Plot Drivers

I imbibe a lot of science fiction, although it’s not called that.

It comes in the forms of blog posts about laughing cats that eviscerate security contracting companies, or in the guise of a swarm of autonomous drones building an art exhibit. It comes as news stories, with headlines too absurd to be believed. Avian flu has been mixed with the common cold in a lab, and a new form of tuberculosis resists everything doctors have attempted to treat it with. Methane plumes pepper the Russian north coast and mines scar the Canadian prairies. A circus of candidates are jockeying to oppose the liberal/moderate/socialist [do words still mean things?] incumbent, who has won a Nobel Peace Prize while sending human or robotic troops into 7 countries in his first term. Temporary autonomous zones popped up in city centers across the United States for months, and financial sector technocrats have taken over two European states amidst large-scale protests. Drug cartels have their own makeshift submarines and tanks, and one in particular is doing a good side business selling black market oil it steals from the state that can’t seem to snuff it out. The leader of the Maoist opposition in India dies, in an event and a war that has perhaps never seen the evening news in the West.

It feels as if world history has taken a hit of a potent accelerant. Understandably, most people just find the whole situation too knotted, obtuse and frightening to warrant unravelling. Occasionally someone comes by with an ideological cleaver and attempt to sort the Gordian knot of present history once and for all, but the optimism fades after repeated unsuccessful hacks.

But the fears are still there, and the fear that is most present to us is that of losing control. Just one step removed from death anxiety, the constant flux of the world in 2012 brings events and change agents into our lives at faster-than-human speeds. Our filters fail, and we respond reflexively, or by retreating into isolationism. In 1848 Karl Marx wrote:

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

A better posthuman manifesto could not be written. When the terrible wrath of Texan wildfires and Japanese tsunamis draw forth our awe and mass die-offs of bats and bees generate tingling sensations down our spines, our simple worldviews and heuristics fail to find referents, and we are presented with an opportunity to truly examine ourselves. To contemplate the human condition, and your very limited place within it. To acknowledge its limitations and revel in its freedoms.

Originally, this post was to be about something else entirely, but this message decided it needed to be spoken, first. I’ll follow up next week with some thoughts on human autonomy