By Ruby Nell Sales ‘98
Sojourners, how many of you feel unsteady in your soul from loneliness, low-grade depression, and suffering that you keep private and hold tightly and secretly? Do you pretend that life is amazing despite feeling low levels of depression, loneliness, unsteadiness, alienation, and anxiety, and growing feelings of irrelevance? Are you besieged with a creeping sense of loss and grief? Do you long for a community of reaffirmation and intimacy where you can talk openly and honestly without being judged in a TikTok society of winners and losers?
Do you feel as if you are swept up in the vortex of a mighty speedball with changes happening so fast that you can’t keep up? Do you feel powerless to advocate for yourself and others in a technocracy of chatbots, automated voices, astroturfing, and paid influencers? Or do you simply feel numb?
Sojourners, you are not alone. Your feelings are a natural response to the expansive and unprecedented changes that we are undergoing. We are in the midst of a 21st century technocracy that is propelled by sweeping socio-spiritual changes without boundaries or life-affirming ethics. These changes are moving so rapidly that our inner lives cannot process the socio-spiritual, economic, and political meaning of the moment. These all-encompassing changes bring out the best and worst of our appetites and habits of being.
Indeed, something big is happening in the world that is changing the nature of what it means to be wholly human. These unprecedented reconfigurations are building a new social order that subsists on displacement, human irrelevancy, and disposability. Within this social order very few lives matter, and Black, Brown, and Indigenous lives of color matter least of all.
Economists and social scientists agree that we have moved into another phase of industrialization, which they name the Fourth Industrial Revolution. When it began in the 1950’s, it ushered in a new socioeconomic and political world order where information theory and digitization expanded and accelerated the production, distribution, and storage of information.