Sometimes I stop and wonder how we got here. Like, how we arrived at our current cultural and political moment. Not on a scholarly level, e.g. economics, although that knowledge is important too. But on an obvious level, like what I observe when I look at the world every day or turn on a screen of some sort.
I wrote recently about how I feel like there is a reckoning coming because the rich and powerful are about to start cannibalizing themselves. When and how, I don’t know. But it seems like we’ve really gone off the rails as a species – not just in the areas that matter to our economic systems and our planet, but in areas like community, common decency, accountability, and kindness.
America is supposed to be a land of freedom, but I really don’t feel that way anymore and haven’t for a while. Do you? I feel like I live in a surveillance state full of ordinary humans who are increasingly frustrated, angry, isolated, and desperate. It seems like the impacts of being surveilled have made it really difficult to do basic things like secure housing, get a job, obtain a loan, etc. Things that I remember being a lot easier when I was younger.
Going back not too far, to the early 2000s, I remember being able to get an apartment without a crazy income requirement. Without multiple references. Without signing a 150-page lease that forced me to give up all legal rights should I be mistreated.
I remember this because I was rooming with someone over the summer while in college (I was not on the lease) and it went south within a few weeks, so I walked down to the leasing office and asked for an available one bedroom of my own. They gave it to me based on my super part-time job and meager savings, didn’t ask for a guarantor, and I moved in two days later.
I also remember being able to get a basic, entry-level job without a check into my entire life history. And also without needing to already know how to do the job, without already having multiple years of exact experience in a long list of requirements, and without competing with 2,000 other applicants who tried for it in the first 5 hours.
Back then it was pretty hard to run any kind of surveillance check on someone beyond calling the provided prior employers, checking on an address, and verifying higher-level education. And it was impossible to use any kind of surveillance software to weed out hoards of applicants in 3 seconds via a single click.
I’m not saying things have always been easy. But I am saying that the world we live in now, where we have no more anonymity and where those in power know our every move as well as our entire life histories, has made living exponentially harder – to the point where it’s impossible for some people to secure basic items, basic survival, basic safety, basic jobs, basic healthcare.
I do often think that positive human traits must still exist within many of us, but perhaps the visibility of these humans has been snuffed out by corporate-owned media and engineered social feeds (that also, may I add, surveil us). At the same time, it seems increasingly evident that we have more dysfunction in America than in some other countries. We have a uniquely brutal culture that is becoming more brutal as of late, yet it’s been part of our fabric since the beginning.
So I wonder…do we ever fight back and decide that we’ve reached a type of existence that is unacceptable and needlessly hard, and also rather unpleasant? If so, when? And, more importantly because right now I have no idea, how?