I got an ENO DoubleDeluxe Nest hammock (actually two) for Christmas - complete with straps, bug net, and rain fly! I'm gonna toss them in the bicycle saddle bags (I got last year) and take my own self camping!
I've always ended conversations about doomsday, the ones that start with "Whatcha gonna do when the grid collapses, huh? What then?" by saying, "I'm gonna go fix the grid. I actually know how."
I am now old enough to reflect on the irony of the Information Age actually making people dumber.
I think about it all the time. Way back in the late 80s/early 90s, way before the movie Idiocracy came out or was even conceived, I developed my "Theory of the Regression of Humanity." I wrote a college paper on it and the prof was pretty astounded.
The original idea I had was based on several lawsuits I read about settled sometime in the 80s, and it got me thinking. For thousands of years, mankind has worked to develop civilizations to protect individual citizens. The premise is of course that the group has more diversity of skill, intelligence, thought, and capability, and is therefore more adept at protecting the individuals, than one would be working on one's own. Obviously when one group forms into a civilization, other individuals tend to feel threatened, whether they truly are or not, so they form another civilization of their own, and so on.
The net effect of this is protection of the species, but it also effectively defeats Darwinism. Before, when stupid people did stupid things on their own, or when physically weak people were unable to protect themselves as individuals, they paid the price with their lives, and if this happened before procreation, their genes were subsequently removed from the gene pool.
So civilizations designed to protect the individuals, have actually ended up harming the species as a whole, because Darwinism was not allowed to play out. That alone might not be considered a regression, so much as a stagnation, but the point doesn't even need to be so finely made.
Because after reading through those court cases, I realized we've actually gone a step further. What those court cases proved to me is that we've not only protected the stupid and weak all these milenia, by forming civilizations and societies designed to minimize the exposure of their weaknesses-- we're not simply defeating Darwinism.
We're reversing it.
When a man in California decides to pick up his lawnmower from below in order to trim the hedges, and slices all of his fingers off-- and he WINS the court case and is awarded millions of dollars for it-- he's not only being spared the death he rightfully earned for himself. He's actually being promoted above his smarter, better peers. His new wealth is capable of giving his witless progeny better resources than the children of smarter people who would never pick up the lawnmower in the first place. His stupid kids are going to be poised to live better, longer lives and further spoil the gene pool, rather than be removed from it.
We're not simply stagnating, we're regressing. We're not just protecting or tolerating the stupid and weak, we're promoting them within the species.
There were other court cases, I don't remember them all now, and it's really not that important, because I later realized that the Information Age itself was going to do more damage than any amount of tolerance of stupidity EVER could. The Information Age is allowing our specie to regress at a much faster rate than I'd ever imagined back in the simple old 80s.
When Charlie Strong quipped that twitter was the downfall of society, he wasn't simply being a thin-skinned loser that was tired of his players acting like jackasses-- he was actually accurately predicting our ruin.
Who knew Charlie Strong would be so prophetic?
