Internet and democracy

There is a lot I want to say about this topic. This is just a taste test.

I remember when I watched curiosity, a NASA rover, land on Mars in 2012. I thought it was so cool that a machine built by fleshy humans was blasted from one tiny planet to another tiny planet. In my mind it was the perfect example of how humanity had adjusted it's focus, zooming out to see the infinitely complex and beautiful universe around us. That feeling was short lived. Shortly after the touch down was declared a success, a NASA employee was the focus of every news channel, YouTube video and Facebook post I could find. He had worn an inappropriate shirt with pictures of sexy women on it during an interview and was being accused of sexism. I don't remember all the details, but I do remember it devolving into a controversial issue, which generated & spread a lot of emotion around the internet. I remember feeling so disheartened that humanity had instantly snapped back to it's zoomed in view of the world. I also wondered whether the future would be any different.

Well here we are, 2020, literally 1 month until the launch of the next NASA rover, Perseverance. There are so many things to be excited about. For starters, this next mission will involve a land rover and a tiny helicopter called ingenuity. This is amazing! A helicopter flying on another planet that has almost no atmosphere! Yet a part of me is already disheartened. I'm bracing for the moment when humanity misses another chance to wake up and really open it's eyes. We're all so zoomed in. I see increasingly more of my friends take to social media to scream into a virtual whirlwind. We're all so opinionated about controversial moral subjects that have relatively negligible moral importance. There's a viscous part of 21st century technology that plays with our primitive psychology, perpetually distracting and polarizing us.

I'm bracing myself for the emotional shock of witnessing Ingenuity starting spinning it's blades for the first time, only for me to notice in my periphery that the following 15 recommended videos are about the TV host not being black.