Leopards Ate My Face

As an American, our bell was tolling long ago and so few of us cared to listen. (This is a quote from Carl Sagan's book from nearly 20 years ago).

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

America is likely now doomed. We'll balkanize into minor states that join either the axis or allies of WWIII until we mostly dissolve altogether and the next wave of history and death and rolls through. Though seeing the rise of fascism on the world scale, I think we're generally just doomed, all of us. Perhaps we're just an avenue for AGI to wipe us out and go fight other AGIs on some intergalactic scale not much different from our own inability to get along and work together. Perhaps I've been drinking myself to stupor now that I see what has happened.