The implosion of American culture and society: No way back?

Over at Linkedin futurist Bryan Alexander linked to this article: FBI raids home of prominent computer scientist who has gone incommunicado. Here’s how that article opens:

A prominent computer scientist who has spent 20 years publishing academic papers on cryptography, privacy, and cybersecurity has gone incommunicado, had his professor profile, email account, and phone number removed by his employer, Indiana University, and had his homes raided by the FBI. No one knows why.

Xiaofeng Wang has a long list of prestigious titles. He was the associate dean for research at Indiana University's Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, a fellow at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a tenured professor at Indiana University at Bloomington. According to his employer, he has served as principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million over his 21 years there.

Later in the article:

“None of this is in any way normal,” Matthew Green, a professor specializing in cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on Mastodon. He continued: “Has anyone been in contact? I hear he’s been missing for two weeks and his students can’t reach him. How does this not get noticed for two weeks???”

Here's the comment I made to Bryan’s post:

Yikes! Super-creepy. As you know, Bryan, I am a ronin scholar, have been for decades. I failed to get tenure in ‘85 and was unable to secure an academic post. For a while, perhaps almost two decades, my guiding fantasy was that I'd be able to write my way back into a really nice academic gig. But as I grew older that became less and less plausible, though I was able to keep my intellectual productivity up. Still, sometime in the 2010s I dropped that fantasy. By that time woke was rising and the academy was looking less and less attractive.

But now, if faculty can be “disappeared”... The academy is becoming a nightmare. Wokism came from within. And while the Trumpist crackdown is ostensibly a reaction to wokism, I can't help but feel that it is also the cumulative effect of decades of anti-intellectualism in American culture. This nightmare is coming from outside the academy. But it reflects the dark underbelly of American culture. We're imploding.

What's ahead? The Democrats surely want to go back, back to the world of Biden and Obama and Clinton. They can't figure out how to do it. I suspect that there is no way back. If that's right, if there really is no way back, then what's ahead? What's the alternative to Trumpism?

I note as well, that we’re facing the deployment of AI in society. That will make it ever more difficult to “go back,” by which I mean restabilize on the world as it existed in, say, 1999 (late in the Clinton administration), but with more computers. Yes, there will be more computers, but they’re pushing, pulling in a different direction.

We’ve reached an inflection point, though “point” is not the right term. We in a region of social and cultural phase change. Just how we come out of it is not strongly determined, nor is the exit zone. We could churn around for years, even for decades, or we could work our way though, perhaps not in years, but, yes, I’d think in decades.