I have had a recurring sense that I am on the brink of an out-of-body experience—sometimes brought on by disjointed experiences of time, or by falsity in social interactions, or by the sudden recollection of memories so buried in my subconscious that they no longer feel like mine. I rarely have dreams that I remember when I am awake, but lately I have had two or three a week, each with a clearly defined storyline. I do forget them, as I forget most things, after about a week, but I will record a couple of the most recent here for posterity:
Somehow, my family was caught in a conspiracy involving a covert government agency, something like the CIA, and a local teen gang. The local police and the government agency were investigating a string of mysterious kidnappings of young girls in the area (yes, I did watch the first episode of Twin Peaks recently). The government agency communicated to my family and me that they had reason to believe I would be the next target and that they were under orders to take me into custody for my protection. My family immediately suspected their motives of being nefarious. As I evaded the surveillance of the men in black suits and sunglasses, I was also evading the attentions of a boy in the gang, whose idea of flirting was to play mean tricks on me, like reparking my car from the garage to the other side of the orchard (back in California). This was extremely inconvenient, as the government agents were hot on my tail, and I had to get to my car as quickly as possible. I eventually had to cut ties with my family, including my brother and sister who had been my shadows at every step, because they had somehow been compromised and it was no longer safe for us to work together. I took this opportunity to join the military, and in the final scene of the dream I was running around a track with a recruit from Georgia who was telling me about her childhood trauma. I remember thinking that she was small like me, but incredibly strong, and I envied her fighting spirit.
My second dream was much less dramatic. I was dating two men at the same time and decided to go traveling with one of them who had nice, dark curly hair (not Italian, I swear!) but was not very intelligent. I was prepared to do most of the thinking for the trip but wasn’t prepared for how much of it I had to do so soon. We were on the plane waiting to take off and he became impatient and marched up to the cockpit to see what was taking so long. The cockpit was empty and the flight attendants were distracted, so he decided to fly the plane himself. I asked him if he’d ever flown a plane before and he said no, but he was already in the air. I told him he was doing a great job, then whispered to the flight attendant that she’d better let ground control know we had an emergency situation. Then she and I strapped in and braced ourselves for impact, and I told myself that if we survived this trip, I was going to break up with him.
I say all this not to seek an interpretation of my dreams—though I welcome ideas, if they are funny—but to demonstrate what a bizarre state of mind I have been in lately. I hope my readers know me well enough to know that I would never date two men at the same time, however curly their hair. More importantly, I hope you know me well enough to know that I would never go for a run. But the fact that I keep having these kinds of dreams contributes to the feeling that I am living in an alternate universe and that everything that is happening around me is a huge farce. And it eerily reminds me of the kind of feeling people describe before some great catastrophe strikes their community. Morale is certainly not high in academia at the moment.
Recently, a friend shared an article from Timothy Burke’s Substack, who classified the rash actions of Big Tech billionaires as a symptom of “short-termism,” in which exercising power in the here and now is all that matters because the concept of loss has become so foreign that there is no longer any point in planning for the future:
“The concentration of wealth and the abstraction of financialization means that the people whose whims structure the forward motion of the economy can’t ever find a risk so big that they might actually lose their shirts. They’ve gone past ‘too big to fail’ into ‘can’t fail even if they try to.’”
– Timothy Burke, The News: Apocalypse Now
That idea of being “too big” stuck with me—being so big that the normal instincts of human survival no longer apply. I tend to write a lot against excess, especially excess of technology. I even wrote a piece called “The Ascetic” several months ago, just to say: “This is the mindset of a person who only takes what they need.” I wasn’t endorsing ascetism, but I liked the way it looked in contrast with modern society.
At the beginning of the year, I released a piece entitled “The Tyranny of Technology” (which one reader accused of being clickbait). But, as both an engineer and a consumer, I don’t think I am being hyperbolic when I call the current state of technology tyrannical. It should come as no surprise that innovation that is financially driven—as most tech innovation is and will soon become even more so—more typically enslaves people than empowers them. An anecdote I heard recently was a medical device design not making it to market because it enabled a reduction in the number of surgeries required for battery reimplantation that would cause the company to lose money. Industry consistently underperforms because it is more profitable to maintain a need than to answer it. And if any need is answered, access to those answers is restricted and priced. A reader provided the following example in a comment on my last post:
“[In the] early free software movement…free software was licensed so that those who used its source code had to free their own software. So copyright law was co-opted into expanding freedom in contrast to its original intent. We slyly called these licenses Copyleft. A few years later, Amazon started AWS. Since they provide access to services rather than distributing software, the free software licenses don't obligate them to distribute their own source code. In the two decades since, there has been a massive centralization into cloud platforms owned by Big Tech. These platforms are quite literally built on a foundation of free software but couldn't be further from the ideal of ‘free as in freedom.’”
It is not necessarily malicious intent that sets these trends, but the natural workings of what is ironically termed the free market. The free market is a marvelously natural system; the problem isn’t that it doesn’t work but that it works too well, too quickly. It produces so much so efficiently that it has to produce a lot of useless things to keep people in need so that it can continue to run. It gets too big and becomes burdensome.
Continuing with the example of tech development, government-funded academic research can be of great benefit since its motivation is to publicize knowledge, not to sell a product. But, as we are now painfully aware, the direction of academic research is at the mercy of the government, and the bigger the government gets the less of the people’s voice it retains.
We create all these systems with the intent of serving mankind, but each one of them grows to a critical mass beyond which it is no longer useful and is often harmful. The paradox is that we cannot prevent systems from growing into excess, anymore than we can prevent a child from growing into maturity. To do so would be an abuse of the natural process of human development—and history has certainly demonstrated the disastrous consequences of all such attempts. Is the alternative to ride the wave of excess, whether into a climate catastrophe or an Edenic post-labor society? I have a feeling that wave is going to break before we ever get there.
There is a great scene in Avengers: Age of Ultron where Ultron says: “When the Earth starts to settle, God throws a stone at it.” Remarkably, that has always happened; there is a rise and fall to every great empire. Just when mankind thinks they’ve built a tower to reach the heavens, the people are scattered. We reset and re-evolve, and when we get to a point where we’re no longer evolving, we reset again. Perhaps my detachment from the turbulence around me stems from the sense that this has all happened before, and that it will have the same outcome this time that it has had every time. These shakings and settlings are the natural cycles of a time-bound world.