I Don't Want to be Negative, But Everything in the World Seems Terrible Right Now

I think, sometimes, about the cyber-utopianism of the mid to late 1990s with sadness, regret and a deep longing to return to a time that felt so much more hopeful than the present. 

The internet was going to solve all of our problems and make us all rich. College graduates would enter an employer’s market. Corporation were going to compete feverishly for employees by offering irresistible perks in addition to high wages and benefits. 

I observed this culture-wide mania from a unique and charmed perspective as a recent graduate of a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents who had somehow stumbled into a dream job as head writer of The A.V Club while still in college. 

At one point Comedy Central was going to buy The Onion for fifteen million dollars. I was given a very small ownership stake in the company and would have made close to a hundred thousand dollars on the sale while barely old enough to drink legally.

That deal fell apart at the last minute. So instead of making six figures, our ownership stakes became worthless once we were sold for a fraction of that price to a billionaire.

The billionaire said that he was buying the site because he loved it and wanted to protect it and would run it as a fan because he was already wealthy enough and did not need to profit financially from this particular investment. 

Immediately afterwards he eliminated our winter and summer breaks and slashed our pay. In hindsight I was probably foolish to believe a billionaire when he claimed to be doing something for altruistic reasons. 

We were all supposed to be able to choose our dream jobs. A quarter century on I would literally be obscenely grateful for a halfway decent job in my field but that honestly seems like an impossible aspiration at this point. 

We were promised a cyber-utopia. What we received, instead, was a cyber-dystopia. 

It might just be the brutal depression speaking but it feels like the world is in a uniquely terrible place right now and only getting worse. 

I am fucking terrified of the cultural impact AI is going to have. It’s already an insidious cultural poison that steals flagrantly, and without attribution, from real, human creators and is beyond glitchy.

While it is, arguably, kind of cute that AI can dream up what, I dunno, an episode of Fraggle Rock directed by Werner Herzog might look like that doesn’t make up for the horrifying inevitability that in the future more and more people will be unable to make a living because computers have taken their jobs. 

As someone who spends way too much time on social media and is, regrettably, extremely online, I’ve watched with mortification as Twitter went from being an extremely flawed and problematic but still useful and important institution to being a fetid right-wing cesspool under Elon Musk’s ownership. It’s not an encouraging development that the richest man in the world increasingly wants to be Space Trump and is moving further and further to the right everyday. It won’t be long until he’s goose-stepping around SpaceX and Tesla and making his employees all wear brownshirts. 

It’s fucking scary, is what it is. I’ve seen the future, baby, and it is murder. We’re losing our humanity more and more day by day and the cutthroat cruelty of capitalism is to blame. 

I’m dispirited by the existence and power of Warner Brothers/Discovery CEO David Zaslaz, who seems intent on single-handedly making the world of pop culture worse. 

I’m disgusted by the way Zaslaz has taken movies that are finished and that people want to see, like Batwoman and Coyote Vs. Acme, and shelved them permanently for tax reasons. Thankfully Coyote Vs. Acme got a reprieve due to public outcry but the fact that it was going to be buried in the first place is deeply troubling.

I can’t imagine how infuriating it would be to spend years working on something only to have it killed for purely financial reasons. 

I am horrified by the nightmare reign of G/O Media, the garbage corporation who bought The Onion and other important websites of note so that they could run them into the ground. 

I’m saddened that they just killed Jezebel, the groundbreaking feminist blog and fired twenty-two more employees from The Onion. 

It feels like the traditional models aren’t working but I have discovered that crowd-funding has its own set of headaches, obstacles and problems. Also, it’s impossible.  I’ve never been able to make a halfway decent living through crowd-funding, and god knows I’ve tried but I’ve also been unable to get a job with another company either. 

The Middle East has been a problem since as long as I can remember but I don’t remember it ever being as bad as it is now. It’s just a goddamn tragedy is what it is. It just seems to be getting worse. 

Finally, I am horrified by the very real possibility that the next President of the United States will be a Donald Trump who has spent the last four years marinating in hatred and bitterness and will see an electoral victory as a mandate to be even more aggressive and shameless about bringing fascism to the United States and crushing everyone he sees as his opponent. 

If we re-elect Trump he won’t be the same as before.

He’ll be much worse.

If Trump loses I have a strong hunch that he will not accept defeat with dignity and grace, or at all. In fact, he’d probably inspire another insurrection. 

That wouldn’t be great. 

I am not doing well. I haven’t been doing well for a while but it also seems like humanity as a whole is going through a particularly hellish stage right now and I don’t know when or if it will end. 

The world is a scary and terrifying place. All I can do is try to make it as kind as possible for myself and my family but it can be tough when everything seems to be spiraling out of control.  

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