By Myles Ludwig
Everything falls apart. Guaranteed. Here we stand on the threshold of the Age of Entropy rather than what we hoped might look like a renewal of the Age of Good and Plenty.
And the view ain’t pretty.
Entropy abounds. Find its ugly Medusa head of snakes in the electronic looting of Target; the bureaucratic, who me? boondoggle that crashed the Obamacare Website: the blown out National Security Agency’s snooperstructure; the exposure of emergent middle-class corruption in China; the dwindling influence of “serious” journalism; the soon-to- be unbundled corporate tyranny of television; the total nuttiness of North Korea; the deconstruction of the Middle East which is erasing made-up borders, up-ending any kind of traditional national sovereignty and returning the region to its pre-WW1 roots in the Ottoman Empire; the stiff-armed paralysis of our own government.
And certainly, the absolute worst of all, the biggest disappointment we are forced to shoulder is the shattered promise of overnight delivery. That’s crushing. Our devout faith in the holy church of Amazon, the infallible FedEx, and the cathedral of Big Brown — well, it has not brought the Rapture.
‘”It’s all good,” as Bob Dylan sings with the kind of irony that informs Denzel Washington’s Shakespearean performance as King Kong Cop in Training Day.
It is definitely not all good.
How did it happen?
We’ve certainly been warned. The physicist in all of us knows the Second Law of Thermodynamics posits that every system will ultimate shred itself. It’s a mission impossible; everything will self-destruct. Nothing is too big to fail. In fact, the bigger it is, you can bet it’s more likely to quiver and collapse under the weight of its own burden. Failure is a built-in fact from the very beginning.
Whether Ed Snowden is saint or sinner is much less important than what he has shown us about ourselves. That we have — our government has, with our tacit approval or willful blindness, whatever you want to call it — constructed a panopticon of pickup sticks that was just sitting there, smug, a prime target for a puff of wind or someone lying in the weeds to wheedle out the first stick and pull the whole meta-thing down on our heads.
The myth of inviolate password, those assurances of unbreakable encryption, the security of the sacred PIN, all have been brought back to bare studs, not by some precocious kid in Wisconsin hiding in his Mom’s basement twiddling with the equivalent of a do-it-yourself crystal radio, but more likely by a world wide web of cagey crims who’ve known what we’ve known all along and built their own version of Stuxnet to provide fodder for an unstoppable lava flow of ungrammatical emails from some supposed-prince down on his luck in Nigeria. If only.
Surely there’s more to come. The big bitcoin crisis is undoubtedly skulking around the corner like a Gahan Wilson ghost. The time-locked vaults of mobile banking are ready made for a wily Willie Sutton of the future.
My guess is things are only going to get even worse and we have no one to blame except ourselves. I’m reminded of that old Russian adage: the horse is not mine and I am not me.
No crying, as Hushpuppy insists with narrowed eyes in The Beasts of the Southern Wild.
We can no longer — we should no longer — put our unrefundable trust in a system of artificial intelligence, droneable deliveries and submit to an electronically induced algorithmic coma.
No tears.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.