Written with: Various devices | Notes | Various operating systems

A short thought, only half formal, barely long enough for a post.

Does anyone else get the sense that humanity is trying to give up on pattern recognition?

Falling educational funding and de-emphasis on the arts is one thing, crippling our ability to understand the complex, interconnected links and signifiers of human culture - and, by extension, the symbols and signs of history and society.

But then there are active attempts to entrench this, like the algorithms: automated sorting machines, making half-assed attempts through "neural" “learning” to categorise all that we have built, and worse, make AI-generated content (ambitiously called “art”) off the back of its findings.

No wonder, maybe, that conspiracy theorists run amok, desperate for a sense of meaning and connectedness denied to them. Tying world events to One True Enemy is a lot simpler. You could also argue that youth culture is going in a similar direction, with the anti-intellectualism of the TikTok generation leading to an emphasis on "vibes" rather than actual structural analysis.

I don't mean to be doom and gloom about this; I'm not so confident as to say nothing can be done. I'm also not so sure this is a problem unique to this one moment in human history. You could even argue the tension between our need to make sense of the connections between things, and the temptation to give up, settling on an easier answer, is a permanent struggle for human society. But it does feel like an explanation for a few of the problems human culture now struggles with.

It may be tempting to brand these things as individual failures at times - as fools falling for lies and scams, victims of their own ignorance alone. And to be clear, there is some level where individual responsibility must be taken into account. But I’ve been increasingly tempted to believe many such "individual" tendencies are linked to larger cultural movements, and by extension, the changing tides of human history.

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