The Global Nihilist-Triumphalist Paradigm
A number of influences and declines during the Twenty-First Century gave rise to a growing sense of powerlessness and a crisis of human purpose. The certainty of modernity deteriorated as
post-modernism eclipsed it, thus supplanting fact with opinion. Two major reactions dominated as a result—either depression and despair, or at the extreme polar opposite, unsurpassed sense of narcissistic superiority.
Nihilism
The Useless Class
The growing power and capability of artificial intelligence and intelligent machines was simultaneously beneficial and detrimental to human beings in the Twenty-First Century. While A.I. proved to be more reliable and efficient than human manufacturing, medicine, and ethics, decision-making, and even creativity itself, this made laborers, doctors, judges and politicians, and even artists obsolete. Machines that had only proved superior prior to this century for intensive labor now had the capability to supplant humans in the matters of the mind as well.
The Decline and Crisis of Liberal Democracy
The Twenty-First Century was littered with crisis after crisis almost from the very beginning, from the American "War on Terror" after their nation was attacked by extremists to the existential threats of disease, global climate change, and environmental degradation, to the outbreak of national war and use of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, to the tumult of economic volatility and change. In times like these, frightened, hungry, destabilized people weary with these challenges often fell to the promises of autocrats, even if those promises were often empty.
When nationalism, regionalism, religious fundamentalism, and ideological tribalism supplanted globalism and liberal democracy, the image and importance of a global human village became secondary to that of the particular identity of a group of people. It wasn't just nations and religions that replaced the global civilization, but also corporations who used their products and services as loci of identity. The story of the people of Earth all being one common humanity became replaced by the story of a particular "my group of people" being more important than "the rest" of humanity.
Sadly, it was often the autocratic minority claiming their "protected rights" that dominated over the democratic majority, who were constrained by voting restrictions and minority autocrat-seated judicial benches or controlled and packed parliaments. Today, many countries may look like liberal democracies, but are actually competitive autocracies controlled by elite interests.
The Rise of Subspecies
In addition to the decline of global humanism, the rise of different subspecies also contributed to the growing disillusionment, helplessness, and meaninglessness of vast quantities of people. "Human Rights" became less important than "Adept Rights" and "Augment Rights" as New Humans and Cyborgs quickly became the majority over
H. sapiens sapiens.
The Ecological Collapse
Unable to find the political and economic will to deal with global warming, climate change, biomass extinction, resource depletion, energy scarcity and ecological systemic collapse, humanity fell into despair as their only home became exclusively hostile. It felt like the Earth itself had turned against human civilization to eradicate its evolutionary mistake once and for all.
Superiority
As a natural counter to the general nihilistic malaise, groups that rallied around a particular identity gained tribal and triumphalist attitudes. Often, it didn't matter what the idea, symbol, activity, or entity was so long as its adherents gave their full loyalty, cooperation, and allegiance against all others. Many of these identities were complex and layered. For example, a person in a nation might identify by their subspecies, religion, or corporate brand. And even these could all be nested like matryoshka dolls into ever more exclusive groups of increasingly smaller numbers of individuals. One could easily be an American Cyborg Catholic Army recruit living across the hall from a
MyndMagick™ "Pure Human" programmer wearing a Yankees t-shirt. Even families could disdain one another based on corporate preference.
An Example
The MyndMagick™ corporation was founded and run for Psychics by Psychics. Insurance, law and financial services, health care, protection, food and clothing, and political guidance were all claimed by the corporation for their members. Citizenship was an issue for nations, but becoming a member became something both similar and yet more fluid—much more easily defined and applied, and just as easily revoked with all of the benefits, responsibilities, and liabilities thereof all legally binding. All decisions of the corporation were performed by a board that was not elected, had no oversight, and was vastly powerful and effective.
If one found themselves in the employment of MyndMagick™ or a Psychic who accepted the corporate board's authority, that person would find themselves superior to the "Pure Human" (for example) whose government was increasingly incapable of providing those same protections and services and even care and sustenance despite living in the same country.
