Final Entry June 22, 2073
How Frances Fukuyama was hilariously wrong
--
OK, so this will likely be the last entry. If anyone comes after and this record survives, I hope they’ll still be able to read, and read in the English language. The translation software was on a different device and it died a while back. So no Russian, Chinese, Malay, Indonesian, Hindi, Farsi, or anything else.
As a historian I find it deeply ironic that eighty years ago someone wrote a book called The End of History and the Last Man. I guess someone privileged enough to go to Harvard and then get tenure at Stanford inevitably would have a very skewed perspective. Maybe things looked rosy back then, especially if you were a member of the affluent middle-class in sunny California. Before the mega-drought, the absurd property prices, populism, and all the rest.
I’ve studied the records, at least what’s left of them. We humans were always worrying about the wrong things, especially in the USA. Seems like the USA always needed an enemy against which it could define itself as the good guy, which was handy because the USA exported more horror to defenseless people than any other nation on Earth. First the indigenous people were the enemy, then the Mexicans, then the Japanese, then Communists, then terrorists, then liberals… it’s a strange thing that no one seemed to notice this bizarre pathology. Maybe they were too busy cramming corndogs, hotdogs, donuts, and pizza into their always-open mouths. And staring at their screens.
It was the screens that pushed our species over the edge. Our brains are adapted for the simple conditions of the African savannah and the primordial forests of Eurasia, not for a constant bombardment of sensationalist fear-mongering. Movies, radio, and television was bad enough. But when Apple Computer Corporation launched the first smartphone it was game over for homo sapiens.
We basically got everything backward. People were sacrificed on the altar of revenues. No matter how vile, how untrue, how harmful something was, provided it attracted attention it was golden. Our entire civilization became filled with endless mental effluent, poured into people’s heads twenty-four hours a day. And the people loved it. While refugees starved, fat complacent Westerners sat slumped on sofas gawping at…
