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We’ve built an alarmingly bad world — only the badness is alarmingly efficient, happens fast, almost instantaneously, at our command.
The rule of hyper-modernity is that you can make your life less interesting faster than ever before — the tools with which to strip your soul of spirit are now more readily available, more powerful than ever before, more adaptable, more fluid, than ever before. It’s said that at after a sufficient point of advancement, technology begins to resemble magic; I would say, that, in its simple, non-biological origins, technology is more like a virus — a self-replicating, decentralized, invisible mode of anti-life. A virus is like the anti-quark that a quark produces in quantum theory — it balances the equation of the bacterium, the basis of all life. I think of technology in the same way — the anti-tool that somehow balances (in the darkest way possible) useful, material tools, like the pencil, or the hammer, or the knife, or the plow.
So we are responsible for life, the spirit of life, we carry it forward, we keep the equation balanced — unless we don’t: unless we fail, allow our energy to become co-opted by the other side, unless we succumb to the virus.
The most frightening dimension of life in 2019 is that we are not frightened; from the vantage point of the neocapitalist island that I’m on, this slice of dystopia otherwise known as…
