Despite increasing populations, burgeoning pollution, global warming, a hole in the ozone layer, virtually all bodies of water being tainted, increasing human-driven extinction, the several genocides over the last century, nuclear warfare, biological warfare, America's explosive prison population (380,000 in 1975, well over two million now, the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with black people eight times as likely to be jailed than white people, meaning that one in three black people will be imprisoned at some point), rising oceans, disappearing islands, destruction of coral reefs, nuclear power with its essentially permanently destructive/dangerous fuel/by-products, globally increasing factory farming, globally increasing corporate genetically modified monocrop chemical farming, vanishing rainforests, profound overfishing and the advent of mountaintop removal mining, among other things, the New York Times, and I'm sure a ton of other capitalist cheerleaders, can still push a book whose essential message is that for the rest of this century, “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.”
Wow. Wow, wow wow.
Prosperity is a problem (exploitation of resources in fundamentally unsustainable ways, taking way more than we need, living in artificial ways, producing nearly unimaginable amounts of waste, the necessary disparities in wealth that one must have for prosperity - workers, servants, beneficiaries, ruling class, etc.), and technology is THE problem.
Technology is how we got here. FUCK. All of this ever-"advancing" technology (more specifically, human use of it) is the source of this destruction, this pollution, this annihilation, and all the things that will come that we do not yet understand - the unforeseen consequences of our "intelligence."
Technology doesn't really solve anything, except how to best fuck something up.
What a great message for the today's world - "go on with whatever you're doing, everything will be more than fine, it will be great." This is so fucked. Have fun with that.
Relying on the argument that "people have always said that the world is going to shit and it hasn't" is majorly flawed in two primary ways - first, they were right. Today's planet is in remarkably worse shape than anyone could have predicted even a hundred years ago. Secondly, people predicting that we are fucked (I am one of them) have the privilege (an ironic term, to be sure) of looking back and ahead in a time that is demonstrably worse, especially in an ecological sense, than at any point in human history. And we are only accelerating from this point, as we have been for several hundred years, most markedly since World War II.
I fucking hope I am wrong. I really do. I want to be wrong about this, but I feel it deep within that I am not. We are fucked, and we are taking out a whole lot more with us on our way out.
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