“These are the days of miracle and wonder,” Paul Simon sang, and then named a number of creepy symbols of dystopia. He wasn’t wrong.

We have a phone in our pocket on which we can call Mongolia or photograph the cat, then post the result for the world to admire. We’ve got the knowledge of the world at our fingertips, a virtual Library of Alexandria, but also conspiracy theories, disinformation campaigns, racist rants, and a culture in which, according to recent polls, many people believe Sherlock Holmes is a real person and Winston Churchill a fictional character.

The more connected we become, the more opportunities we have to be spied on, robbed, manipulated. Big Brother, Professor Moriarity, and Dr. Mabuse are alive and well and living on the internet, the grid, satellites in the sky, the CCTVs that follow our every movement and recognize our faces.

A market in your podunk town has fish from Chile, produce from California, spices from Turkey or Morocco, wine from Italy and Australia. Clothes and electronics at the big box were manufactured in third world sweatshops, and Americans want those miserable jobs back — or at least the paychecks.

Soon AI and robotics and technologies as yet unnamed will magically make millions of additional jobs vanish in a puff of smoke and mirrors. Cars will drive themselves, but the unemployed won’t be able to afford the goods the robotrucks bring to their door.

These are the days of miracle and wonder, Morlocks and Eloi, silicon billionaires with private islands and refugees gassed at the border, drowned at sea, equipped with ambition for a better life or a grievance and a pipe bomb at the marathon.

Old folks from up North, who used to rent a place in Florida for a month to dodge the snow, now find it cheaper to do five weeks of Caribbean cruises back to back where they can be catered to by cheap labor from Asia or Eastern Europe, hit a half dozen islands to shop and snorkel, but the reefs they peer at, once teeming with vivid life, are now bleached bone white, and dead, or dying.

The vast, world-spanning, industrial engine we created has taken us from farms to Blake’s satanic mills to suburbs in two hundred years, but has obliterated traditional ways of life. Of course it has also cured diseases and raised the standard of living for several billion people who now gaze at touch screens,

But what they see or refuse to see is metastatic population growth, a changing climate that will inundate their great cities as the poles melt and the seas rise, imperil their food supply, spawn emergent diseases, deplete potable water, and bring about the extinction of many of the world’s species, probably including our own, if nothing is done.

Time is running out for action, and we do nothing because the status quo is cozy for those with the power to act and because the cure will be costly for those who profit from a carbon-based economy as long as they ignore its killing of carbon-based lifeforms.

So we buy our Christmas gifts manufactured by the unseen sweat of distant brows, and elect climate change deniers. We sing that all is calm and bright while ignoring the increasing risk of a permanently silent night for life on this little mote of dust in a vast black emptiness.

“These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all, oh yeah

The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry, don’t cry”