HyperDystopian

A Closer Look at the Current Doom Boom of Media

“HyperDystopian,” Midjourney

What’s most interesting about the two articles released this past week about overblown AI hysteria is not the fact that they were written in magazines with wildly different political perspectives. It’s not even the content itself frankly (although that is also great). These articles are two shimmering, rainbow-hued drops in the bucket of AI hysteria that continues unabated throughout the media. Just now I found this hilariously alarmist headline:

Yes, the quote is attributed to Biden, but a mainstream media outlet like USA Today would never knowingly bring attention any of the President’s many verbal gaffes unless it reflected what they believed.

Not to be outdone:

Funny that climate change is brought up because that was the big bogeyman when the ‘70s news media was pumping out doomsday headlines daily. Like the ‘70s, our decade’s media seems so fatalistic and bleak as a result of a hangover from a brighter, hyper-utopian time. What made the ‘60s different from the ‘50s according to David Frum was that, while President Eisenhower and other leaders helped bring gradual, reliable change like ending segregation, JFK and MLK in the ‘60s were young and rarin’ to go. Their eyes were on the prize. Jim Morrison may as well have been doing a Kennedy impression when he said “We want the world and we want it now.” It is true that the news media at the time, not yet overrun by boomers, may not have always warmed up to hippies or even the ‘60s counterculture in general. But the left new and old, mainstream and underground, worshiped the trinity of JFK, RFK and MLK and whether we are looking at hippies, British Invasion rock stars, fashion models, artists, athletes, the spirit of the times was change. A different, better world. Whether through LSD or miniskirts.

In this context, with the trinity dead, along with Jimi Janis and James dead as well as The Beatles broken up and Nixon in charge, the ‘70s could only be viewed as the coked up hangover after the Day-Glo party. This is not to say that times were great. Stagflation seized America. The Arab oil embargo added insult to America’s Vietnam injury. The nation itself was distrustful of government and authority in general. But, since there were also no cheerleaders like Kennedy, cynicism and malaise was everywhere from the unemployment line to the fourth estate. Editorial after editorial poured in about how we lost our way from the idealism of the ‘60s. How today’s music ain’t got that same soul.

Besides the idealism getting sucked up in a vacuum, there were also the two big go-to’s for the hyper-dystopian news media of the ‘70s: global warming and overpopulation. As Americans grew numb to the decades-long threat of nuclear annihilation, news stories about Walden’s demise fueled the yellow journalism of the times. Global warming was and is a concern. But too many false doomsday prophecies were made predicting that California would be underwater by 1987. This is is not to say that the public always bit. Crime and terrorism proved of greater concern. Reagan understood this and won.

The media tried to remain alarmist about Reagan (rightfully so) but the country was having its own love affair with him. Neither wildly enthralled by utopian speakers like they were in the ‘60s nor hyper-skeptical like they were in the ‘70s, the media from the ‘80s to the ‘00s was relatively even-toned.

Then Obama ran for President. He may not have been as radical as Kennedy or Martin Luther King, but he sure sounded like them and he did promise change. Boomer journalists and millennial bloggers were enthralled. And the culture again became hyper-utopian. Perversely, the Obama era actually had more victories for civil rights. Gays were allowed to marry. More minorities got hired. But with the Internet as the engine, nothing was good enough. Hopeful Upworthy articles about students singing and cutting class gave way to Buzzfeed articles stumping for a black Spider-Man. Bloggers and journos in the Obama era wrote articles about awesome things and op-eds on how things need to be more awesome right now. Yes, the media became embittered with Trump’s victory, but they were in a state of denial too. Surely, the Russians stole the election and misinformed the otherwise non-racist, decent American public. We voted for Obama twice!

COVID came so conveniently in 2020, neatly marking our current decade’s HyperDystopian outlook. Like global warming in the ‘70s, there were plenty of news stories rooted in truth. But any digression that aimed to heighten the severity of the pandemic was fair game. Here we are in 2023, masks off, going to restaurants again, wondering if perhaps this was all smoke and mirrors after all. Hush your mouth: there is a squadron of killer robots in our pockets!

What makes our current HyperDystopian moment distinct from the ‘70s is our moment has been brought to us by Big Pharma and Big Tech. Lest we need to be reminded, Big Tech guys are warning that their own tech can be as big and bad as the atomic bomb. Why even I myself in these very pages succumbed to Apocalyptic Derangement Syndrome. But let’s look at why Big Tech honchos like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are sounding the alarm. No one can definitively say, but I’m putting all my chips in the circle on the felt table that says “So the government passes regulations that help centralize Big Tech so open source scrappy upstarts can’t compete and major companies maintain their natural monopolies.”

In this post, our current moment is like the ‘70s but for half a year now I have been comparing our moment to the ‘60s. To paraphrase Succession, I still see that shape. On the surface, with the protests and the utopian spirit, the ‘10s may have appeared like the ‘60s, but in actuality I see it more like a bizarro liberal ‘50s full of repression and aversion to sex. We are in the early part of this decade. 1963 was not quite the swinging ‘60s just yet. I do hope that our existential dread is matched by our curiosity on what humanity and consciousness ultimately mean. I am less enthused by trying to match the breathless hope of the Age of Aquarius. I am more interested in echoing the exploration of consciousness, but with more questioning and less rushing to conclusions. If we keep rushing to half-baked, sensational conclusions, how much different is Chat-GPT from us?