Last year, Hu Wenhui, an editor in Guangzhou, asked: ‘How should those unfortunate enough to encounter the garbage time of history conduct themselves?’
Good question. Perhaps two heuristics that might help:
The most direct is one of the insights from computer science that really is applicable to politics, economics and society: garbage in, garbage out (GIGO).
Combine Occam’s Razor with ‘if it looks like a duck…’, and from this: if it looks brutally stupid and/or stupidly brutal, then that is most likely what it is.
For of all us (un)fortunate enough, how to conduct ourselves?
To restate this line from Tolstoy:
We say, “It is not we who have done all this; it has been done of itself”; as children say when they break anything, that “it broke itself.”
Faced with conditions of ‘shock and bore’, we are overwhelmed by tactics of ‘flooding the zone’ while we (un)happily choose the option of ‘drinking from the firehose’. Perhaps it feels like we are being collectively subjected to the ‘Ludovico Technique’ from A Clockwork Orange, but a more honest recognition might be that our conditions are closer to a demented digital version of Oliver: ‘Please sir, I want some more’.
With all of that in mind, I strongly recommend you read this piece from PC:
And should you desire to think further, I would suggest a pairing of two recent books: Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, and Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource.
To finish, a line from an interview near the end of Michel Foucault’s life:
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism.