The Music of Creation and Destruction

Today, I'm writing from Citta Mall, which I am quite fond of because it's a relatively quiet mall with a lot of outdoor eating tables where I could sit with a book or computer. But since it's a pretty warm day today, I decided to sit inside the air-conditioned cafe to summon the Muse.

I'm feeling very relaxed today after a short busy week, spent catching up on work. I believe I have mentioned somewhere in this blog before how social media is an amplifier of the good and the bad. For the past weeks, the world has been discussing the assassination of the American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

The shooter, who is now in custody is a 22-year old by the name of Tyler Robinson.  His true motives have not been fully revealed yet but in text conversations with his room-mate, who asked why he had committed the act, he was quoted as saying: "I had enough of his hatred...Some hate can't be negotiated out".

Why had he felt such 'hatred' from someone he has probably never met or talk to before? Most likely he had been exposed to Charlie's right-wing rhetoric through social media. Charlie has a daily podcast and had many live events debating those who disagree with him.  I'm sure many of us in this part of the world had never heard of Charlie Kirk before his horrific assassination. 

I follow US politics very closely and I fully understand the sentiment from both sides of the aisle. This so-called hatred that exists between the left and the right has never been amplified to such a magnitude before. The algorithms of social media has bifurcated society into two extreme camps, simply because we had allowed our attention to be consumed by the personalised content pushed to us.

 Whether we are left or right leaning, we'll be served content that reinforces our biases all day. Addiction to social-media is in some ways worse than being a drug junkie. The former transforms you very subtly into a bigoted extremist holding a single viewpoint with zero capacity for nuance; the latter simply destroys your body and soul. 

Rather than dying slowly from a drug addiction, you are instead transformed into a TikTok-infected zombie carrying a binary view of the world: extreme left or right. zero or one. We have now carried the digitisation process from our information technology into the social realm. We no longer see the varying shades of grey: either you are with us or against us.

How do we rectify this? Unfortunately, the genie is already out of the bottle. In a way, it's part of the inevitable evolution of technology and society. The universe is dispassionate. It has no obligations to us humans. But one thing's for sure, all cycles exhaust themselves ultimately. Oscillations will dampen; new tensions will build up elsewhere and a fresh round of thesis-vs-antithesis begins again. Yes, Hegel was right. It's the basic dynamic of the universe. I see it as the Nataraja, dancing to the music of creation and destruction.