An age of extinction is coming. Here’s how to survive
The digital era is killing us softly by distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life and making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.
The idea that the internet carries a scythe is familiar. But the scale of the potential extinction still isn’t adequately appreciated. Bethany Rae
Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution – the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence – threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a “bottleneck” – a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction.
When university students struggle to read passages longer than a phone-size paragraph and Hollywood struggles to compete with YouTube and TikTok, that’s the bottleneck putting the squeeze on traditional artistic forms like novels and movies.
