How to Stay Human Forever: On America's Digital Technology Crisis with James Poulos

Please tell me, what is the digital catastrophe?

Sure.

Well, you know, once upon a time, the United States was the freshly minted sole superpower, the indispensable nation, turbo America, hyper power.

Many terms were thrown around during that ostensibly end of historical time.

But the one thing that everyone seemed to agree on

was that this was a regime or had become a regime where the dreams were bigger and better than anywhere else.

And the ethos that animated the West and the globalized West at that time

was basically familiar from all of the great imagineering visionaries of the 20th century in the US.

If you can dream it, you

can do it.

Just do it.

Imagine all the people.

It's a long list.

And the ethos was one of if you can dream it, and if you can dream it better and bigger than anyone else, then you deserve to be in charge.

You deserve to shape the everyday life in which we all, ultimately, the entire world, lose.

And for quite some time, although in hindsight, it went by really in the blink of an eye, it seemed as if the United States was going to very smoothly improve its technologies in a way that would perfect or cement that form of Imagineering as governance around the world.

That's what globalism simply would be.

The planet would turn into America, and America would perfect this sort of marriage of technology and the human imagination in order to do it.

So we did that.

We ran that playbook.

We got the internet.

We got the smartphones.

We got better and better connectivity so that all of these invisible information entities basically could communicate instantaneously.

with each other.

And just at the moment when we thought we'd done it, history was really over, globalization had been achieved, America and the West would simply dream our way into a kind of paradise on Earth.

Please tell me, what is the digital catastrophe?

Sure.

Well, you know, once upon a time, the United States was the freshly minted sole superpower, the indispensable nation, turbo America, hyper power.

Many terms were thrown around during that ostensibly end of historical time.

But the one thing that everyone seemed to agree on

was that this was a regime or had become a regime where the dreams were bigger and better than anywhere else.

And the ethos that animated the West and the globalized West at that time

was basically familiar from all of the great imagineering visionaries of the 20th century in the US.

If you can dream it, you

can do it.

Just do it.

Imagine all the people.

It's a long list.

And the ethos was one of if you can dream it, and if you can dream it better and bigger than anyone else, then you deserve to be in charge.

You deserve to shape the everyday life in which we all, ultimately, the entire world, lose.

And for quite some time, although in hindsight, it went by really in the blink of an eye, it seemed as if the United States was going to very smoothly improve its technologies in a way that would perfect or cement that form of Imagineering as governance around the world.

That's what globalism simply would be.

The planet would turn into America, and America would perfect this sort of marriage of technology and the human imagination in order to do it.

So we did that.

We ran that playbook.

We got the internet.

We got the smartphones.

We got better and better connectivity so that all of these invisible information entities basically could communicate instantaneously.

with each other.

And just at the moment when we thought we'd done it, history was really over, globalization had been achieved, America and the West would simply dream our way into a kind of paradise on Earth.