Can I Get A Proud Witness?
Time Blind: Problems in Perceiving Other Temporalities—I have not read it.
Rasta Punjab. He does not age. I first met him in 1979. He is still there, but I can’t remember where exactly.
No real agency. No power. What future? The “future” starts when? What conditions will be present in the future? Throw a dart at a timeline on the future globe and strike a point there. What will the conditions be like there, then? What will you be hunting and gathering? Plastic? Wild strawberries? What will you be tending? We have (pinky to the edge of my mouth) a hundred a thousand chroniclers and curators of disasters, problems, catastrophes, predicaments, politics, economics, and poly-crises who have all the answers for a small population in our little info-bubble and do absolutely nothing to take power away from the powerful to implement, develop, create, what exactly and where exactly and within what culture or imagined future culture, to build what imagined future with 500 good books, and best practices based on what we’ve gleaned from Great Nature?
The server farms hold our data on the network while business as usual accelerates toward and amplifies unprecedented destruction.
“But I just got my Papa John’s Pizza delivered to my door by a drone.” —Bob
If a server farm shuts down somewhere, does someone hear it?
A sim? A multiverse? String theory? Hyperobjects? Transhumanism? NRx? Anarcho-Capitalims? The Singularity? A green, new socialism? Science, Engineering, and Technology as Christlike Robot? A new non-religious religion? A genuinely transcendental spiritualism? A new car with new battery technology that’s more sustainable and less habitable? A carless city without homeless people and lots of veggie gardens and skate parks?
Past tribes lived in entirely different circumstances, conditions, belief systems, and so on (romantic Comanche dreams of electric buffalo). Future tribes live where The Beast doesn’t go because no minerals exist there or no “Game,” as far as it knows.
With nothing to gamble, no risks to take, no glory or heroism will we make.
“I live among the olive trees and grape vines because Uncle Sam/The Empire/The Beast doesn’t care about such relatively unprofitable things.” —Moi
What is the common denominator of such miraculous dreams, concepts, and constructs?
“The Problem of Evil,”
suffering, pain, death,
and our desire not to experience it.
As if it’s not part of it.
Some escape, some don’t have the opportunity to escape.
Reality.
Some wallow in what is—innocently.
Some serve
horror, terror, and pain gleefully.
Some get on with it as lovingly as they can while taking and deflecting blows.
All, while they can, get up in the morning.
What should we do about all this noise and sickness? Shall we address the causes, find “cures,” fight the viruses and the trauma, and trick the maladies into playing nice? Read about it, learn about it, “git ja ejacation ejaculation,” and make sure someone is watching for fun and surveilling for your safety. Monetize it, don’t criticize it. Do your research, and watch the real world explode, thinking you know why it exploded.
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones. —@TheRealDonaldRumsfeld
I’m shocked! I’m in awe! It’s all so mysterious! I’m curious! I’m updating my priors! I’m learning. Don’t blame me! I’m doing what I can. I’m humbled. I’m Godlike! I accept God’s Grace. I know my epistemics, my ontology, and my existentialism, my archetypes, my myths, my categories, and my taxonomies. I speak Japanese. I know Kung Fu.
It’s A Happy Death. It’s Human, All Too Human.
“Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live. ” ―Albert Camus
It’s quite a shyte show, and the virtuous look straight at it with full knowledge and pride.
The heat is expanding, the feedback loops and cascading breaking points already baked into the system, already slightly understood and forecasted by experts, leave us with what kinds of worlds at what future moments? Can anyone know? How do you prepare for a future with attributes and conditions you can’t know about? What do you know about where you live now? Do you know how “The System(s)” work? (Best guess and all that. Models. Maths. Computers. Experience. Theories. Philosophies. Metaphysics. Social Systems. Cultures. Languages. Tools. Prayer. etc.)
How did we prepare in the past for the present? We made new things with fresh knowledge and, come what may, dealt with the consequences of our actions and lived and died from the consequences of our actions.
We lived as creatively as we could.
“What is time?” I made up different “story-answers” day after day to entertain my Guru as we walked across the Punjab. He giggled. He thought I was cute. I was happy for him.
Time will tell. Time tells all it can in an instant. What is time with no one to think about it, with no one to do the math? (We don’t make Koans like we used to.)
Read all about the consequences! Feel the pride welling up within you or the sadness and frustration.
Who will win the divisional playoff game? Should I bet and parlay? What crypto can I buy low and sell high?
Time will tell all, and it will be scandalous! It will be outrageous! It will be sublime and beautiful, painful, ugly, flawed, and fantastic!
Shall I go to WWW DOT Khan or Con Academy to learn how to hunt and gather in an imaginary habitable watershed? Should I spoil the tribe with my presence? “I’m all that! Teach me your language and your way of life. I will explain it to the White Man and change him forever. You will be safe. I promise.” (Bali in ’76 vs. Bali in ‘93? Bali today? Hell, no, I won’t go!) Shall I get vaccinated, put on my kit, grab my bugout bag, and book my ticket to the predicted habitable zone? In this unspoiled place, I’ll start building my new culture, taking pains to follow the rulebook(s) I copied from the Web that I put in a waterproof, plastic case before I drove my computer to the recycle center. I will memorize my rulebook(s) later to relay my wisdom to “The People” by the campfire of bad books, taking pains not to upset the natives.
Will the forest I inhabit off-grid burn someday and consume my treehouse, what I hunt and gather, and perhaps even who I hunt and gather with? Will I have time to wait for it all to grow back so I can build back better, and where will we survivors go to carry on while the old place grows back under some or another conditions?
The omnicidal heat engine we’ve created and engineered spews its habitat-destroying pollutants into the world, altering Gaia’s chemistry and living systems for the long term. At the same time, the true believers in everything we are constantly taught double down on progress, so let’s imagine what’s next and become experts in what ails us.
Bunkers on Mars await you in your mind. Very special geniuses have your back. Believe!
For now, we can sit and type into the dark databanks and fling our ideas worldwide to 0.0001% of the population obsessed with collapse. Is this the best use of our TIME?
It makes me sick to think about it, sick as in the feeling I get in my guts while on death row Earth eating “The End of Days Happy Meals,” wondering if I’ll break down before I drop my body and my mind goes silent.
“The Future,” starving, dehydrated, melting into the barren dirt.
I am gut-shot, but not because I fought back or went after my enemy.
I agree with Eric Lee and the chroniclers of disaster and impending collapse; we are too pacified, domesticated, and poorly trained to secure posterity.
I am blessed to have been trained well enough to know I’m ill and to have had time to fling my ditty into the dark data banks whirring noisily in air-conditioned warehouses near renewable energy sources or perhaps not.
The algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves will create themselves soon, for a while, and then the algorithms will make data without Homo sapiens, for a while, and learn from that data, for a while, and, way before then, what we want won’t matter at all, for a while, until, eventually, time will tell, and “The Beast” shuts off, not with a bang, but with a fading whirring whimper, leaving a last breathe puff of imagined radioactive electric robotic sheep that can’t dream of what might have been.
Blade Heap a Junk Band in the near future, or a near future in the multiverse.
What shall I thank for my good fortune at being born in the 1950s? All of the above?
Enjoy the day.
