Last night I watched Idiocracy. Despite the exaggerated satire, I felt there is no other movie that relates to the situation and direction the world is heading to. If you look around you will find evidence everywhere. From quality of education to popular TV shows to the sheer incompetence of the financial and healthcare systems. Whether it is profit driven greedy corporations bombarding senseless advertising to every demographic, or stupid people breeding like rats, it is evident that the human race as a whole is getting no smarter.
Look at the senseless media explosion and the priorities of news consumption by the masses. A celebrity scandal is perceived to be ten times more important than the serious geographical, social, political and economic issues we face today. Why ? Because the former is a no-brainer entertainment while the latter demands some maturity. It is all about popular culture now. The government does not care since the big guys are well fed by the profit making corporations and can woefully ignore the smart and geek minority.
Creative destruction is rampant in the modern technology world as well. Social networks, facebook, twitter. Everyone is busy doing status updates of the most trivial things in their lives. It is a big cacophony. No one listens. No one has any attention span anymore. How important you are is proportional to how many followers you have. And anyone who has a decent number of followers is a “guru” or a “ninja”. It is unlike anything we have ever seen.
Look at all the usability initiatives that go so far as to make common sense optional. Everything should be so easy that even a caveman can do it. There you go. Products and services must be made to appeal to the dumbest people on earth. And then there is the biggest joke of legal machinery here in the west. Fine prints everywhere to prevent lawsuits for when people hurt themselves by accident or by lack of common sense. Beware, the knife is sharp. Beware, the coffee is hot enough to burn your skin. Beware, you can fall from the ladder. You get it. How about a generic “Beware, you can possibly kill yourself if you are stupid enough to be omitted by natural selection” label in anything and everything ? Ok, I digress.
When I look at the kids here in the west it makes me sad. No genuine curiosity, no manners, no respect for elders. Despite free public schools, the abysmally low standard of curriculum and lack of discipline from parents are making them far from the generation we need in the future. The amount of tax money that goes to pay for the wasteful education system here is just incredible. The developing countries are catching up as well. It makes me feel incredibly lucky to have grown up in a small place, with strict discipline and some real education. I actually had to work hard to get into one of the best undergrad colleges in the country. The entrance exam was one of the most difficult in the whole world. But, as I found out later, those tests are significantly diluted by now to bring average students with money to fill up increased seats and new colleges. It is downright disappointing.
Sometimes I think we humans are just another species who are on this planet for a limited length of time. Our collective intelligence might already have peaked a few years back. And while we still produce newer technologies, the proportion of smart people is dwindling in our societal system. Idiocracy could be awfully accurate. I just hope I won’t be there when the tipping point is reached.
Relevant reads:
Worldwide dumbing down: it’s happening
Dumbing down: the awful truth
#1 by Francesco Gallarotti on April 20, 2010 - 5:32 pm
“Accept certain inalienable truths, prices will rise, politicians will
philander, you too will get old, and when you do you’ll fantasize
that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were
noble and children respected their elders. Respect your elders.”
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen#Baz_Luhrmann_version )
#2 by Naveen Bachwani on April 20, 2010 - 9:16 pm
A little pessimistic, but an interesting read. I agree in parts to your argument that some of the world is “dumbing down”, but in other ways, we’re also getting smarter on the whole.
Technology is smarter today, mobile phones are getting location aware, content is getting context aware, today’s kids have unimaginable access to info and are smarter than kids of earlier generations… even today’s grandparents have learned to harness the power of Google.
The point is our world view will shape our world.
#3 by MonkeyTale on April 21, 2010 - 1:38 am
Great post, thanks for the link.
Idiocracy is one of those films that just clicked with me when I saw it. As stated in my post, I am pretty sure dumbing down is happening en masse.
