What If Social Media, AI, and Digital Communications Are Like Clean Water?
Constant controversy, fears of AI taking over the world, and toxic online discourse feels terrible, but underneath it all, are the invisible daily positive effects benefiting everyone?
Like millions of others, news of constant war and conflict is traumatic to me. Those of us who’ve survived violence have trouble hearing or seeing others suffer. And, the current social media warfare using images of extreme violence as propaganda, inspired by the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, is worse than anything I’ve seen.
For at least a couple of years, I’ve been suggesting to others that maybe we humans actually did survive the “Zombie Apocalypse,” aka the 2020 Pandemic. 675,000 people in the U.S. alone died of the 1918 flu. COVID overtook this total, but in 1918, the US population was 103 million, less than a third of today. Prior to COVID, only the HIV/AIDs epidemic was as deadly as the 1918 H1N1 flu.
“I’m the impossible person,” I sometimes tell Bruce. My life — what I do, how I live, the experiences I have had — would have been unheard of in prior generations. Me, and tens of millions — maybe hundreds of millions — of others.
But other parts of my life are my inheritance. My forebears were strong women who excelled and achieved amazing things. My grandmother Nana was born in 1901 and became the first generation of women in the U.S. to be able to vote. My grandmother Mary was born in 1895 and not only emigrated to the U.S. from Berdichev, Ukraine in her early teens, she also learned English well enough to graduate from Columbia University with a degree in pharmacy, opening her own store in Hell’s Kitchen, and later becoming the first female pharmacist licensed in California. My great-grandmother Nallie raised two generations of children in Riverside, California. She owned the Loring Block across from the Mission Inn, where she employed dozens of women who made clothing for local, fashionable women. Nallie designed the clothing and made the patterns out of copper herself.
She also stole my grandmother’s math homework because she liked math so much and wrote stories for the Saturday Evening Post under a man’s name. And made extra money for holiday gifts making chocolate candies.
She hid the money from this under the dining room rug and one year, someone stole it.
Default: Things Were Better In The Past And Worse Now
I think maybe the 60s and 70s weren’t such great times for women as is often portrayed. Our worldview was so greatly skewed by mass advertisement, movies, and television.
If I look at 80s movies, the only “liberation” that occurred to most Western women was “no bras” and “open wearing of stockings and garter belts.”
The narrative goes that women’s “liberation” of the 70s changed lives. As you can see from what I just wrote, all of my forebears on both sides of my family were strong, independent women long before official feminism.
“Feminism” was unknown to my forebears. Taking care of their families was well-known to them. All of my forebears had a lot of grief to work through and survive. Nallie gave birth to 13 children, but only 3 lived beyond infancy. Grandma Mary had twins, my father and uncle Victor, but lost her husband early and could not have more children.
Each, and all, did what they had to do to protect and care for their families and survive.
They educated themselves, worked hard, learned, and grew and lived.
What the current digital media landscape feels like right now is akin to having a terrible infection.
And We’re Going To Go To Sleep And Wake Up Better
When I was young, I remember being incredibly sick and even calling it the “Stephen King Flu” (after King’s book The Stand). It was one of the early bird flu pandemics. One day I had such a high fever I was hallucinating, trembling, and shivering. But at last, I went to sleep.
When I woke, I was better. The fever had broken.
There’s a big difference between what I experienced in that illness and what my great-grandmother Nallie or other forebears experienced.
I had fresh, clean water coming out of my bathroom sink faucet. I had a flushing toilet that cleared waste away. I had a freezer with ice cubes.
I think socially in the U.S., maybe globally — I hope — this is what is going on.
An African man commenting via X (former Twitter) to Western readers said, “The old ways are at an end. We don’t have to obey what Western nations say. We don’t have to support your lifestyles, suffer from your wars, or give all our resources to you.”
He said this in English, which for the time being, is considered the international language of business and communications.
If we make the analogy that digital communication is like a clean water system, people around the world using a common language like English, or simply using Google Translate or similar programs, receive information much as the final treatment process prepares water to go to homes.
Back in 1918 when the flu went around and killed millions of people — an incident my grandmother Nana barely remembered and said “wasn’t that bad” — she and the others in Riverside not only didn’t know what was going on elsewhere except for garbled newspaper reports, she also had no opportunity to speak to any person from Africa. And, she couldn’t yet vote here in the U.S.
In my lifetime, I’ve been treated badly by stupid, privileged men who have called the shots for a long time. I’ve also been treated badly by mean, self-entitled privileged women whose lives are devoted to serving these men. I am a professional writer and I use these simple words accurately. Men’s Rights Advocates are stupid and they are angry because their privileged easy lives are eroding. Mean women who support this are unfortunately still deluded and entitled, deriving their privilege from kissing these jerks’ asses.
My life history is a repetitive Lifetime Movie of trauma and recovery.
