Do You Have a Moment to Talk About Industrial Society and Our Present?
It’s hard to talk about Industrial Society and Its Future without sounding like you’re bordering the edge of sanity. Why wouldn’t someone want the perks of modern life? That’s the question most people ask, and honestly, I might not be the best person to answer it. But here we are.
The digital age has hooked all of us. It doesn’t matter if you’re chasing endless entertainment, instant social validation, or the illusion of knowledge at your fingertips. The machine offers you something you can’t resist, but it comes with strings. Agree to the terms, click accept, and suddenly, you’re locked into a deal that makes a pact with the devil look like a handshake between friends. The systems we’re tied to seem like they give us choices, but it’s an act. Like a magician’s card trick, the deck was stacked before the game even started.
We’ve never truly been free, but now, for the first time, it feels like our options have been stripped down to the barest illusion. The war was fought and lost long before anyone realized it had started. Most people are blissfully unaware, floating in a sea of pointless choices, while the decisions that actually matter have already been erased.
Our Fragile, Fading Legacy
There’s something darkly ironic about how the oldest cuneiform tablets will probably outlast every digital record we’ve ever made. The proof of our existence might be ancient tax forms from peasant farmers, while our greatest achievements and failures will vanish as if they never happened. When the digital Library of Alexandria burns, it won’t be the epics or discoveries that survive. If anything endures, it will probably be a social media post written by a bot hawking over-the-counter erection pills.
The same fragility extends to the systems we depend on to survive. Just-in-time processes have already failed us before, and they’ll fail us again. To think otherwise is to deny reality. The interconnected points of failure in everything from supply chains to power grids should terrify us all. And when it happens, don’t worry. You can eat your decentralized cryptocurrency and wash it down with e-girl streamer-flavored bathwater. That’s where we are now. Economically domesticated, incapable of meeting even the most basic needs for ourselves or within our communities.
I’m not saying you should pack up and move off-grid because it’s pointless. You’ve already lost. Why have you lost and I haven’t? Because when you lose, I win. Nothing will satisfy me more than watching the masses brought to their knees, suffering the consequences of decades of indulgent, grotesque behavior.
The Collapse You Deserve
We live in a society obsessed with distractions, constantly fighting imagined injustices while ignoring the real ones staring us in the face. People elevate celebrities and professional athletes to near godlike status, no different than how ancient societies worshipped Pharaohs and Caesars. The difference is that at least the ancients got something in return for their worship. Our modern gods only take, endlessly demanding more.
We’ve handed control of reality itself to the delusional and the abnormal. They dictate the terms, and we’re expected to celebrate their fantasies as if they’re facts. All the while, big tech companies manipulate every one of us into compliance to push agendas that strip power from the majority and funnel it into the hands of the few.
The End Isn’t Coming. It’s Already Here.
This isn’t a call to action. You’re not going to save yourself. The reckoning has already begun. You might not see it yet, but you’ll feel it soon enough. When it happens, when the systems fail, and the screens go dark, you’ll realize you weren’t in control. You never were.