Teetering on a Pin Head. The Age of Anarchy

​Think of someone you have known for the past 30 years, puts the era right at the back end of the 20th Century, circa 1986ish.  Seems like such a long time ago and in technological terms it really was back in the slow age. Now this individual, dead or alive, would have preferably been around between 20–30 years beforehand, born into the 50’ through the 60’.  The spread is important in era factors, as that generation are the last to know and experience life before the digital explosion, a crossover generation in the mix of rapid change.

The Information Age really ramped up around 1986 and life and its pace have been inexorably moving in ever more quickening revolutions since then.  The last 30 years have wrought changes that are now bearing very strange fruit indeed.  There are those who say that life is better now than ever before.  There are those who say it’s going to splatter in one huge and final shit storm.  It’s completely relative to the position you’re in and therein resides the generational angst ad infinitum.

There are some certainties that are pretty hard to argue against though.  The global religion is money and its God is one nasty and unforgiving fucker indeed, no meek inheriting the world stuff uttered in this house of hoarding.  Global war is here to stay and those damn refugees really are such an inconvenience to our material consumer driven peace of mind.  Global population is outstripping planetary resources and pushing degradation of social cohesion to tipping points, resulting in upheaval of community stability and pushing governments once regarded as democratic into more blended versions of dictatorship.

The pin head at the tenth and final century of the 2nd millennium wasn’t all peace and joy, no rose coloured glasses there at all.  However it was a period of possibilities, of relative stability or the illusion of such, a period when humans had learned from history, we hoped we had.

The first century of the 3rd millennium is an unknown, its possibilities interlocked to an age where the reality of interconnectedness is driving instant and never experienced before chaotic change.

Laying out what life would be like 30 years forward to those living back at the dawn of digital is an exercise predominantly in denial.  Not in that it couldn’t happen but more so in a general response of, ‘I really don’t think I would want to bring my children into a world like that’.