On Deciding Between Lord of the Flies or Matrix

Life Lessons, Truthiness Comments (1)

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today. – Abraham Lincoln

Many of us have become drones in the great machine of our great Civilization, and like drones, we don’t have to know what’s going on, only that we are working to make the whole better than it’s parts. Thou, we are poorer now, the differences in rich and the poor grows every day and the sacrifice of all of us, doesn’t seem the same as those in charge.

A popular blog i read likes to mention the fact that we are well on our way to building our enslaving robot overlords aka matrix style. There is something to be said about the nature of this fragile veneer that we call “civilization”

I sometimes think we are one solar flare away from being back in the dark ages. AT the time we live now, the 80/20% solution is being challenged greatly. I would say, that less than 10% of the people, know how 90% of our society works (technologically speaking). Worse, at this point, some many machines, build so many machines, that no human could build them anymore.

Technological advancement is now exponential. We have two directions to go. Build what shall eventually enslave us, or retreat to the last vestiges of untouched lands and wilds (taming them first of course, who wants nature to be dangerous?).

What have we become? It is now shocking to see someone who’s good at more than one thing. Think about Da’Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Michelangelo, Dean Martin, and many more multi-talented individuals who painted, sculpted, sang, invented, dreamed and made the world we live in the magnificence that is it.

Now, if you run into a brain surgeon that’s all he is. Wait, he’s also a pretty good golfer, but do you know he’s a dancer? A damn good hot air balloonist or rock climber? Expert level even? It’s hard for most of us, we are too poor not to work every single day for every single thing. We can’t afford to be good at anything else, just what we do, and that is sad.

When Civilization falls, Not if,- when- what can some of us really do? What about our knowledge? It no longer lasts. Kept on fragile magnetic fields, and platters microns apart. Hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, all destroy the veneer we hold dear and there is precious little we can do to pull ourselves out of it.

We need to think a little, before we head off into great unknown. we need to ensure that as a society and as a species we shall survive. There is no repository of knowledge, there is no manuals or centrally located databases. We like to say “nothing disappears on the web.” Really? try to find that article you read last year. Try to find footage of September 11, longer than 5 minutes. Still, I believe in technology and I believe, uniquely, we as a species can avert our own extinction, and not just physical extension, but mental growth.

In choosing between the Lord of the Flies or The Matrix, I choose instead Utopia.

Thou, at the moment, I’d rather be Da’Vinci, with a cellphone.

OceansOfThought @ June 3, 2008