The New Yorker asks, “The Terrible Twenties? The Assholocene? What to Call Our Chaotic Era?” It’s a damn good question. Some outtakes.
“Online life has befuddled more than enlightened us. The New Dark Age is “an age in which the value we have placed upon knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that profitable commodity,”
…
“She traces the dawn of the Age of Unhingement to the election of Donald Trump, but sees its true expression in post-pandemic times, as we’ve been confronted with the realization that there are more horrors to come, and there is little sense of normalcy to return to.”
…
“The modern era, the long twentieth century, offered a kind of teleology of progress, a line on a chart going upward and to the right. Systems worked; certain logical frameworks—for markets, for politics, for labor—reasonably applied. “What if the gravitational center is just kind of lost?” Tooze asked. “There isn’t any longer that anchoring; we drift in a permanent state of being out of equilibrium.” Defining any kind of era implies that the era may at some point come to a close and make way for another coherent stretch of time. Tooze told me that he tries to resist that kind of “stability thinking.” Our current age is not dark; it may simply not be an age in the first place, because a linear, finite period of historical time may be an outmoded framework for our current reality—in which case, the scariest part would be that it doesn’t require a name at all. We just have to live through it”