Many many years ago, there was written a SF story about the Boston subway system wherein a shuttle line was opened making the system possess infinite connectivity from a mathematical/physical standpoint, and then one of the trains disappeared on the line. People could hear it, but no one could see it and it ran until it reappeared. There was, of course much more to the story: my favorite line is when a physicist says that the train hit a node, and one of the maintenance guys said: We don't leave no nodes lying around on the track...

My point is that we have reached, in a sense, infinite connectivity within the society and are seeing the breakdown thereof much more clearly than we would otherwise and perhaps we have accelerated the process exponentially with all these Intertubes and stuff. Toffler's 'Future Shock' underestimated the rate of change of the rate of change. We are disintegrating at a rapid pace and in the not-too-distant future all we'll have is our keyboards, our streaming Netflix, and our fixed 'elections'. The morans have been empowered to a degree to which they could never have imagined and idiocy reigns: if you don't think so, have you watched network TeeVee lately? It makes the really really stupid shows of the 60's look like Masterpiece Theater. This is what kids watch, this is what they expect, and relatively speaking, very few of us try to give the next generation the sense of history, of political dangers of autocracy, and of true morality - as opposed to the 'theology' which is proffered by these political know-nothings. the is an extraordinarily troubling time.