The End of Nature and Evolution
Another response of superiority came with the advancement and perfection of technologies, such as artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, and of great advances in genetic engineering. If Earth was turning against humanity, humanity could fight back. In the face of global warming and pollution came technologies that would keep humans alive, crops growing, and climate manageable. Humans survived sea level rise by moving into the oceans and creating new cities, industries, and nations. The colonization of space, from orbit to the Moon to Mars, started in earnest with robust astronauts capable of withstanding the effects cosmic radiation and weightlessness. Energy extraction came from fusion reactors just like the sun, while comets and asteroids—once feared as a way to end life on earth as it did the dinosaurs—were now being gobbled up to provide rare minerals long depleted back home.
Humanity may have felt abandoned by Mother Earth. So it took Mother Earth by the throat and made nature just another plaything. Even the forces of evolution were tamed. Genetic diseases themselves could be managed and altered. Species that had gone extinct were re-engineered and reintroduced back into the environment, even animals like dinosaurs and fictional creatures like unicorns. It didn't matter if anything was "natural" anymore. If biology didn't work, it was now possible to fix it or throw it away and start again without so much as a care if it fit within the ecosystem. Humans could now build their own damn ecosystems and make them work together.
And even death itself was becoming a non-issue. Between nanotechnology and rapid gene processing and tissue growth, the richest humans could download their consciousness into an electronic matrix and engineer any body they wanted to last as long as possible before doing the whole thing over again.
Symbolism
With the global identity crisis and rally around anything with meaning, the importance of symbols and symbolism skyrocketed. It became very necessary to identify those in your very small "in" group. Icons and symbols helped to do this in an instantaneous way, both on the street and online. One only needed to spot their particular symbol and know instantly that it was an information source they could trust. A string of symbols could also help narrow or bridge similar interests and goals among various groups.
Among the symbols most often seen were religious symbols representing nearly every major religion—popular most among Humans ("Pure" Humans), national flags, seals and symbols, animals, and symbols representing power. Cartoon/manga, pop reference and comic book characters, social media celebrities, and corporate logos and mottoes were also popular. With the ability to cure most diseases and even death, Ancient Egyptian iconography came into vogue along with death imagery such as skulls, the Grim Reaper, and bio-hazard and nuclear radiation signs. Colors and geometric figures also helped distinguish one group from another (e.g. green Earth versus blue Earth).
Symbols also became ways of identifying one sub-species from another. What categorized one as a Cyborg or Adept wasn't whether they had implants or skin grafts. It was whether their microscopic DNA had changed in such a was as to accept one of the particular new technologies of the Twenty-First Century. A particular symbol, along with the nano-sized identifiers hidden in its design, could be used to quickly identify one sub-species from another without having to undergo an invasive medical sampling.
But the newest sign is "§"—which formerly stood simply as an innocuous document section, but has come to symbolize subspeciesism much like the swastika came to symbolize Nazism. Unfortunately, this new sign is gaining popularity.
The Hacker T-Shirt
Many nihilists and resistance to the symbolic zeitgeist expressed their discontent by the "f██king hacker" or "fracking" t-shirt. This style was simple two symbols engaging in some kind of sexual, violent, or dominant-submissive act. These shirts, easy and cheap to make, were deliberately meant to be offensive and ironic, reflecting a rather nihilist, self-centered, ideologically bunkered attitudes of the mid-to-late 21st Century.
Displays
Icons and symbols were displayed nearly everywhere. In social media, they became more important than author bylines. But in addition to t-shirts, jewelry, tattoos, hair styles, and other body adornment blossomed. In an interesting development, tattoo artists were one of the few professions that gained importance as the century unfolded because of the increasing paranoia that a brand, tattoo, or other icon applied by a machine could be a spy device or location tracker used by someone outside of their clique. It wasn't enough to go to just any tattoo artist, but be inked by a certified "Unicorn" or "neo-Hobo" or "Orthodox" tattoo artist. It became an issue of purity.
Religiosity and Religious Fundamentalism
Technology and scientific advancement had continued to make human meaning irrelevant while doing so in the name of serving the very humanity it was replacing. As a response, it is no wonder that the interest in religious movements actually intensified and diversified. The major religions of the previous century had to either adapt or become irrelevant. Vast seismic shifts inside and outside of these religions shook the world. New religions were invented, and ancient once resurfaced when throngs of people could no longer be satisfied with the old answers. Established religions splintered, some embracing technology and others increasingly taking a stand for human rights, decency, and dignity.
