This year has been about much more than just some political realignments and chaos. It is the year a fundamental change in the inner workings of society became visible.
Back during the election, I argued, with anyone who would listen, that we need to get away from left-right dichotomies in thinking about politics. The thing that happened is that the Trump campaign had figured this out, and went much further, while the reporters and pundits either didn't get it or could not use it in the context of their papers, magazines, or shows. Of course I'm talking about the way Trump's campaign and affiliated groups broke the electorate up into tightly focused groups and targeted them. They were not looking at a simple left-right continuum but something more like a cloud with a several score dimensions. Put another way, while everyone else was looking at a grainy, monochrome display they had a 4K screen displaying millions of colors.
So here we are a year into this mess of an administration, and the media and pundits, and a lot of the politicians, are still talking, writing, and behaving as if they can still deal with a continuum, possibly a forked continuum with a progressive and a socialist branch breaking away from a neoliberal branch on the left and libertarian and alt-right branches on the other end, but really nothing much more complex than they have been for a couple of hundred years. Whether you want to view this as intentional concealment, institutionalized blindness, or something else, it is making it very difficult for anyone to follow what is really happening.
This is not just a political problem. We are living in a world where, thanks to surveillance capitalism, the surveillance state, and the heretofore freewheeling nature of the net, we still think and act on binaries (male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, rich/poor, black/white, Christian/non-Christian, etc., etc.) that were a product of an earlier period of sociological and economic thinking. We continue to frame ourselves and our world in old categories, but our society increasingly has no use for them, except as ways to manipulate us. We all drag huge clouds of data and metadata with us wherever we go. Increasingly, we are those clouds, or rather, we are what analytics programs and AI's can pull from those clouds and find useful. So while we still see ourselves in one way, we are seen in a completely different way by business, pollsters, and government. But just to make things worse, the biases and prejudices that go with the old binaries are getting folded into the analytical software.
For at least the past couple of centuries, we have been educated and indoctrinated to think in binaries. We are not well equipped to think and function in a society that is no longer structured around them, and our society is increasingly moving away from them. This makes for a dangerous transition in which those who can think on cloud terms can more easily manipulate those who cannot. To heighten the danger, we have no way of knowing if the few have a good way of understanding the implications of their actions (events would seem to indicate otherwise) or can really retain sufficient control of their AI's. What happens when the algorithms and AI's are complex to a point where they become incomprehensible and make decisions no one can understand (we may already be there or be close to being there)?
Something new is taking form. It is not the anticipated Singularity, nor the much longer prophesied Millennium. It is something other, other than those events and other than what we have previously experienced. We have to understand it. We have to learn to live with it and within it.
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