Friday, September 6, 2013

Watching Where We Are Going

Young man texting feverishly as he walks off train into station deep underground, maybe fifty of us all walking toward the longest escalators in the Boston transit system, usually two escalators working to get commuters up onto the earth's surface. In this moment only one is working. Text-Fever guy heads assumptively toward the escalator not moving, full speed afoot, blazing speed afinger.  I spy with my little out of the corner eye his leg lift up in the air as if the steps are celestially predestined to always rise up to meet him. The analog world of blood, bone and mechanical contrivances is somehow a constant and regular bandwidth of experience in the digitized mind and body of this specimen of Post-Landline Man. 

And his rudely awakened goin'-nowhere dance was stellar!  An inebriated George Balanchine could not have produced such gross motor madness as this man stumbled back - if only for an embarrassed moment - into consciousness of a world that proves daily why our field of vision is actually about 180 degrees wide...or so I hope.  His feet groped their way back to truth then sped him back to The Matrix for his "blue pill" cocktail.  Thank goodness for him he lives in a world relatively "protected" from most semblances of natural realities like slimy snakes, scary bears, inconvenient trees and motivated stairs. The modern human did well to find a virtual place to hide from eye contact, embodied intercourse a la conversation, the perniciousness of soil and absolutely unncessary things like sacred naturo-spiritual energetic experiences and ritual that sustain our understanding of the primacy of nature and analog(ous), embodied experience as humans born into the Family of Being and Becoming (one large branch of hughly successful human cultural development calls it "All Our Relations"). 

Our little digital, virtual, electronic pseudo-world is stumbling toward an implosion of sorts. 

We are analog.  We are frequencies. We are vibrations. We are waves. We are wind.  We are rivers. We are rain. We are wings.  We are fins. We are blood and we are bone. We are not reducible to bitstreams. We are not equal to the zerosums of data. We are not predestined to accept The Singularity.  We need not take seriously the fantasies of the Terasem movement, though we must treat seriously the cultural implications.  We needn't give in to the idea or reality of immortality through matricizing with humanoid android technologies.

And we should watch - much more carefully and critically - where we are going.

(images from a Panasonic exhibit at a Boston shooping mall)