This is the second time in 24 hours that I have seen a reference to the current era as “apocalyptic.”*
No. This is not the apocalpyse. “Apocalypse” means “apocalypse,” just as “literally” means “literally” and “complete” means “complete.”
In the current crisis:
- A lot of people have lost their jobs.
- A few big companies have disappeared.
- A lot of people and organizations have less money to spend.
- A lot of people are suffering extremely painful disruptions.
but …
- There have been few direct fatalities (excepting perhaps the poor guy who was friends with Bernie Madoff); compare this to World War II with 150M dead.
- Not one jot or mote of physical infrastructure has been destroyed — in fact, we are about to build a whole bunch of new infrastructure.
- No species have been made extinct, no forests have been laid waste, no crops have been sown with salt.
- Not one byte or scintilla of human knowledge has been lost.
To be sure, as the recession deepens, there will be further direct fatalities and continued real suffering. But the point is that most of the damage is not occurring in the physical layer of the world. Rather, this is a disruption in the social abstraction that v2.0 chimps use to manage resources.
This is not the end of capitalism or the beginning of socialism.
This is not The Great Disruption or the Inflection Point.
This is a period of rapid change in our social abstractions, and humans are fearful of change.
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