Age Of Regression Upon Us

On the threshold of Neo-Luddism, and other things.

The other day I stumbled into a Walmart for the first time in many moons, and was awestruck to see the music section converted into a wall of vinyl records. Must be some sort of vintage sales gimmick, thought I. But upon closer inspection, I discovered these were new releases, of every conceivable genre and artist. And to boot, being offered up right next to it, were brand new record players. Not those cheap electronic knock-offs with circular touchpads modern DJ’s use to mimick record scratches—but actual, real-minted, newly-produced record players. Sure, they were embellished with a skin of splashy modern design—but they were record players, nonetheless. Had I stepped through a portal into the ‘70s?

Coincidentally, just two days prior I’d seen this article about Metallica having purchased their own personal vinyl pressing plant, in light of surging vinyl sales. In fact, in recent times vinyl has surpassed the sale of CD’s for the first time since 1987.

A recent report by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) stated that the vinyl industry in the US rose by 17% in 2022, amounting to over $1.2 billion in revenue. In that same timespan, vinyl outsold CDs by 41 million copies to 33 million. CD revenue, meanwhile, is down 18% to $483 million.

We’ve likely all read those announcements, but I hadn’t expected to see it so viscerally thrust in my face. In fact, this was in effect the only music section in the entire store. No other real physical music media of any sort are sold these days, since everything has gone to digital downloads or streaming.

And we’ve all heard over the years of vinyl’s growing resurgence, particularly during the ‘hipster era’ of the 2010s. But it was usually under the sway of irony, a little inside joke or chic hipster accessory and aesthetic.

The vinyl album was developed in 1948, and soon became the standard of the industry.  Thirty-eight years later, 1986, CD’s passed vinyl in sales, and held that position for thirty-four years, until 2020.

But to see something developed in 1948 have such an actual ‘non-ironic’ front-and-center placement as the centerpiece of a Walmart section was quite something else.

It led me to thinking. A lot of things in our present age feel like they’re arching back onto themselves, a sort of cultural ouroboros. Sure, you say, every age and cultural moment is littered with these ‘retro’ movements of isolated regression; there will always be some segment of society looking back toward the idealized ‘better days’.

But in our current era, there’s a host of objective data and statistics pointing to it being more than just the usual breezy crosswinds of societal sentimentality.

Take, for instance, the fact that today’s youth are actually trending toward a sort of comparative Puritanism from the standpoint of previous generations.

They’re having less intercourse, drinking less, fighting less, and the biggest shocker of all—according to some studies, they’re even more technologically averse. Or perhaps a more accurate way to put it would be: they’re more technologically cynical, less trusting of tech’s hold on their lives, have more privacy concerns than previous generations.

This explains the vast exoduses seen from Facebook—which was considered too ‘open’, where parents and other ‘cliques’ could track your life—to other platforms that feel more homey and private.

Beyond that, we can feel the echoes of the sentiment in society at large. Particularly since the last few years, where Big Tech has truly reared its ugly head and doffed its mask (no pun intended), many now rightfully feel that everything from Big Tech, to Big Healthcare, to Big Government can’t be trusted.

But these are all jejune observations. Where am I going with this?

In many previous eras, at the point of some great technological dawn, a dubious and skeptical contingent has always existed to push back. The ones who follow the third path, who want to turn back toward the forest, to re-wild humanity to its roots.

But I believe the era on whose cusp we now sit is unique in one specific way. In that, never before have these sentiments converged with a looming, potential technological dark age. What do I mean by ‘dark age’? In the phatic, emotional sense—‘dark’ as an expression of cynical opinion? No, I mean dark as in the trends outlined in my previous article. The headwinds of a failing global financial system and the economic, technological ills associated with such a decline.

This sympathetic convergence creates a sort of fallow field for a societal sentiment shift toward turning away from technology. The resource-rich corporations will continue pushing toward newfangled innovations, but the public appears less and less suggestible to their wiles, amenable to their tech pitches.

The recent high-stakes flop of Meta being just one in a long line of examples. Facebook leveraged everything onto that golden goose, only to learn—in spectacular fashion—that the people really had no appetite for the vaunted “virtual world”, particularly one populated by creepy Big Tech Hall Monitors, GroupThink enforcement, and WokeAgenda programming. Previous attempts at ‘the next big breakthrough’, like ‘Google Glass’, similarly resulted in abject failure and total floppery.

