Year 2048

Looking back and looking forward

I’ve been feeling very disconnected from the world due to my deletion of my Twitter and Threads accounts as well as not using any other social media very much. I plan to use Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn sparingly, and Mastodon not at all. Twitter isn’t a real view of the world and it’s one of the primary sites getting people addicted to pseudo-events and doomscrolling (see the linked video essay for more info).

I’ve been reading the new book Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter to fill in my knowledge of how the site has fallen to pieces under the erratic domination of Elon Musk. We’re so used to thinking in terms of the daily/hourly news cycle that a lot of people aren’t thinking about the big picture. I recently became semi-addicted to a puzzle game called 2048 after seeing a version of it included in the source code of the Linux U-Boot bootloader as an Easter egg (2048.c) and being reminded that the game existed. The game is easy to learn but difficult to win. So far I haven’t gotten to 2048 a single time after playing 100’s of games. It’s even more embarrassing to learn that it’s possible to get even higher scores than 2048 if you’re sufficiently skilled and lucky.

The game got me thinking about the year 2048, which is just over 8,500 days away, at the time I write this, or just over 23 years and 3 months. We’re nearly 1/4 of the way through the 21st century, so I got to thinking about how massively the world has changed since the year 2000, and wondering just how massively and unpredictably society will change over the next year, two years, four years, and so on.

First, we had the run-up to the year 2000 and the Y2K bug that had to be fixed in so many business computer systems, along with the fear that society might collapse if the bug wasn’t fixed in other important systems (some people thought that planes would fall out of the sky). Looking ahead, there’s a different computer date wraparound issue that’s going to become very well-known in the next decade, the Year 2038 problem. This is going to be scarier because of the sheer number of embedded computers running Linux or some other flavor of UNIX, or simply written in the C programming language using the routines that operate with a date value in seconds since Jan. 1, 1970, which will wrap around to a negative number in 2038 unless you’re using a 64-bit processor or a newer OS that uses a 64-bit value for the time. Linux was only patched in 2021 to work properly on 32-bit CPUs past the year 2038, so there is going to be a lot of consulting work to fix the billions of embedded computers that will likely be affected by this.

In March 2000, the dot-com bubble burst and the stock market came crashing down after irrational exuberance that some companies without sensible business models would succeed because of “the Internet”. Then came the contested 2000 U.S. presidential election which was awarded to George W. Bush thanks to a partisan Supreme Court decision to stop recounting votes in the state of Florida.

The next world-changing event was of course the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. “Everything changed”, including pop culture.

Because George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were in the White House, the US went to war in Afghanistan to overthrow the government that was harboring the masterminds behind the 2001 attack, and then they started an illegal war in Iraq in 2003, based on fear-mongering and claims that Saddam Hussein had a secret cache of weapons of mass destruction. Those two fiascos cost trillions of dollars and countless lives.

Also in late 2001 and 2002, we saw the collapse of Enron and WorldCom due to accounting fraud, along with similar scandals such as Tyco and Adelphia.

The next turning points came in the 2007 to 2012 window, starting with the introduction of the iPhone and the rise of smartphones, and with them, social media and app-centric and no longer human-centric interaction patterns with the world.

Also in 2007-08, the global financial system crashed due to very expensive gambles made by financial speculators that real estate prices would continue to increase indefinitely, despite the run-up being caused by speculation and predatory lending to unqualified home buyers. Financial institutions had been allowed to merge low-risk and high-risk operations and place leveraged bets on mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps that linked risks to other risks, which collectively became “toxic assets”.

In the midst of this crisis came the 2008 election of Barack Obama and the reaction by conservatives, some of whom claimed without evidence that Obama hadn’t been born in the US but rather in Kenya (which wouldn’t have mattered if it had been true, since his mother was a US citizen, but it was all racist fearmongering anyway). Among the people demanding to see Obama’s “long-form birth certificate” were future president Donald Trump.

In 2012 there was a popular belief that cataclysmic or revolutionary events would happen on or around December 21, 2012, based primarily on fears related to the end date of a 5,126-year-long cycle in the Mayan Long Count calendar.

In 2016, Donald Trump was elected President thanks to his controversial claims, stoking of resentments, strong support on social media, public dissatisfaction with Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for a variety of reasons, and some help from Russian hackers, who leaked emails from within the Clinton campaign, some of which had strange references to what were apparently inside jokes or harmless discussions of Italian cuisine, which some speculated were part of a coded language used by an apparently nonexistent pedophile ring, a theory that became known as PizzaGate, which later morphed into an even larger conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which combined many different conspiracies, a few of them true, but not the overarching narrative, particularly the hope that Donald Trump would save everyone from “the cabal” and order mass executions of Obama, Clinton, and others.

Then came the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and the lockdowns mandated by various governments in an attempt to limit the spread of the disease, which led to massive unemployment, supply chain disruptions, and people staying at home finding various conspiracy theories about the reasons for the response, and later, suspicions about the vaccines which were developed unexpectedly quickly and in many cases using new mRNA vaccine technology.

This happened at the same time as 5G mobile phone technology was rolling out, leading many to draw illogical connections between 5G cell towers, the virus, the vaccines, Bill Gates, and various other events. This wasn’t helped by Pres. Trump’s refusal to take the pandemic seriously, or to recommend wearing masks or social distancing to limit the spread of the disease.

When the vaccines were rolled out in the early years of Joe Biden’s presidency, a partisan divide combined with reaction against attempts to mandate vaccinations in order to be allowed into offices or otherwise participate in society led to vastly more deaths among Republicans than Democrats due to Republicans’ collective refusal to getting vaccinated, and a death toll in the USA likely far greater than we would have seen if everyone had taken the pandemic equally seriously. The virus killed over one million people in the United States, 800,000 in Russia, 690,000 in Brazil, and 530,000 in India, although these numbers are likely undercounts.

Looking ahead, after all of these chaotic and unpredictable events, I have no idea where we’re going to be in 2 years, 4 years, 2030, 2038, or 2048, but one thing I’m fairly certain of is that today’s social media is going to mutate into something different as a reaction against the harms caused by the current super-addictive “doom-scrolling” version. YouTube videos and podcasts seem to be the most stable and informative ways to share information, but the recommendation algorithms have led people into believing all sorts of misinformation as well. The short-form sharing of Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. leads to people and events “going viral” in ways that aren’t necessarily helpful to society, as people rebel against having their emotions and mental focus hijacked in ways that aren’t healthy to them or to the larger society.