We need to stop climbing Everest completely until we know what is going on.
So, when you take one look at the video of hikers slowly forming a long line at the summit, you might be inclined to say yes.
More and more people are spending more and more money to post images on the Internet of themselves stepping over the frozen corpses of those who came before them, doing something that no one did before and that now there is not enough space to accommodate all the visitors.
“It’s crazy how they’ve turned Everest into a high-altitude DMV line for the super-rich,” sighed one X poster. “Imagine climbing to the top of Everest and then two minutes later the next person is pushing you and yelling at you. It’s my turn baby” joked another.
Of course, you don’t need to be rich to climb Everest or any other mountain, but the self-destructive spectacle of today’s mental lemmings ascending to famous peaks, taking Instagram photos and coming down highlights how hollow, empty, and increasingly automated our wealth today has become.
This is true in all the ways in which technology shapes our behavior, regardless of our hopes, beliefs, research, and plans. Serve Let us make our passions and plans come true, just as the legendary monkey’s paw can grant any wish, no matter how good or difficult.
Ironically, we are always looking for ways to give up the freedoms we seem to jealously guard, when in reality our stronger motivation is to be jealous of those who appear to have more freedom than we do, because we hate it whenever someone appears to have more than we do.
As a result, we simultaneously crave ways to automate our choices. and A desire to feel special compared to others who are increasingly like us.
Namgyal Sherpa/Getty
So we develop technologies to facilitate that process, but then when it does happen, we are just as reluctant to recognize how much control we have given over to it as we are to allocating funds to the same insane causes.
Right now, on Everest, both forces are converging in a stunningly absurd and depressing way: More and more people are stepping over the frozen bodies of those who went before them, and spending more and more money to post more and more images on the Internet of themselves doing something no one did before and now there isn’t enough space for all the climbers.
Pop music is no longer the “early warning system” that Marshall McLuhan once granted to society’s artists, but at least one band saw this coming: the edgy, catchy, and always topical Everything Everything. Their latest single, “The Mad Stone,” from the band’s new album, Mountainhead, denounces our relentless stupidity through a metaphor that comes obscenely to life on Everest.
“You wanna go out? I’ll make a business out of it and sell it to you,” the lyrics begin. “On top of Choice Mountain, you’ve been saving up.”
At the top was a screen with a picture of a man on it.
Who was it that was standing there looking at the photo of the man?
See a photo of a man on a screen
And he was looking at another picture of a man standing there.
Standing there,
A photo of a man who looked just like me…
Madstone is singing
Can you say the same?
No pleasure is received from the pleasure center
In your reptilian brain
In an age when so many of us are itching to blame our biggest problems on oligarchy, technology, or anything other than ourselves, it’s hard to escape the infinite regress of mirror images and experiences depicted in Everything Everything But is it really any harder than getting out of the DMV at the top of a mountain of choices?