Remember this? It promised to ‘revolutionize the world’.

Of course, the transnational intelligentsia class has made a habit of betraying the underclass, for many generations. But we live in the first such generation where their betrayals play out ‘on the big screen’ for all to see.

Think back to previous decades: to get abreast of the goings-on behind the scenes of global power politics, one had to make efforts in seeking out the most obscure volumes, in the remotest corners; the Eustace Mullins and other pied pipers of shadowed knowledge. But these days we’re all audience to the most rarefied and withheld of mysteries at the touch of a button.

The democratization of citizen journalism coupled with the internet has allowed us to peel back the curtain on a mass scale for the first time. This has led to the normalization and acclimatization to the inner workings of the world at such a degree and scale that public distrust of all institutions is now innately reflexive.

Any new gadget or technological breakthrough, particularly when coupled with some institutional cachet, is now routinely viewed with the same heightened distrust which caused Meta to become a -700b trainwreck.

In his brilliant article, author Dr. James Alexander envisions the following explanation for the crisis of today:

1. Through all ages there has been a balance of spirituality and secularity. In our modernity, secularity is dominant. There is only this world.

2. For three or so centuries we have believed that this world is getting better and should get better. This is the ‘myth of progress’.

3. There was always disagreement about progress: some supposed it was happening as a result of accident and individual interest; others supposed it could only happen as a result of deliberate design.

He goes on to theorize a fourth codicil, which states that the global elites have fused the previously held beliefs of progress happening serendipitously with a new moral tyranny of ‘directed progress’ by those who claim the scientific and moral right to be humanity’s helmsmen.

In essence, the modern age has devolved into a cult of moralizing science-based tyranny. The ruling class believe they should control humanity’s progress and very direction, based on their having the moral and ‘empirical justification’ to do so.

The Altar of the Empiricist Cult.

The age of postmodernism rejected the classical ideals of grand narratives or ‘meta-narratives’; that is, beliefs that our world can be described by one consistent, overarching transcendent or ‘universal truth’.

What we were left with was a vacuum. Dr. James Alexander described the classic balance between the spiritual and secular that previous societies had maintained. But the spirituality of religion was one of the ‘meta-narratives’ effaced by our postmodern age, leaving only the secular, the worldly, the peremptorily Empirical to occupy the throne.

Sensing the power vacuum of this imbalance, the string-pullers of the ‘empirical’ clan filled the void by restructuring our world into a ‘cult of science’ as new religion. Global institutions, operating under the aegis of the ‘empirical mandate’ began to believe only they know what is right for humanity, and ipso facto they should have the power to steer the world’s course.

Under these pretenses, the twentieth century was characterized by a slow coalescence of international institutions into what we know today as the globalist power structure; the WHO, WEF, etc.

What is interesting is how closely their grip on power mirrors the struggles of the Church during the Middle Ages. One of the chief catalysts for the Protestant Reformation which split the Church in the 1500s, was the idea that the common man should have access to the ‘Written Holy Word’ of God.

The Bible was not a book the general public was familiar with. It was not a book most individuals or families could own. There were pulpit Bibles usually chained to the pulpit; there were manuscripts of Bibles in monasteries; there were Bibles owned by kings and the socially elite. But the Bible was not a book possessed by many.

The religious institution of the day held its grip on power by literally monopolizing access to the sacred knowledge, which only they could ‘own’, translate, and dispense out to the rabble. It meant control.

The revolution came when the bible was translated into the common tongue, and distributed to people in their homes, such that they no longer had a need for the ‘institution’ of the Church. It logically follows that if you no longer have a need to go to the Church in order to commune with God, then you no longer need to ‘tithe’ them for their services either. The middle man was cut out.

Similarly today, the Empirical Cultists keep their grip on power—and relevance—by lustfully clinging to the sacred knowledge of ‘The Science’, which you are forbidden from questioning. And just like in the 1500s, when the bible was literally chained to the pulpit of the church, they do everything in their power to lock away the Key, by concealing and repressing the true information of this ‘science’ from public access. There is only an opaque wall—total non-transparency of what they do behind the scenes. We are merely supposed to sit back, watch their practiced hand-waves and then accept the results pulled out of the hat, whatever they may be.

