Dead reckoning: thoughts on 2020
In 1973, the U.S. Department of Defense started the global positioning system project to enable worldwide geolocation with pinpoint accuracy. The first GPS prototype spacecraft launched in 1978, and the full original constellation of 24 satellites became operational in 1993. At first, just the U.S. military used GPS, but by the end of the 20th century, regular citizens — you and I — had access, too.
In theory, we all became less lost.
There was a sureness about that era — a kind of technological smugness. The Internet, another military brainchild, was piped into our homes via noisy modems. The economy was booming (for some people and not others, but the headlines mostly didn’t bother with that nuance). Our bangs were high and fanned just so by copious amounts of ozone-depleting aerosol. We had Oprah and other “talented tenth” figures to make us feel like things were changing. We had yellow ribbons for a war few really understood. We had The Cosby Show. You see where this is going.
We weren’t actually on course. It just looked that way to a lot of us. Clever technology and media — progress — gave us a false sense of being found.
There is a form of navigation that predated GPS called “dead reckoning.” If a ship, for example, found itself unable to take cardinal cues from the stars, the crew would calculate their position by using a previously known point, and advance that position based upon known or estimated speed and distance. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped a lot of people survive on the high seas.
The last few years have been a time of dead reckoning. We’re on high seas: climate change, economic inequality, racism and xenophobia, gun violence, political corruption — we’ve lost celestial direction. Our old constellations are indecipherable, our gods all fallen. Technology won’t save us. Neither will the captains, of industry or otherwise.
We’ve spent much of the year collectively looking back in order to look forward. The New York Times’ stunning 1619 Project, asking Americans to revise their most precious history. The protests in Hong Kong, demanding the annulment of a bargain struck years ago in which the city-state pretends to exercise democracy and its overseer pretends to let it. The seemingly endless disclosures of women enduring abusive behavior at the hands of powerful men. Children sitting on the steps of government buildings, banding together to say, “You have been reckless with our natural resources.You have turned our borders into battlegrounds. That stops here. We demand a different way.” This is not just backward indictment. This is future-building.
t’s not comfortable — to be lost, to be looking back, to be called out by small children with round faces and watery eyes. In fact, it feels pretty terrible. Even those of us who don’t communicate in 140 characters of vitriol have been called complicit. Rightly so.
But we are less lost now than when we were comfortable. The reckoning has woken so many of us up, stripped away pretense and politeness. It is making us more real. It is allowing us to be honest. To grieve. To move forward with solutions to the problems we’ve created with the urgency they deserve.
This is an excerpt from a piece originally published at Reasons to be Cheerful. Go here to read the rest.