Having grown up in the ’50s, I’ve seen America face numerous grave threats:
polio, nuclear war (duck and cover), the Red Scare, cigarettes, lung cancer, LSD, Vietnam, more recently climate change, Fauci’s disease, gender dysphoria. But in the background of these more recent issues lies a subtle yet greater hidden danger.
In the 1950s, a popular sci-fi movie loosely based on Shakespeare told of a highly advanced alien civilization who with “a million years of shining sanity” builds a machine that can create or project matter by mere thought anywhere on the planet and can never be shut off. The entire civilization and all its accomplishments are destroyed in a single night, a victim of its own natural and violent subconscious. The U.S. isn’t quite there yet, but the machine is here and cannot be shut off; it’s the smartphone.
When conceived, having a global communicating computer in your hand sounded promising: You can speak to anyone in the world if they have a phone; it can provide instant information; if programmed, it can project possible future outcomes; it can entertain; all communication can be done with great anonymity.
While not actually creating physical matter, the smartphone creates “virtual” matter that can produce real world outcomes. Individual behavior can be changed by virtual garbage communicated without control or restraints. Group or mob behavior can be coordinated by a few chosen leaders. Thoughts and ideas with no genuine evaluation or veracity can become “viral” in a day. The banal, trivial, and petty become headlines. Laziness in thinking or research is endemic. Addiction to the virtual, and ignorance of the actual, is now the threat facing citizens as they stare at their smartphone screens. Sadly, we haven’t had a million years of shining sanity before us to rest on.
David Crook
Arizona
