We are experiencing a global speed bump that is dissolving the ties that bind society: it is known as technology. While globalization has been taking place at a relatively glacial pace in comparison, the technology at our fingertips is fracturing ideas of cultural bonds. The Marxists at one time were afraid that the influence of a ruling class would put its stamp on the minions, instead, self-inflicted stupidity exacerbated by ego-driven indulgence is running rampant. This is possible due in large part to our lack of emphasis on education while social media drives the push for everyone to be a celebrity. The culture of community, city, and state is reduced from a shared culture to millions of mini cultures that have their cliques of adherents.

Small isolated islands of humanity filled with obtuse people dismissive of outsiders have started to form. This promises to foster new classes of utterly stupid people who no longer have the slightest hint of belonging to a larger group, much less society, a country, or maybe even our planet. We are licensing broad idiocy on a scale not seen since our most primitive beginnings, and that is unfair to our ancestors as they at least had strong survival skills. We are doing this in the name of personal freedom while not recognizing the basic tenets of civility that arise out of the shared community. This must happen, though, due to our headlong rush into technology without having knowledgeable people at the helm trying to parse what this explosion of social media and personal expression might bring to our societies. A counterbalance could be as simple as having serious leadership that would place an emphasis on education instead of conflict and mediocrity.

Could things be different? Not likely unless we’d been striving for broader intelligence decades ago. The prospect of enlightenment and social change hinted at frightened the status quo, which triggered a force to malign education and make it mostly unaffordable. While our tools used for the distribution of information and, ultimately, knowledge continued to evolve, the faculties of the masses to understand their potential have been hindered. So instead of mobile technology being used for our betterment, we are using it for games, porn, dating, sharing photos of our food, watching videos, and ordering coffee.

The things we use our smartphones for are all valid, but it is the imbalance where we eschew learning in order to bide our time due to perceived boredom that would otherwise overwhelm us that is my beef. That we treat education as a kind of malevolent thing is a criminal act against humanity. We should not know boredom if our minds and hobbies were able to engage us with practice instead of the internal pacing of a quiet brain untrained for dialog and further development of our skills. On our hamster wheels, the speed bumps are self-inflicted obstacles of our own making in our desire for an “easy” life.  Our technology should help challenge us, not pacify us into stasis.

For the better part of our evolutionary history, people have talked with others in their local village, community, and immediate social setting, which included their family, church, and probably a fairly tight circle of friends who shared quite a few similarities. For over 50 years since the advent of television, humans have been rendered into passive viewers who, in some ways, have lost their ability to communicate. The internet is not only reawakening communication that had been languishing dormant for decades, but it has also greatly altered things in the blink of an eye.

It used to be that one’s opinions reaching the larger world were largely impossible due to limits on infrastructure regarding book and newspaper distribution, telephony, and the ability to travel and the effort needed to attract an audience who might listen to one’s point of view if one wasn’t already a celebrated personality. In effect, there were gatekeepers.

Today, the internet flattens this and forces humanity into exchanges between people of radically different backgrounds, geographies, and opinions, but also with potentially like-minded individuals who really do want to listen. These people who are “out there” may not be on the wavelength of communication traditions that one’s friends and families are familiar with. So, the nuance needed in finding a voice that is acceptable to this new electronically connected group that may have already been forming rules of decorum among themselves has to be negotiated with a deft voice until the newcomer finds acceptance. Some who are not aware of this global cross-cultural, economic, and intellectual diversity, join groups of various linguistic abilities may find themselves frustrated by not being able to make themselves understood and are lashing out, mostly due to their own inability to communicate effectively, though they likely cannot see that yet.

The situation may not be that people are inherently rude; this is just a very difficult time in our evolution to understand we might have a position in the global hierarchy where like-minded people could accept us if we could adapt to evolving rules that are still fluid and uncertain. What is certain is that those who are getting a toehold on these new methods of threading information in and out of the online think tank begin to demand respect and patience.

Many newcomers want instant gratification, such as what is found in their local community when they drop into the bar and root for the same team. When a cheer goes up, and our mates raise a toast in support, we instinctively understand that we are with our kind; we are in symbiosis. On the internet, we often do not receive any immediate feedback. In the case of asking questions of a group where we do not know the rules of decorum, we can feel that we are being rejected and allow our frustration to lash out at those who are seemingly ignoring us and thus isolating us. The imperative is on our shoulders to first understand the group dynamic and then enter the conversation and take cues from those who are trying to nudge us into respect to what the group’s expectations are.

The idea of moving beyond one’s immediate environment and not having filters or community standards where stigmatization can occur demands we humans develop new skills of communicating across vast geographies and cultural distances that have never been a part of the toolset that evolved with people. The period of change we are living through is not an easy one as, contrary to the last million years of humans walking the planet, we have no experience in opening communication across the breadth of Earth.

It’s January 1st, 2019, and we are just a year away from having 20/20 hindsight about what will have occurred and not occurred during the intervening year. We are no closer to starting the important conversations about the direction humanity should take regarding cost, quality, and availability of education, online verifiable and secure voting, universal basic income, protection of the environment, affordable healthcare open to all, a global initiative to secure food and water resources along with viable transportation of goods, and honest and truthful news that arrives at our fingertips.

Instead, we are distracted by geopolitical shenanigans orchestrated by the people in charge who play poker with our environment, healthcare, education, and participation in democracy. We allow these “leaders” to derail important conversations while instilling fear by portraying pandemic crime, war, immigration, and economic malaise as the major threats that face people’s well-being.

