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https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-me-against-you-jon-ronson-investigates-the-perpetual-outrage-of-the-culture-wars-227477>
"The culture wars are perpetually waged in response to new and imagined
threats, but they’ve been around forever. They just keep taking on new forms.
In Australia, we’re seeing heated zero-sum disputes about everything from
gender and sexuality, and race and religious freedom in schools, to climate
change and the right to protest.
Just last week, western Sydney’s Cumberland Council voted to ban same-sex
parenting books in eight Australian libraries – a ban that was overturned at a
late-night council meeting two nights ago, as police watched over competing
protests (for and against), outside the council building.
During COVID, conspiracy theories and related ways of thinking accelerated –
helped by social media. But neither COVID nor social media caused this shift.
Things were already falling apart, and that event and those platforms
accelerated processes already underway. We are reaping the rewards of something
toxic that has been brewing for a while, which is perhaps borne out by our
tendencies to cast everything in binary terms: me against you, us and them.
Maybe we are whipping ourselves up into a state of perpetual outrage and
distraction because, in the end, we desperately don’t want to acknowledge the
complexities of how bad things are getting – in a world beset by accelerating
climate disasters, humanitarian catastrophes, widening wealth gaps and
cost-of-living and housing crises.
In 2024, populist and authoritarian leaders around the world have succeeded by
leaning into conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation. And the
recent introduction of artificial intelligence only makes it easier for these
things to spread. How did we get here?"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
