When belief trumps facts, feelings trump reason, and violent psychopaths declare themselves the only legitimate arbiters of Truth, darkness can be the only result. – “The Oncoming Night”
There’s no good reason to rehash my columns for last year’s “Banned Books Week” and those of 2023 and 2022; my records have not yet been censored, so those essays, all heavily-fortified with links to earlier writings on the subject, are still there for your perusal. Instead, it seems more urgent to call your attention to the fact that the impending dark age I have warned about for years has now arrived. Lest some of you (especially the ones who used to call me a crank for warning what facial recognition would become) think I’m exaggerating, let me reiterate what a dark age actually is. People who know nothing about history tend to think of the term as synonymous with the Middle Ages, despite the facts that A) only a small part of that thousand-year period qualify as “dark” in the historical sense; B) there have been a number of dark ages in human history; and C) the term in and of itself says nothing about technological progress per se. In reality, a dark age is one lacking reliable records, so historians cannot be certain of what actually happened. Of course, censorship is typically part of that; if a government or religion burns books, anything recorded in those books is not available to future historians. And if too many of the burned books contain scientific or technical knowledge, the result may indeed be a reversal of technological progress. But such a decline is not the defining characteristic, and indeed one of the major causes of the dark age we’re now entering is the misuse of technology.
The way people of later times view a dark age is, due once again to the lack of reliable records, not at all the same as the way people living in such an age view it; the only people who are in a position to recognize that they’re living in such an age are those who understand what the term means in the first place. So it’s doubtful that the authoritarian rulers of countries like India and the United States recognize (or care) what they’re doing to future history; what’s important to this discussion is that they are using modern computer technology to do it. In the last century, it would’ve been impossible for a Trump, Modi, or Xi to eliminate every single instance of a fact or opinion they disliked; Mao and Stalin tried, but books and other physical records cannot be eliminated by merely ordering the creation of search-and-destroy algorithms or threatening large, centralized fascist companies into censoring their own highly-indexed media. 20th century tyrants could never hope to find and destroy every copy of a banned book, film, recording, etc, but when physical media are no longer the norm, universal censorship of a work enters the realm of the possible. And now that it has become child’s play to flood the world with computer diarrhea presented as fact, even electronic records which somehow escape a purge will be lost in a vast fecal sea, making it difficult for even experts to know what is real. And if the techlords get their way, there will be a lot fewer experts in the future to attempt it or even care about it. And if you can’t see that as a formula for a dark age, why are you even bothering to read this?
Although effectively the same (available information is useless), I feel like there should be a new term for the modern misinformation age.
Dark implies the absence of light. If information/knowledge is that light, then right now, we’re being practically blinded by shiny disco balls reflecting football-field lights in every which direction. Just this morning I watched a video about how the mad emperor’s & the U.S. department of public health’s declarations about Tylenol & autism amount to hard-to-spot-or-disprove cherrypicking (“Lawyer Bullshit” to quote Hank Green’s exact words).
The Palace of Illusions, Hall of Mirrors, or even TV Static feel like they’d fit better than simply “dark.” “Noise age,” “snow age” or “flurry age” could be comparably short & sweet alternatives for “dark age.” I personally like the description of static as “white ants on your screen” so “antsy age” could also work. People do also get pretty antsy quite often these days.
“20th century tyrants could never hope to find and destroy every copy of a banned book, film, recording, etc, but when physical media are no longer the norm, universal censorship of a work enters the realm of the possible.”
I’m not going to claim that things aren’t bad today, but I think you’re overstating with that sentence. It’s just as possible for me to conceal that I have a book’s contents on my computer as it is to conceal a physical book. In fact, it’s easier to hide and transmit information the government doesn’t like today, using steganography, which conceals that something is embedded within an innocent-looking image or sound file. I’ve written such a program myself, at adaptune dot com slash steg dot htm.