Leadership starts with a conversation, not a lecture or announcement that the boogeyman is hiding in the shadows. We need to discuss why doing well for all is bad to those who decry that we should even try. We are told that problems on a global scale are intractable and yet the individuals that make up this global population are able to feed, clothe, educate, treat, and comfort 7 billion fellow inhabitants. It is not the dictums from presidents, czars, kings, prime ministers, mayors, or senators that the organization of humanity relies on; it is the individual citizen cooperating with others in the community that gets the job done.

Too many people are rendered into feeling like parasites, ashamed that we need each other in a symbiotic relationship formerly known as community. We are given enough resources to survive and witness others losing everything in order to force our silence and buy acceptance that we have what we have. We are encouraged to be greedy because greed is flaunted as good all around us. We are shown what opulence looks like and what we should aspire to have it. The reality is that we cannot all live in gilded mansions, but we can have certain expectations.

I’m not cheering for communism or even socialism, nor am I suggesting a form of anarchy, but I am suggesting that our planet’s only possible direction is participatory culture. It’s going to require a much more enlightened population that can start to understand the logic of a system in balance instead of the blind march into disequilibrium. The whole must encourage the individual and find those people inspired enough to help themselves while real leadership supports them through mentoring and not burdening them with debt.

We have eviscerated the mind, which only sets the stage for revolution and the downfall of those who fostered the decline of the masses. When people are without purpose, and the individual is lacking the satisfaction of accomplishment, a festering boil of rot is brewing. Humans require the challenge of stepping into the unknown. We are biologically driven to explore and share what we’ve found.

In the moments of discovering conspiracy theories, fake news, memes, and other fringe banalities, we are driving ourselves over the cliff like lemmings falling to their death. In this sense, social media is, in fact, likely contributing to the dumbing-down of our population. Short of a rapid roll-out of artificial intelligence-driven real-time intervention when people encounter such nonsense, we are probably going to continue having to deal with large swaths of our fellow citizens being abused by their own infatuation with the absurd.

The fatal flaw in my hopes for a new Renaissance is likely the fact that chaos is at work, and it’s a lot more chaotic today than in 14th-century Europe. Back then, when the population of Italy was estimated to be about 12 million people, and the city of Florence, where the Renaissance was born was a mere 80,000 inhabitants, nobody could have guessed that they were about to influence all of humanity.

We no longer focus on a particular city for the progress they might be making. We tend to dismiss innovation, as demonstrated by our current hostility towards the likes of Amazon and Tesla. Nobody cares if a school is exceptional and setting new trends and standards. Instead, we are waging populist wars of nationalistic anger over immigration, gender identity, and espionage, along with tainted news and information that has gone awry due to faults in our emerging social media.

We cannot see the gilded lining of our age, and we probably will not be able to due in large part to our fear of change. Nearly 700 years ago, the people of Europe were ripe for a great leap forward following The Black Death, as it had become an even greater imperative to conquer ignorance. Today, on the verge of our own potential intellectual plagues, we cannot muster the wherewithal to act in our best interests. If we cannot rise to the occasion when the current reality portends horrible outcomes, then how will we place progress back onto the pedestal of human goals?

A slow month for blogging as more attention was wrapped up in closing out the year and dealing with loose ends. The big news of the month was that Caroline gave her notice to leave her current job after we returned from Oregon. Her new job will focus solely on data instead of the website front-end, with a smattering of data that she has tired of after so many years. She starts early in the new year.

The job change opened the can of worms that is our healthcare system. Due to rule changes, it appears most employers now have a 90-day waiting period for new coverage. Insurance companies have a rule that states if you are without coverage for 63 days, they don’t have to cover preexisting conditions, so going without coverage during that time is not an option. Because Caroline’s current employer has less than 20 employees, they do not have to offer COBRA, though they can if they choose to. We looked at the options of private coverage and the ACA, better known as Obamacare; the first option would cost us $1580 a month and the latter nearly $1200. Luckily, her employer allowed her to sign up with COBRA for only about $950 a month.

We are fortunate that we can afford this premium, but it seems so very inhumane that this is likely an effective means to move people off of insurance that covers their preexisting conditions since so many in our population wouldn’t easily be able to afford the extra $3,000.

Prior to running out of our current coverage, we scheduled as many doctor appointments as possible in case we’d have to take private or ACA coverage where getting care in the gap would have been pricey. Our dentist, eye doctor, sleep doctor, and general practitioners were all seen this month, and prescriptions were refilled.

Then, before the month ended, we took our Prius to trade it in for a new one, but Toyota was out of 2018 models, and the 2019 Priuses weren’t due until mid-January. As I’ve not been on payroll with my own company since May 2017, I was not going to qualify for financing a new vehicle. With Caroline changing jobs after five years with her current company and 10 with the one prior to that, she might not have qualified for a loan without a paycheck or two from her new employer. Off to Kia we went, and by the end of the day, we drove off with one of their hybrids.

Due to the job change, we ended up staying in Phoenix over the Christmas to New Year’s holidays (it’s not like her employer was going to give her even more paid vacation right before leaving). With nothing else to do, we went into hibernation and stayed warm in our cocoon, whittling away at our hobbies and a fair bit of nonsense.

New Year’s Eve was celebrated like so many other years at 4:00 p.m. when Caroline called her mom to listen to the fireworks at midnight. Jutta dons her coat and opens a window, letting in the cold winter air of Frankfurt so we can hear a real celebration while tuning in various live cams to see the mayhem along the Main River. I need to turn my attention to the new year and focus on what great adventures Caroline and I will share as we move beyond our 25th wedding anniversary, which is coming up in less than two weeks.