So you still think you’re not a techno-savage?
Perspectives ever changing. Focussing on the unfocusable. Overlays. Heartbeats like giant footsteps in hollow deserted places. Background windows. Unidentifiable forms. Icons. I’m trying to put it all down. This life, this time, these things are memes that live in formats we can't see because we are the dust that scatters from a fireplace after the trance-dance is over.
Think back to when you didn’t have to think so hard to get those grades to make the elevator ride up one of those tower buildings where chemical warfare air-conditioning units systematically infected humanity with the memetic plagues of mediocrity, avarice, and ass-licking, a place that existed before the year summer never ended, before everyone and their dog had access and was cruising the Information Superhighway, before point-and-drool-no-brainer access to the net became utterly commonplace and inexpensive enough to become the mark of a technologically conscious person.
They used to call us ‘cyberpunks’, back in the glory years where UNIX skills ruled and anyone who couldn’t remember exactly what they’d just typed in were doomed to long hours of penance till they did. It was a time when code first ruled and the dimension of cyberspace was opened up to us. We got sucked in, kicking and screaming towards the great digitizer, where some of us were lucky, or hacked the system and escaped into a wormhole of opportunity, only a few of us, armed with the novelty of it all and the possibility that human experience has already been encoded into us by scientists from the future who use a feed-back loop into the past to try and inform us of what we should be doing.
I didn’t look back because it was a new way of looking at G-D but don’t tell anyone or they’ll go Dawking on you and we need all the faith and hope we can get if we’re to make it through the next 500 years. Neither science nor religion has all the answers. Cyberpunks take these things seriously, a set of attitudes tuned to take the whole thing into account, the meaning of life, the culling of one kind of attitude, the installation of another into the human experience, itself a program where you can’t see the programmer, even if you know it’s yourself.
One can only hope that the bonding of science and spirit becomes one of the 21st century’s priorities, along with diversity and sustainability. These are our mantras for successfully slowing down the speeding up of the melting-down - and the carbonization of what’s left.
Schwann Cybershaman - 13th February 2008 - Where I'm at in RL right now
