Testament of Youth

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Jane pointed out an article in today's i, under the 'Society' byline, by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown; outlining the increasingly corrosive influence of populism on today's politics and society. She references Turkey and India, as well as, obviously, the US and more locally, the UK. There seems to have been a sudden hinge-ing toward this notion that a political/philosophical free-for-all is somehow the right and democratic way to go, which has only really taken root in the last decade. The misuse and abuse of the internet, social media, and now AI have become the tools and enablers of the frankly unhinged: the useful idiots of the neoliberal libertines espousing capitalist realism and the end of histories.

The problem is that this insidious malaise is now completely embedded in the heart of the populous' consciousness at an almost cellular level: when your algorithmically-tuned feeds to your life-support system of a phone are tailored to echo and amplify whatever you - sometimes inadvertently - choose to look at, you only ever get to see that biassed and filtered view: the machine is doing your thinking for you, make no mistake. Bad for you. Bad for society. And bad for your descendants.

It's gratifying therefore to observe that there are a growing number of young people out there rebelling against what has become the tyranny of 'tech'. Not before time, but I think it's something that could easily have been foreseen, given that youth's natural constituency is kicking back at the establishment: and that's the point, all of this stuff is now, oh, so establishment, and that will be the downfall of the shitheads who are currently making hay out of it. Any establishment that dismisses youth as 'rebellion without a cause', fatefully misreads itself. Bring it on...

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