I recently discovered Sam Kriss’ Substack, Numb at the Lodge. I wish I could write like that.
At the same time, I don’t envy Kriss. He’s desperate. Whatever he describes, it’s terrible. Here he is about the impact of smartphones:
We thought we were just having fun times with devices; it turns out we were spreading nuclear waste over the entire surface of the earth. Piling up heaps of radioactive slag inside our homes. Smearing it over our faces at night. And then a generation was born into that poisoned world; we got to watch them take shape, and it became obvious how broken they are, how we had broken them. The kids can’t read. They can sound out the letters and recognise words, but they find it impossible to sit in one place and ingest a single extended linear piece of prose for more than five minutes. The kids don’t go outside. They don’t feel the sun on their skins. They spend whole summers locked in their rooms, alone, experiencing the world through five and a half inches of glass.
That sort of dark exaggeration is typical of Kriss’ writing. I don’t think it’s just a way to drive engagement: He seems genuinely devoid of hope about the world. Which made me think, maybe he’s right and the reason I see things differently is that I haven’t yet fully realized how messed up everything is: The AI apocalypse, societal breakdown, wars, the end of democracy, global warming. Things look gloomier than they ever have since I started following the news. Isn’t desperation the adequate response?
Yet I don’t feel it. The reason is probably simply that my personality isn’t compatible with long-term gloom. There’s also the observation that we can’t predict the course of events. Things may get worse or they may get better. It’s basically a random walk. There’s a 50% chance things will look up in a few years. Given the longer-term trends over the last decades, it may even be higher than that. Either way, I’ll know how things went when we get there.
Nehaveigur 