I wouldn’t want to live 100 years from now. It’s tempting but shortsighted to only consider how cool it may be.Every morning we greet the world under a set of assumptions.We assume our car will start, our loved ones will be there and that a fat naked man is not watching us from a discreet vantage point.These assumptions are necessary to live out a normal day, but our society is full of foreboding trends that go unnoticed.Examine a global population graph of the last 2,000 years. You’ll find the number of earthlings lay dormant for centuries before shooting upward at an almost right angle, thanks to medical advances, and soaring past Earth’s carrying capacity.Exponential growth is not limited to these census charts. The first Nintendo console used an 8-bit processor. The next one was 16-bit. The number reached 64 a few years later. We don’t even keep track anymore. This doubling trend has helped humanity reach its blissful neon reality — a technologically decadent global culture in whose way natural selection can no longer stand. We’re climbing a slope so steep — not just populously, not just technologically, but culturally — we can hardly process our progress. As I watch students stare at their touch phones with little incentive to look up, Henry David Thoreau reminds me: “Men have become the tools of their tools.” Things meant to simplify our lives have come to complicate them. Now we can check our Facebook from our iPhone. Great, but whatever will we use to check our Facebook checker? Will we ever be able to check our iPhone from our iPhone? Probably, because we like to create necessities out of thin air.When Isaac Asimov “predicted” the advent of the Internet, he thought it’d be used for learning. He probably envisioned Wikipedia or Google, not AddictingGames.com.Humans may be great at discovering new technologies, but we can only be judged on how we use it. What will be the legacy of nuclear energy? A society may be categorized on its pool of available information within it, but it can be judged by its willingness to access it. The information is there, but my generation doesn’t seem to care much. Since when has the general public cared about health care? We know our auto insurance rates, but how about our cholesterol level? People think our president is an Islamic communist. Every generation has idiots like this, but thanks to new mediums, their voices are louder every day. Thanks to new mediums, false information gets repeated more frequently. How many times before it’s true? Humans are obsessed with the Armageddon. Couldn’t the writers of the movie “2012” wait just two more years to interpret the end of times? Is it healthy for people to constantly project such cataclysmic thoughts into the global consciousness?Based on this snapshot of our current culture and given the perpetual nature of objects in motion, do we have any reason to believe our society’s values will improve? Is a society more than the sum of its values?When the Internet became mass marketed, humans became something else — a new species to whom conventional wisdom does not apply. Sometimes I wish I could go back to 1995, before the Internet came to my house. There is little value today in turning to the past because, though history repeats itself, I don’t think its writers had this in mind. Maybe they assumed too much.Jack Johnson is a 23-year-old mass communication junior from Fort Worth, Texas. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_jjohnson._____Contact Jack Johnson at [email protected]