What are people doing?
Something weird is going on. Maybe you’ve noticed. People are dropping out of the labor force. There are lots of jobs that are unfilled. Lots of construction work is going on all over the place. Lots of office buildings and homes being built. But it will be empty because office work is not really part of the future, and more and more people are unemployable because of new technologies replacing them. And most people don’t have the kinds of jobs anymore that will allow them to get approved for a mortgage. What are people doing? They aren’t working in the jobs that are available, so what are they doing?
They aren’t online as much either. Even TikTok, the one social media app that has been growing like crazy the last couple of years, is slowing down. Hollywood movies are way less popular than before, with big tentpole movies bombing all summer. People aren’t watching that. Big buzzy shows aren’t as popular as they used to be—HBO’s The Idol was supposed to be the big show of the summer, but it fizzled.
Maybe it’s part of the demographic shift: not as many babies are being born, and people are dying earlier. Those are very serious things, and they have social manifestations. The species, at least in the USA, is in some kind of definite death spiral. Society has clearly had nothing to offer the mass of people for a long time now, so lots of people have decided to just not be part of it. There is a massive contraction happening in real terms—but at the same time, capitalism is all about expansion, so this contradiction is strange. The system has to keep growing, or seem like it’s growing, even though in real, human terms, there’s a contraction happening. And also the nature of the digital age is for everything to seem limitless and huge. But the human core sustaining all of this is shrinking and shrinking. This is the very definition of a bubble—but this isn’t just an economic bubble like we have seen before (although that is part of it). It is a social, cultural, even existential bubble—the human material which generates the whole edifice of civilization is wasting away, but the edifice keeps growing bigger and more complex.