What Should We Call This Age?
By: Mister Lichtenstein
Tags: Politics, Influencer Marketing, Social Media, Zeitgeist, Entertainment

What Should We Call This Age?

Informally named “ages” come and go, so what is this one?

Photo by Bernardo Ramonfaur on Scopio

I was born in The Space Age. We were still getting our sea legs up there and building things like the International Space Station. I watched The Challenger blow up on TV in my classroom at school. Later came The Information Age. As an early adopter, I was on The Sierra Network and later ImagiNation. I got on the internet as soon as dial-up was a thing. I remember being excited about a 9600 baud modem and having email addresses like “Mark1@AOL.com” when that was normal.

We live in strange times. For a number of reasons, one cannot compare our current age to any other in living memory. This isn’t so much The Information Age any more than we’re still living in The Industrial Age; we still have factories and the internet is no longer new.

So what distinguishes these past few years and the ones ahead of us?

Cheat Codes

Anyone who plays enough video games knows about cheat codes. Sometimes they are built into the game and sometimes they are merely glitches discovered by lucky players.

Originally these were fun little easter eggs that meant you could unlock a special stage in Streetfighter II or get unlimited ammo in Doom. Sometimes it was just a matter of finding that perfect Tekken combo that meant if you landed the first punch, you would destroy your opponent with the rest of the combo. Once, when Quake was popular online, I made a custom skin which was just a big alpha channel so, when I played online, I was invisible save for my shadow (hence my handle in those days was SLG — Shadowy Lurking Guy).

Ryu being Ryu, from Giphy

Our world is so ruled by technology that it has developed its own little cheat codes. Bringing a country to its knees doesn’t require the forward-down-forward-punch of a conventional military engagement. All you need to do is penetrate a nation’s computers and you can lock cities out of their own infrastructure, or ransom a bank’s data. Want to cause some chaos? Everyone is a publisher now, so you can just put together a fun conspiracy theory and publish it in the right places to take on a life of its own. Airplanes? Chemtrails! Vaccines? Poison! Facts? Fake news!

Between foreign actors like Russia, who want to see America fall down a flight of stairs, and domestic opportunists like Donald Trump, who don’t care how they win or are seen to win so long as they win, these tools are employed now and have been in use since at least 2015. We live in a cyberspace world and that world has cheat codes a few people have discovered to devastating effect.

Lack of Good Faith

At the same time as all this nonsense goes on disrupting our society and causing problems both politically and in tackling the pandemic, there’s a fraying of the social fabric. Specifically, there are a lot of actors who act in bad faith.

From Giphy

Take the US Congress as Exhibit A. It is an institution held together as much by conventions as it is by rules. Conventions are like rules, but they only exist because of mutual good faith on the part of the parties involved.

When Mitch McConnell held up Merrick Garland’s appointment to SCOTUS by President Obama, he gave a reason that was not a rule but a convention. It was argued about because it was a convention that really hadn’t existed until just then, but fine. It went. It became the way things were done from now on.

…Until four years later. When Donald Trump moved to appoint a new justice to SCOTUS, the Republicans changed their tune despite the circumstances being the same.

This is textbook bad faith. When one deals with someone who acts in bad faith, it makes any negotiation impossible. It is possible that the bad faith party can always crawfish; go back on their word. If you want to know the source of gridlock in Washington or anywhere else, then look to the parties who negotiate in bad faith. They are poison.

Loads of Choices

If you want someone to make a quick choice, don’t give them too many options. Buyer’s remorse keeps a lot of people from decisiveness. Fine dining establishments usually have small menus for this very reason, while your neighborhood greasy spoon probably offers everything from hamburgers to souvlaki.

From CBS’s Giphy channel

When you’re tired of all the choices you will go to what you know. I honestly don’t know what’s on HBO these days because I stream it, and I only watch His Dark Materials and Last Week Tonight. This tendency causes the balkanization of media; not everyone goes to the same places to be entertained, enlightened, or educated.

The result is it supercharges the effects of cheat codes and bad faith: people go to the lunatics at Newsmax or Infowars for their facts because reading newspapers is too hard, or they only watch 1970s Clint Eastwood movies for morality because they don’t like to be challenged, or they just endlessly stream Family Guy for entertainment because they don’t have any taste.

Where we used to have a significant monoculture where we could all count on everyone having similar cultural, factual, and moral touchstones, we don’t anymore. Today is an age of Choose Your Own Adventure, where facts, morality, and what is clever, funny, or fun is up for argument.

Conclusion

There’s an old episode of Kitchen Nightmares, from back when it was all shot in the UK. It’s my favorite episode.

Not actually the episode in question, but I thought it was funny. From Giphy.

Gordon Ramsay visits an Indian restaurant that, in its attempts to please everyone, has the option of a make-your-own-curry on its menu. The dish is universally terrible because diners don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They pick things that sound good to them looking at a menu but make for awful curry. It would be like going to the hospital for minor surgery and being given a chance to pick which anesthetic they give you, without a medical degree. “Sir? Would you rather this injectable 2005 diaxopianolpan or a tablet of our fine, house flixapenannide?” Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Offering too many choices causes inaction and regret. It opens up people to being pushed around by others who claim to have the answers.

I often bring up the problem of too many choices. This is because it comes up a lot in this age. The best example I usually give is how BMW lets drivers customize every setting in the car, from how much horsepower to deliver to how long the headlights should stay on when you get out of the car to exactly how the seats should massage passengers when under way. These choices seem like a good idea, but in the end, it’s just more crap than most people can deal with. The choices are binned by most consumers who, instead of studying their owner’s manual like the Talmud, just end up using the defaults and feeling bad for paying all that extra money for crap they didn’t use.

On the other hand, there’s Rolls-Royce. They don’t offer any customization settings in their cars* because their cars are Rolls-Royces; they know more about how a car should be set up than you do, so take the settings you paid extra for. It’s the best car in the world because Rolls made it, not because you twiddled a knob.

The paradox? BMW owns Rolls-Royce. BMW knows how a car should be set up, but out of craven, let’s-please-everyone-BS, BMW gives options on everything, which it should not. It’s a make-your-own-curry.

There are whole YouTube channels dedicated to “influencers” teaching you just how you should set up the settings in your BMW, and they are usually right in their opinions, but shouldn’t those just be the way things are set up from the beginning? Why should there be a cottage industry of people to tell you how to set up your car/phone/whatever when it should just work from the get-go? Cowardice on the part of BMW, that’s why.

The real problem is that influencers don’t just influence about makeup or cars. They influence about things that matter. They influence how people vote. They influence whether someone gets a flu shot or not. They influence anything where you might hesitate or feel regret.

We are no longer in The Space Age. We are no longer in the Information Age. We’re not even really in a Disinformation Age. We’re in an Influence Age. All the leverage in every area of life seems to turn on the influence one can exert on others.

Welcome to The Influence Age.

*Rolls-Royce does let buyers customize their cars before they buy them, ie if you want a car painted the exact shade of your mail order bride’s eyes, they’ll do it for you. Once you have the car though, it’s a simpler experience because everything is simply as it should be.