But once more, we face a great schism, not unlike the Reformation. The internet, for all its ills, has democratized the ‘hidden knowledge’ in a way resembling the distribution of the sacred bible of Martin Luther’s days. The people, thirsty and acquisitive for the truth, now have access—at least in part—to the Holy Word of the Techno-Empiricists, cutting out the third man entirely, obsoleting the parasitic priest-class whose job it is to ‘interpret the truth’ for us from its opaque source.

So where does that leave us? Distrustful, skeptical, cynical of all things institutionalized. Just as the parishioner who, now able to read the bible’s words for himself for the first time, has come to realize that ‘God’ never in fact demanded his pecuniary absolutions that the priest so adamantly claimed, now too the humble kitchen wife can discern for herself, what’s best for her kids’ and family’s health.

From every conceivable standpoint, in today’s society we find that the techno-corporate squatters who’ve positioned themselves as indispensable ‘middle men’ between ourselves and free knowledge—in whatever form it takes—have become totally expendable archaic holdovers, as the average person now has the capacity to go ‘directly to the source’, judging and interpreting it for himself.

Like an un-watered weed, these parasitic squatters will have no choice but to slowly wither and die away in the coming age of Technological Regression. Just look at CNN, for instance—exposed as a charlatan network, stripped of all its trust, it now finds itself slowly etiolating, losing influence, power, status as the ‘esoteric interpreter’ of the holy gospel of truth.

But back to the fortuitous convergence which began this digression: this historic loss of institutional trust is now on a momentous collision course with long-term economic downtrends which are destined to cramp technological progress in the coming years. The fusion of the two stands to potentially induct an ‘Age of Technological Regression’—a growing society of the disaffected who look at each new tech advance with a cynical and wary eye, defiant and resistant to ‘innovation’ shepherded by an elite class of corrupt, decaying, faithless, and increasingly out of touch institutions.

The truth is, every age seems fraught with similar pregnant moments—history spins on like a vinyl record, after all. Those 1970s were a time much likened to ours, a cross-convergence of economic malaise with a post-war generation future-shocked and bedeviled by the sudden technological and cultural imperatives which seemed to promise a descent into some dystopian Philip K. Dick-inspired dream.

But, lacking that free access to information we have today, the ‘70s could not have reached the same level of institutional distrust, that unprecedented and historic critical mass we see today. Despite the odd snarky misgivings or steamed uproar at the growing immorality, the average blue-collar worker would still plop down on their Sears catalog-purchased couch at the end of the day and tune into their Chet Huntley or Cronkite, and all would be all right.

The world was once more at peace.

Nor did they have social media, to bounce around each new objection or angering observation, snowballing them into a crescendo of rebel discontent.

But today feels different—a point of no return has been reached. A growing critical mass, a Singularity of Discontent. There is no more forgiveness and conciliatory ‘tuning in’ to the Same Old Program. Furthermore, most of the important tech innovations these days either serve only the growing ruling class, or conversely, serve to harm the average citizen. Think of the ‘50s, the weekly catalogs of home improvement innovations, World Fairs filled with gadgets to make the domestic life less burdensome.

What are the top innovations of the past few years? Things like Space-X, which has no meaning for the daily lives of the average citizen, things like the ‘Co-Vax’, which only served to sicken the average citizen and divide society. Flying cars and specialty delivery drones which will be used by the wealthy upper-crust—same goes for the Tesla self-driving cars and other things out of reach of the average struggling worker. A.I., which has arguably done more harm than good by taking jobs under the guise of ‘streamlining industries’, which is just a nice way of saying: making the human element in the ‘production line’ redundant and disposable.

One can easily accuse such slants as having been made through ‘rose-tinted glasses’, in the age-old extolment of things long past, in favor of modern excesses. And it’s a valid point, perhaps. But can one intrepid soul name a single recent innovation which serves the average burgher—QVC-style gewgaws like ShamWow™ notwithstanding—rather than the increasingly detached wealth-hoarding Ruling Class?

Admittedly, these could be reactionary thoughts. Maybe progress and innovation will infact continue unimpeded, unchecked, even as financial institutions serving the supply chains underlying that progress crumble around us. After all, during the Great Depression, scientific and technological achievements lumbered along unabated, or so it seemed. But there’s good chance we’ll be witness to at least an era of Regression, be it short or long.

In the meantime, a little old-fashioned vinyl fidelity is a welcome thing. Maybe within the coming regression, humanity will, for the first time in a long time, find a rare balance between the novel and the proven, the celestial and temporal.

---

Tip Jar

---