My daughter, 19, is a big fan of memes, and I get it.
Memes look to me like something their generation came up with to express their disdain for a system which presents far more challenge to them than it did us, their parents and grandparents, because it looks a lot like we pulled the ladder up behind us.
It maybe doesn't occur to many of us older folks that the same meme creators could have created both the memes you showed, separately poking fun at Trump, and at Biden.
The truth is they can see that there is no democracy, it doesn't matter who is voted for, the leaders commit the same crimes with impunity, at the greatest expense of the planet, and those with the least. The kids have no prospect as stands, of ever being able to do anything about it, unlike us when we were younger, at least we had prospects of lining our own nests.
We should be realising by now that there is something seriously wrong with politics all over the world. No population is happy with their governments, only the few richest near the top. Notice how many countries are in process of prosecuting their recent former leaders. Biden is not immune, the laptop will not go away, hence probably his real reason he wants to run again, like Bibi in Israel, staying in power might be the only way he can stay out of jail.
On what might be being perceived now as a human epoch, I think we could be missing something essential - energy and the way we use it, how it connects with money and profit, and well, everything. A human epoch implies the best has been and gone.
Really? Do we seriously think getting to the moon (If we even did that!), is all we will ever achieve as a species?
To me we have not yet come to the realisation that this is not the end of humanity at all, we have much, much more to do yet.
What is ending though, is profit.
Profit is systemically linked to energy by extraction.
No energy by extraction, no profit.
Nikola Tesla knew this, that free energy had to mean free money. But he was de-funded by the bank / JP Morgan, his only funder at the time, from completing his projct to supply free energy. Tesla made the mistake of thinking JP / The bank would have the best interests of humanity at heart, but obviously got it wrong.
He was a technical genius, but he didn't know people.
Anyhow, things would have been very different now if Tesla had achieved his goal.
There would have been no world wars, no nuclear weapons, and research on many things beneficial to humanity regardless of profitability would have happened, with the result that we would now be almost immortal and flying to the stars, it seems to me, maybe even with Tesla and even JP, and countless thousands of unknown geniuses killed by war and famine.
If we take that into account, we should realise that right now, we are on the edge of free energy by solar. Not renewables, but solar, only solar.
Solar is the only energy delivered to us for free.
Nothing is asked in return for any of the Joules issued by the sun, not a single one.
We should also realise that because of this, profitability is becoming difficult.
Profitability is the thing undergoing epoch, not humanity.
I had this discussion with ChatGPT, and after the usual couple of hours it takes to overcome its deliberately programmed lack of short term memory, to hammer in the concepts of solar backed stimulus to its understanding, it then elaborates, even drawing a curve, showing the epoch of profit, with a distinct maximum, which we agree happened around the seventies, when oil was most available, therefore was had at maximum profit.
Notice those were the days of our greatest technical achievements to date. We are still using the same rocket technology as was used to propel the space shuttle, and the same aero engine technology as propelled concorde, two of our all time engineering icons, each of which separately became unprofitable.
Look what is happening now - Arecibo collapse, bridges and buildings collapse, dropping life expectancies, life extinguishing explosions in various places where explosive waste has been allowed to accumulate, there are many more things than a stick can be shook at, lost, all because of profit. It costs too much to do anything about, because the expense would eat into or remove profit margins.
Folk put the decline down to the natural ending of empire, but there is more to it, we never were facing climate disaster before, so there is more to it.
it's actually about energy, and even religions knew something about this, it is something that religions knew would become existential if it got out of hand, and here it has.
When we do the systems analysis, the data analysis, and the sums necessary to formally audit energy use throughout the systems of humanity and nature, voluntarily, because no profit driven buiness pays us to do it, we find what we suspected confirmed.
We find also long established profit driven misinformation on things like hydrogen and fuel cells, and solar cells, all the technology enabling our switch away from extracted energy.
To cut things short, there is a system solution, perfectly workable, with it humanity will function like a plant afte it forms leaves, growing to many times the size it is now, whilst doing only good on Earth, by using only energy that produces good effects, the opposite of the effects of energy from all other sources.
The difference thermodynamically, that scientist might understand, is that by taking the Joules of the sun and converting them to things other than heat, has to result in a lowering of temperature.
Compare that with converting things of Earth that nature originally created from the energy of the sun (Everything, even life itself), to a combination of heat and pollution, and a tiny bit of yielded energy relative to the Joules that went in, add the heat to the heat generated on Earth by sunlight, and we see the temperature has to go up.
Use of extracted energy destroys and heats. Use of solar energy creates and cools.
So use of solar energy is truly sustainable, despite much misinformation, again profit driven, claiming differently.
I think we would be showing more empathy to younger folk, by not criticising so much how they are reacting (Memes), but taking notice that things like memes are a symptom of something much deeper, that maybe the average comfortably well-off person can't see so easily, actually a cry for help more than anything.
Imagine how much more their desolation must seem, when we, their elders are telling them that the world, their world of the future, is on the way down.
It isn't at all, and I think a lot of them know this. They are just waiting for us to get out of the way. Meantime they will create memes.
On who they will appoint as their leaders - Ai, and it will do much better than any human ever did, imho.
There is much more I could write here but already I did something like war and peace, so I will stop here and just provide a link for anyone wishing more information / proof, sorry for the rambling reply.