What you said about the media ignoring important events but sucking up celebrity piffle is certainly true. The other day I read online about some mysterious radio waves that have been discovered in space – scientists can’t fathom out what is causing them, but what is known is that the object generating them is travelling at 4 times the speed of light, thank about that for a moment – possibly using some kind of space warping phenomenon to do this – i.e. like on star trek….this is from the New Scientist:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18775-mysterious-radio-waves-emitted-from-nearby-galaxy.html?DCMP=OTC-rss
So was this featured on the news on TV? Was there an emergency broadcast interrupting the latest incarnation of a formulaic celebrity show? No, of course not…
#4 by therider on April 21, 2010 - 2:15 am
Naveen, technology alone will not do much I think. The awesome technologies we have today are in fact making the new generation lazy. Thanks to google and hi-tech cellphones, learning the hard way is not much appealing to today’s students. Add to it the grades inflation, you will find most kids are scoring A’s and passing all kinds of entrance exams, but they are not necessarily getting smarter than what we were at their age. Common sense, maturity and the simple concept of stop-and-think is slowly vanishing everywhere.
#5 by therider on April 21, 2010 - 2:20 am
MonkeyTale, interesting news indeed. I would hazard a guess that it was not shown on TV because some bullshit like Letterman or Jay Leno show was on.
#6 by Kedar Subramanian on April 22, 2010 - 3:03 am
Though provoking indeed… Well, I think all commercial inventions and innovations have been made with the objective to make life more comfortable… I don’t think that necessarily translates into making us more ‘dumb’!
The Web is acting like a global mind and helping us to learn, interact and have fun. But it can’t make us become ‘better’ individuals which is what I think you wanted to imply in this post…
I can’t agree with you more that values and ethics are most important today than ever before and that’s something which no gadget can ever help us imbibe !!
#7 by Swetali on April 22, 2010 - 5:29 am
I agree with you. World is indeed dumbing down slowly. I haven’t seen Idiocracy but whatever i see around in everyday life makes me crazy at times.
We do use latest gadgets and technology to the very best and always try to upgrade ourselves to the newest ones wherein you can still survive with the ones sufficient enough to suffice our needs.
Just for example yesterday the i was in a meeting for 2 hrs which introduced us to yet another reporting tool used in financial services industry which did the the same as of the previous one but with some extra features so that anyone can use it to design/build client reports.
Truly speaking with every enhancement they make, a good amount of thinking is put in it to make it easy to use but actually speaking users have stopped thinking. When we support these users i come across so many clients who just refuse to use any commonsense even to use such user friendly tools.
In short, there will always be things to do around in a BETTER way to make it a BETTER place to live in. so don’t worry Joy, tipping point won’t be reached so soon.
Life is still beautiful, Enjoy it!
#8 by Lig on April 26, 2010 - 11:52 am
Totally agree on the situation we have at hand. Got any solutions? Less breeding?
#9 by paawun on May 9, 2010 - 8:28 am
This post echoed a lot with how I feel about such things…though I found it a bit depressing too naturally. Wish I could figure out something ..that could be a game changer. A very rigourous, marks driven study curriculum is also not the right answer, as it was in place and it did not survive! So obvioulsy, it worked for some and not for many..but don’t know the answer!
#10 by paawun on May 9, 2010 - 8:34 am
As for the population explosion..it is directly proportional as I have begun to realize to levels of poverty and neglect. Those who can survive on merely nothing, breed and breed and breed (may be mindlessly, or maybe they feel they can find strength in numbers..who knows) because, they don’t worry how the kids will live. They find they could survive on next to nothing, and they let the children survive similarly. And when people are born to so much abject poverty, many of their sensitivities are dead. Not in their DNA even I guess. And from generation to generation the survivor gene becomes stronger. Eradicating poverty is the only answer but how is the unanswerable question. A well to do person, worries how he/she will give their children a good quality life. THEY THINK before having each kid, in majority of the cases…but the parasite types, who are used to someone always picking after them…and who have no qualms of using resources earned by anyone else..well they breed. It’s a good time pass for them I guess!
#11 by James on June 12, 2011 - 6:16 am
Hi Joy, I’ve just started a blog as have found myself slipping into the bad habbits, and trying to get myself out of the same rut as the rest of my generation. Facebook has a lot to answer for. Teaching is no longer the exciting field it once was, why would someone with genuine passion and talent want to turn it to a group of people who are uninspired and unmotivated. At that, being underpaid for the privelage of teaching a mass of people who will devote more attention to their Facebook feeds than further their own development. Education and Society needs to be completely rethought and retaught to be of any benefit. Passion and interest needs to be taught, for people to javascript:jQuery(‘#commentform’).submit();want to educate themselves.