You're witness to mass hysteria driven by a whole lot of profit motive, career posturing, and social signaling, with a touch of "some kinda/pretty bad stuff is

You're witness to mass hysteria driven by a whole lot of profit motive, career posturing, and social signaling, with a touch of "some kinda/pretty bad stuff is gonna happen." When I was younger—before the internet was in every home—I read articles about how the "information superhighway" was going to bring the whole world closer together. To my mind, that was analogous to a major city gone amok: unprecedented competition with everyone vying for attention. One guy paints his sign on his window. The next guy lights up his sign. The next backlights a plexiglass sign. The next uses neon. The next blinks his neon. And so on. It took some time, but we're about at the point of maximum stimulus on the internet. And so to compete, the messaging follows a similar pattern. And eventually some people believe what they read. And others believe what they write. Those that believe what they write become desensitized. Those that believe what they read become indoctrinated. And you're left with this emergent characteristic of a chaotic system stuck in feedback loops. What you read as overstated, others will read as gospel and damn you for underplaying the emergency. And they will try to shout louder than the next, because everyone is a storefront for something; profit, or power, or ego, or social status. So what's an apocalypse? Not global climate change. The apocalypse is what you witness as you try to decipher and pick apart the insanity that has become not only the internet, but soon the whole of humanity. The climate change cathedral had it right all along: we are the apocalypse. But they got wrong the cause. The cause is not climate change. Or fascism. Or racism. Or even hatred. The cause of our apocalypse is us, by virtue of our connected hyper-competition. The apocalypse is the "human superhighway."