Too Much, Too Many, Too Fast

Remember the term "sensory overload"? Being bombarded with information and events and opinion is not what most human brains are developed for. There is such a thing as too much coming at us with too little time for processing. The MAGAs have adopted this as a strategy, simply flood the field and watch as people's filters become overwhelmed and breakdown, causing a profound spike in anxiety, fear and basic incoherence. One such event is global migration and ecological breakdown. A notable reaction to this disorder is the turn to a Malthusian critique, grasping at a simple mathematical explantion and saying there's simply too many people. Check any comments section of any article on any aspect of the polycrisis and you will see the calls for fewer humans. Not explicit advice on how to reduce the population...that gets a bit dicey. This goes hand in hand with a generalized nostalgia for what never was. Of course conditions were less dire back when there were fewer people but let's not confuse correlation with causation. Lots of things are different now. But the tendency is scary, because if you believe there are too many (black, brown Others) you will have little motivation to protect them when they are threatened. As many are and many more will soon be. Then there is too fast. The AI guys are telling us to be ready for a speed up, emblamatic of the way every technology affects our lives. Back to information, which is coming at us constantly and at warp speed. Cultural shifts are coming at us every few years, rather than generationally, leaving no time to process. Think of challenges to patriarchy and white supremacy and Geo-politics, with the rapidly changing maps as we break into smaller tribes. Emblamatic of all this exponential change is Sand Hill road in Palo Alto. As a teenager, I used to drive up that windy road into the foothills to drink cheap wine and smoke Mexican pot when I was cutting class with friends. This is late sixties, early seventies before Silicon Valley kicked into high gear. Steve Jobs and Wozniak were one year behind me at my high school in Cupertino. Palo Alto was still a lot of grassland, orchards and open space, although the bulldozers were running all day to flatten it out and mow it all down. Now Sand Hill Rd is home to the most powerful venture capital firms in the world. These people exist to convert the too much too many too fast into profit and their version of progress and super-modernity. So it goes.