Long story short, we're heading towards a Blade runner-esque dystopia.
Do you agree? Should we be more positive about the future or is our future bleak and depressing?
I think there's a bit of hyperbole there, but I do think that things are more and more routinely crazy.
Now, we don't function within an agreed reality that is held essentially by everyone. (And there is a distance between 'essentially everyone' and 'everyone.' There were always outliers.)
But now, you choose your reality a bit like you choose your preferred form of music. It has a branding consequence. You join with others, not because you have an agreed upon concept of reality earnestly arrived at, but because the beliefs are offered as a badge of belonging — and as a communal animal, you make a decision and buy in.
It's all a bit robotic, it seems to me.
(I'm exaggerating, of course, because this sort of thing always goes on. But much more now, much more routinely, than 30 years ago, say. At least according to the sense I am getting more and more. Can't prove a word of this, of course.)
And yes, in a funny way, I sense there's something Bladerunnerish about it.
I think we had more agency as individual political players a few decades ago -- when the political divides were not chasms, one saw the human being in your political opposite, and people of differing political views could know that while consensus is more ideal than actual goal, a common commitment to the common good would most often nudge public processes to good outcomes.
But that faith is gone.