America’s slow phlebotinum poisoning

The Ghost in the (Voting) Machine- The MyPillow Guy is living in a dream—and he’s not alone.

 
A couple of weeks ago, pillow magnate Mike Lindell attended a meeting at the White House to help figure out a strategy for Donald Trump to cling to power despite losing the election. A photographer snapped a picture showing his notes from the meeting, which included references to the Insurrection Act and declaring “martial law if necessary.”

Before I go on, let us take a moment to bask in the weirdness of that.

If, six years ago, I had told you, “One of these passages will be accurate five years from today,” you might pick this as one of the obvious fakes. Of course, it would depend on what the other snippets were. If the other choices included things like, “The national debt has passed 130 percent of GDP”—which it has—or, “Canada stays out of the headlines for another year,” the Big Pillow Menace sentence would stand out as particularly implausible. But if the other passages were things like, “One year after border collies seized control of the federal government, kibble production has surged,” you might find the suggestion that a Pillowy Bond villain was in on a conspiracy to keep the guy from The Apprentice in the Oval Office to be pretty plausible by comparison.

…..

We are in the early stages of the dematerialization of our economy. We are a long way from living in some digitized astral plane. But if you looked back on this moment a century from now, you might see our present as prologue. How many people spend big chunks of their lives in the digitized landscapes of video games? How many careers involve simply moving or manipulating things on screens? How many kids are already bored by the technology that lets them swap their face with Luke Skywalker’s?

Imagine if, a century ago, I tried to explain the power of iPhones and their imitators. Nearly every person in America will be able to afford a pocket-sized computer that will let them talk to anyone around the world, often with video. They will have at their fingertips access to more information than is contained in any library as well as an endless supply of porn, panda bears sliding down hills, and poutine recipes.

You could certainly imagine someone saying, not unreasonably, “This is too much power for one person.”

Now, I’m no Luddite and I don’t think the genies can be herded back into their bottles anyway. But in a world where the cut-and-paste of screen life is increasingly part of what we call real life, is it any wonder our brains might think you can cut-and-paste the non-screen world? Obviously, few sane people think explicitly in these terms. But technology has a way of changing how we think without us thinking about it. For instance, the convenience of technology changes how we perceive time and distance—just think about how 19th century people thought about the prospect of traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast and how you think about it now. In other words, we think crossing a continent in a few hours while catching up on WandaVision is normal.

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