And part of my recovery each time has been supported by digital communication.
I met the love of my life via the Internet.
I schedule outings with my real-life friends via the Internet. We maintain and strengthen our friendships via the Internet.
I work via the Internet. In the past, I probably would have been a pharmacist like my grandma Mary or a dressmaker like my great-grandmother Nallie. I would have had a life in Southern California.
Maybe I might have married a rich man or a poor one. I don’t know what my past life would have been in their times, before the Internet, AI, and digital communications.
I’m healthy now because I was able to access information about my microbiome and diet via the Internet. I use a fitness tracker to document my health progress and maintain it.
I quit smoking tobacco with the help of an online support group. I’ve been refining my abilities to bake sourdough from an online community.
Now, when I ask a search question, Chrome/Google AI provides an answer I can quickly judge is beneficial or into which I need to look more deeply. I’m sure, because of my work, I ask many more diverse — and probably weird — questions than the average person.
A Discussion With A Conservative
I have a friend here in our community who is very conservative and is well-versed in conservative media. I spoke with her yesterday about the conflict in the Middle East.
She said, “The Palestinians have a terrible lifestyle. They’re poor and live in rudimentary houses. They’re uneducated.” Or something to that effect. Her belief was that the majority of Palestinians were violent terrorists, the same people who attacked the Twin Towers on 9–11. She believed our nation was in a new phase of the War on Terror against animalistic maniacs who want to kill us all.
“You know, there’s an excellent PBS show made a few years ago that will show what life was like in the region before 1948,” I said.
It’s called Shattered Dreams of Peace.
Amazon Prime and PBS, through Amazon Prime, was featuring this video a few weeks ago. The New York Times Magazine also just provided more depth and background on the 1990s to early 2000s peace process for Palestine and Israel.
These shows and writings are like a small water cleansing filter station on the firehose of digital media information about the Middle East — and anything else that harms people.
AI Is Like a Major Advancement In Water Treatment
I’ve written before that I think AI will be a positive game-changer because it will give people more time to improve their lives and the lives of others.
AI, being inherently agnostic as to the information it takes in and puts out, is already having a positive influence by informing people more quickly and efficiently about the things they want to and need to know.
Even though there are efforts made to bend its responses in favor of the people who want to promote war, suffering, lack of resources, lack of education, and lack of quality of life for the majority because in the past, this has personally enriched them . . .
Adding AI to the social media, digital communications, and worldwide connectivity landscape really is like the final part to the puzzle of a safe, clean water system.
As I write this, many nations around the world are still working to bring clean water to their people. I’ve done a business plan for a Pakistani clean water endeavor, led by a team all under age 30. Some companies, like Nestle, have taken control of fresh water in many areas, including my hometown San Bernardino Mountains (Arrowhead Spring Water), and have advanced plans to continue to manipulate local governments to …
Let’s not put too fine a point on it.
Steal the water, bottle it in plastic that’s harming the oceans and marine life and getting into the blood of every living creature including us —
For the profit of their owners.
I can’t help but think what the man from Kenya said to the others online about military conflict and colonialism in the Middle East:
“The old ways are at an end. We don’t have to obey what Western nations say. We don’t have to support your lifestyles, suffer from your wars, or give all our resources to you.”
We, all of us regular people, can say this to those who are taking advantage of us now — and we can say it in many different ways and put it into action.
Maybe the digital world isn’t Meta’s VR at all — any more than a Super Bowl commercial represents the pinnacle of civilization.
Maybe the digital world is the way we connect together and get real, true information to help us little blind blinking cave creatures creep ever closer to the edge of the cave where we look out and see the amazing, wonderful world and life before us, which has always been concealed from our view by the creatures who thought they were helping themselves by climbing to the top of the crowded heap in the back of the cave to steal all of the fetid, stale black air.
Bad things happen. Bad things are always going to happen.
But there were 1.8 billion people in the world in 1918 and people didn’t have clean water even in Riverside, California — much less the internet.
Now there are over 8 billion people, and yes, Flint, Michigan still lacks clean water, but 6 billion people worldwide do have clean water. About 5.3 billion have internet connectivity and use digital communications.
In 1918, only about 20% of the people in the world were literate.
Now? The figure is opposite.
The combined effect of digital communications, the Internet, and AI is like clean water.
But not for our bodies: for our minds.
You might not believe this, but there are places in Canada where people have to boil water so they can drink it without getting sick. And most of them are in Indigenous territories, so the problem is ignored more than it's fixed.
And Canada is supposedly a first world country. What about in less-affluent places?
Nestle and company have a lot to answer for because of their outright theft of the world's few remaining reserves of uncontaminated water.
This is an example of something I probably wouldn't have known about in the pre-Internet era, when those who controlled the media could easily suppress things that damaged their reputation or those of their advertising clients. It's one of the real ways we've made progress in communications.