Yet even secularism and consumerism didn't suffer when sizable populations abandoned religion altogether and took up secular and atheistic religions. Ideologies became religions themselves (an ironic example being old Soviet Union communism as a religious movement in which both Lenin and Putin were worshiped much like Roman emperors once were). Perhaps the biggest changes came when "natural law" kind of religions, like Buddhism, gained great popularity as unprecedented throngs of people sought to deal with the "attachments" to life in the Twenty-First Century.
Those that embraced religion tended to embrace their particular kind with great fundamentalist, triumphalist fervor. Extremists often committed acts of terrorism against one another with growing regularity. Even non-violent religions threw themselves as martyrs at one another using blockades, sit-ins, and propaganda instead of bombs, bullets and missiles. Using emotional media pieces, entire groups would provoke each other with the losers being the ones breaking their patience first. In some countries, governments and corporations used these nonviolent wars to revoke freedoms of speech, religion, press and assembly, which these groups weaponized for their own purposes against one another.
The Typical Human
In a world of nearly ten billion people, nearly eight billion are alike in the amount of power, ability, and mobility with one another. They have much in common, but so much not in common. There is about a 50% chance a random person on the street is unemployed or self-employed in some kind of gray market. If they are lucky and live in a country that was once democratic (or remains marginally so), they still may have protections and government or corporate support (if a corporation has elected to take over governmental services for a particular population). If they are not lucky, they are either fighting with their neighbor using pointy sticks for whatever limited resources they can get their hands on (which isn't much since their government most likely uses A.I. machines to keep the peace) or their government has implanted them with technologies that modify behavior and instill unquestioning loyalty. If they are extremely unlucky, the local authority is using machines to eliminate these redundant drains on their dwindling resources, interest, and power.
What does one do in a post-scarcity (for some) world when they are bored and have little-to-no ability to gain influence, power, and meaning without either great energy or luck?
If you are H.s.sapiens, you probably struggle with health since your body bears more brunt of ecological change. You cling viciously to whatever religion preaches that at the End of Days, God will destroy every technology and subspecies other than "Pure Humans" and restore Earth to paradise.
If you are a Cyborg (Augment), you are probably more upbeat because you are fused with the technology to do a pretty good job and the nanites in your blood keep you healthy. The same with being an Adept (New Human), only using biological technologies to do similar things. However, both Cyborgs and Adepts may also find themselves without much purpose, employment, or vision and could be just as depressed and nihilistic as a Pure Human, especially if they find themselves in the local subspecies minority.
If you are a Psychic or a subspecies employed by MyndMagick™, you have the added benefit of an organization dedicated towards your well-being. Also, as part of a system that defies the very laws of time and physics, you may have more of a sense of control over the fate of humanity. On the other hand, MyndMagick™ has always been a very tightly controlled and secretive organization for various reasons (history has countless incidents of everything from discrimination to outright genocide of Psychics). So, you either may chafe under the yoke and nearly omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent eye of the organization, or you live in a place still hostile to Psychics.
If you are one of the Outcasts, your life is probably pretty miserable. If you are a Mutant, you probably suffer from something biological worse than a so-called "Pure Human". No wonder most of you believe in the Outcast Manifesto and Morpheus. Survival is a very potent source of meaning. If you are a Vampire, you are also openly hunted by MyndMagick™ with the blessing of the other non-Outcast subspecies. Even if you are, you may be morally opposed to hunting other subspecies for food and consider yourself a "Vegan Vampire" in which you are also hunted by the not-so-moral Vampires. And if you are a Zombie, you may not even have the luxury of thinking or feeling anything...or maybe you do but there's not a thing you can do about living in a perpetual nightmare.
As with most humans throughout human history, much of one's attitude depends on what they choose to focus on. Some simply give up even this ability and let their non-Singularity artificial intelligence helper dose them regularly with mood-altering medications, planning, and psychological encouragements. Quite a number find meaning and purpose in the fight against the Technological Singularity, and still others in the organizational, nationalist, philosophical, religious, corporate or other identity of their choosing.
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