Duty Now For The Future (part two)

(In our previous installment, our erstwhile essayist was about to plunge off the deep end yet again with his ideas of what the post-coronavirus pandemic world will look like.)

Venn Diagram Society

Because digital communications eliminates the need for physical proximity, and because we can find or form “tribes” of like-minded souls linked together by a common interest, we’ve seen traditional neighbor socialization fade.

We’re starting to realize that no one person is all one thing, that you are the biological relative of one group of people, related by marriage to another group (who in turn have other non-biological relations they share, are friends in real life with a variety of other people for a variety of other reasons, and are online friends with even more people whom we’ve never met face to face).

(As David Gerrold observed, sci-fi fans had a leg up on the rest of the world when the Internet age started because we’d been establishing these overlapping Venn diagrams for decades via print and mail communications.  We were primed for this, compadre!)

What we’re in the process of hashing out right now is how these overlapping groups will interact with and among themselves.

There are people we do not wish in our lives, and online that’s easy:  Block ‘em.

But that’s a lot more difficult when it involves biological relatives or people we’re related to by marriage.  New rules and customs are being hashed out (or is that #hashtagged_out?).

If it hasn’t be created already in some part of the world where long distance familial relations are important, we should see apps that let us figure out how we are related to one another.  The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game will provide a template for this.  When we encounter others in real life or online, the internet will find out how we’re linked through family and friends and special interest groups and clue us in.

We will become more interconnected, like it or not.

. . .

Future Culture Is African-American

In 2048 white Americans will only count as 49% of the population.

Years ago I predicted we’d be seeing a lot more white extremist racial violence between now and then and so far, I’ve been proven right.

There will be more incidents in the future, and some of the specific incidents will be very serious.

But eventually biology will hammer it through the thickest skulls of the whitest bigots that they are no longer in the driver’s seat, and if they want anything they better learn to play well with others.

If we were a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation up to this point, what will we be past 2048?

I think African-Americans will finally come into their own.

They have spent half a millennia buttressing their families and their culture against a dominant culture determined to destroy them, if not through outright genocide then by utter subjugation. 

With all those odds thrown against them, with all the handicaps and limitations and exclusions they faced, they nonetheless created a vibrant and thriving social network linking a vast number of sub-cultures and sub-groups within the larger African-American community.

Look at how the Jews, surviving in the face of three millennia of attempts to eradicate them, produced a culture so vibrant and strong that they prospered wherever they went.

Lok how the Irish, the whipping dogs of Great Britain, suffered oppressive bigotry when they emigrated to America, but once the foot came off their neck they dominated politics and culture in cities around the country.

The same will happen to the African-Americans.

They are prepared for this. 

They are going to dominate politics and culture for the rest of the century.

This is not to say that other groups won’t have a voice, quite the contrary.

Their voices will be heard louder than before, because the voices that had shouted them down will no longer be strong enough to do so.

But there’s something unique about the African-Americans position in US history that is going to give them and their culture that little extra boost that will put them at the forefront of the parade.

Good.

I think they will prove to be both stronger than their white predecessors and less callous about the rights of others.

. . .

Less Touch, More Contact

We’d already begun moving in this direction re online dating, with more and more people expressing dissatisfaction at “Tindr nightmares” who can’t grasp the basics of interpersonal relationships.

The coronavirus pandemic is going to produce a “slow down, cowboy” ripple through the dating pool.  There will be a shift away from instant physical gratification (yes, I understand not everybody uses online dating for that, but it is a common thread among those who do use it) and more towards building actual relationships.

We’ll see a gradual turn away from the more obvious forms of using sex to sell products, this in turn will lower the expectation that all close relationships must have a sexual context to them.

Sex ain’t going away, of course, but we may find romance coming back in unexpected ways.

The various…uh…”special interest” communities won’t go away, either, but they will become more insular.  They’ll see discretion as a powerful recruiting incentive, and within those communities there’s likely to be an even great degree of group identification and commitment as anybody who makes it in will need to demonstrate a sincere desire to join, not just casual curiosity.

. . .

Young & Stupid

The age of majority may shift…upward.

The western world may recognize the late teens to mid-twenties not as the start of adulthood but the last hurrah of adolescence.

People -- young ones especially -- do a lot of stupid things (see: “airline toilet, licking” in our first installment).

We tended to shove young children into the labor force as soon as they could pull weeds on the farm or work a shift in the factory.

We saw eighteen as a symbolic adulthood because we needed mass conscription for armies and younger than that the soldiers became too problematic re discipline (not that there’s weren’t very young soldiers in all wars).

We’re not entering an era where we may be able to push that back a bit.

Instead of urging young people to form families, we’ll be giving them time to get things out of their system, make their foolish mistakes, indulge in their embarrassing experiments.

All digitally documented, of course.

I expect we’ll eventually come to some sort of tacit cultural agreement that nude pictures or similar personal scandal that occur before a certain age will be dismissed as “kid stuff” and attempts to hold such shenanigans over the head of an adult (i.e., anyone past that age) will be regarded as pointless and silly and gauche.

This won’t apply to criminal activities, or things that get people hurt, or blatant displays of bigotry that reveal an underlying pathology, but it will give a pass on a lot of other things.

(I’m not predicting this, but the sci-fi writer in me can easily imagine a society codifying certain types of behavior to be done at specific ages under chaperoned behavior.  That’s not a new idea; parents in the late 19th century organized and supervised kissing games like Post Office for their adolescents in order to let them enjoy limited safe experimentation and to introduce them to acceptable adult behavior.)

. . .

Incels In Hell

In the short term, a lot of incels with borderline or not-so-borderline personality disorders are going to lose parents who exercised some degree of control over them.

They are going to be truly alone except for their online buddies, and many of them are going to be dispossessed in the aftermath of their parent/s death.

Since a lot of them have guns and dangerous chemicals, this is going to have some very bad repercussions.

I expect to see a dip in mass shooting rates during the crisis (counterbalanced by a rise in domestic assault and familial murders), then a sharp spike when the all-clear is sounded.

© Buzz Dixon