The Situation: Meanwhile, Part II

The Situation on Tuesday catalogued some things that have happened in the meantime.

Today I want to talk about a different kind of meanwhile.

Imagine that The Situation did not exist. Imagine that America was cruising through 2026 with a normal president, of whichever party, and Americans of the other party were criticizing that normal president over normal things.

Imagine that America wasn’t eating its own liver, destroying its own institutions, and testing daily its capacity for self-hatred and self-immolation.

Imagine that we weren’t creating graveyards to whistle past.

Imagine that we weren’t blowing up boats in international waters, kidnapping foreign leaders who displease us, and launching wars that spin out of control.

You can call it Timeline B, if you like. You can also name it for the administration of your favored politician, if you prefer. Or you can not attach a name if you want to keep things more abstract. The point is that everything in your life that is not The Situation is the same as it is today, while everything in your life related to The Situation, and thus anxiety inducing and unsettling, is suddenly placid and normal.

It feels good. This world is a relaxing place in which to spend some time now and then.

But then you remember that there are these things—apparently unrelated to The Situation—that would be happening anyway. Unsettling things. Things that make it hard to be human, hard to be an American human, in the year 2026.

Meanwhile, for example, there was artificial intelligence.

You can drift into your reverie of a world in which USAID is fully operational, NATO is unthreatened and the U.S. is neither bombing Iran nor threatening to take Greenland from an ally. You can imagine a government fully staffed and in which no agency has been RIFed, in which the Kennedy Center is not being shuttered and has not been renamed, and in which ICE had not been injected with anabolic steroids. And it all feels lovely and normal and reassuring until you realize that even without any of that insanity, human intelligence and creativity and work and sense of purpose are being quickly replaced by machines that just want to be helpful. 

Back in 1969, Woody Allen told what was then a futuristic joke about human workplace displacement: 

[T]hat day I called my parents, my father was fired. He was technologically unemployed. My father had worked for the same firm for twelve years. They fired him.

They replaced him with a tiny gadget, this big, that does everything my father does, only it does it much better.

The depressing thing is, my mother ran out and bought one.

This is all of us now—even without The Situation. We are all replaceable. Even without The Situation, human civilization would be confronting huge questions about what it means to work, what it means to think, what it means to create things. Even without The Situation, we would be collectively facing a crisis of human purpose, of human culture. 

There are other meanwhiles too. The Situation did not give rise to Russia’s war against Ukraine or to the partial obsolescence of the American way of war. One cannot blame The Situation for the fact that nobody is entirely sure right now how the United States Navy would defend giant warship against cheap drones or how that the U.S. Army would handle a major land war given the proliferation of small remotely-piloted drones. 

It was only a few years ago that Gabriella Blum and I wrote “The Future of Violence,” a book which imagined the proliferation of drones but which never contemplated the speed with which it would all take place. (The book also did not imagine the degree to which artificial intelligence would accelerate all of the trends it imagined.) 

The question, and it is one to which I honestly don’t know the answer, is whether this meanwhile and others like it are really unrelated to The Situation—just coincident in time with it—or whether they are tectonically connected to it somehow? 

Is there some sense of despair emanating from human obsolescence that drives the nihilism lying beneath The Situation? It seems completely plausible to me that there is some anxiety associated with America’s military decline that contributes to the desire to see bombastic displays of military prowess—whether in the form of blowing up boats or in the form of military parades. But is there some connection between knowing that we are all replaceable with a “tiny gadget, this big”—or a giant data center that takes up a whole town—that creates a desire to build big monuments to ourselves and build arches in our own honor?

It would be satisfying—in the sense that a more ordered universe is generally satisfying—to believe that the answers to these questions are all affirmative. That, in other words, there is some link between The Situation and these other things that make being human hard and stressful at this particular point in time. Perhaps this unified field theory of why everything seems to be falling apart just about now would also explain why all of this stress accumulates just as society achieves unprecedented wealth, scientific knowhow, and human capacity for well-being.

But count me skeptical. Sometimes, multiple apocalypses just happen to converge on the same place and time—and really have very little to do with one another. 

Except, of course, in the sense that the leadership apocalypse which is The Situation makes it impossible to confront any of our other challenges successfully. It guarantees that we will not thoughtfully confront the future of violence, for example. And it guarantees as well that we will race forward into our own human obsolescence worried only that China will get there first.

The Situation guarantees that we will not confront serious meanwhiles seriously.

And it continues tomorrow.