The age of panic

The Internet took the illusion of immediacy and boosted its power. Instead of people being incited just by centralized bureaucracies far away, now they could incite each other directly. The distant was suddenly immediate, with more of a realtime “you are there” facade than even TV in its prime with three stations could reach. A sort of moral hazard was created: the seemingly frictionless feel of immediate data pumped over TCP/IP removed the constraints that actual immediacy and actual localism impose. Networked information subsidizes an epidemiology of constant realtime concern, optimized for packet switched networks.

The leaning pressure to magnify events of only local significance into a global contagion that must be dealt with NOW! NOW! NOW! has gathered force. The relevance of the irrelevant has been massively inflated. The availability intrinsic to any species of eternal now has made every itch everywhen into the paramecium that roared. The current president is THE WORST PRESIDENT EVER. Their policies are the WORST POLICIES EVER. A minor colonial conflict like the Iraq intervention is blown up into THE WORST FOREIGN POLICY DISASTER OF ALL TIME. And SO FORTH.

There is nothing new about the darkness that comes in from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. What is new is the tax on attention that constant blowing of pinpricks into galaxy-wide tears the fabric of space and time itself imposes. The small has acquired a largeness that it hasn’t earned and doesn’t deserve. It now casts a formidable shadow over larger things that do matter, the darkness of its narcotic dazzle fueled by the false intimacy of data immediacy.

This is not a time with any substantial claim on unusual notoriety. It has no ownership on tragedy, no monopoly on ruin, no death grip on turbulence. What it does have is a new, sharper urgency in panic. The spring in the red button of crisis has been worn clean through by constant frantic pushing every time wolf is cried. Our time has its own pathologies. As in other ages, its wounds should be lanced and cauterized. But when every irritation is a world stopper and every paper cut is a global crisis, the only harvest will be frayed nerves and a growing insensitivity to things that actually matter.

When you can frictionlessly grow a burst pimple into a national ordeal, you live in a world where anything can reach outsized importance. In a world where everything is an unfolding apocalypse, then nothing is significant. You will virtually lynch the umpire over the injustice of that missed call. You will virtually damn the opposing team for thwarting your now, now, now. Casey’s enemies will be your enemies. And there will be no joy in this world because everyone everywhere will convince themselves (again) that they live in a global Mudville.

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