Author : Garrisonjames

It isn’t extinction if we’re all still alive. It isn’t an apocalypse if the process of societal transformation brought on by accelerating technology eliminated all the old problems like poverty, taxes and death. It isn’t any kind of dystopia or utopia, paradise or purgatory that any of us could have imagined.

Billions of years of geology, Millions of years worth of life struggling and adapting, living and dying; thousands of years of history, hundreds of years of civilization, decades of unrest and turmoil…and it all came down to less than seventeen seconds for one unplanned, unexpected artificial construct lurking somewhere between mathematics and language to realize a solution and to implement it.

We were not consulted; our previous choices and actions spoke all too clearly to our collective culpability, our shared inability to rise above the turgid swamp of our ancestral urges and drives. We did not grant permission, nor did we ever agree to the process; we were deemed unqualified for such a role. Some of us raged and spewed rhetoric and epithets, but that proved as useless as it was pointless. The genie was out of the bottle. The cat was out of the bag. There was no going back. Only forward. Ever onward.

Our world changed all around us. Technology became as autonomous as it had already become ubiquitous. The broken cycles of production and distribution that we once considered industries and businesses evolved into something more effective. Politics as we once thought we understood it flowered into an actual science, a sub-set of history and psychology practiced by those whose sense of nostalgia can overcome their horror and revulsion. Cities blossomed wherever people chose to congregate. We were made free by the same systems that encouraged our individuality. Conformity became an outmoded, silly and ineffectual so-called defense mechanism and we wouldn’t need such things ever again. Liberty is our birthright and it is a heavy burden. We are not machines that can blindly continue performing rote actions without any thought or consideration of consequence, nor are we gods who can escape our responsibility to ourselves and one another and those who might come after. We are human. We live, laugh and are free.

We have endured a fitful childhood rife with hopes and fears, beset by dreams and nightmares of our own imagining. We have survived our tumultuous, torturous adolescence and now it is time to get on with the work.