A scenario, some indeterminate time in the future:
The world is looking back on the times in which we are living now from better place. A place and a time in which it can see itself as having passed through a great and turbulent transition. And emerged revitalised, to a world somewhat different.
The futile game of left and right has finally passed away. Scattered around the world are the remains of failed ‘new world order’ projects. Metaphorically, the remains of vast networks of facial recognition cameras hang in tatters and hectares of old AI data centres that failed to live up to insane expectations lie abandoned. Relics of great mechanistic infrastructures of every kind, originally designed to trammel and contain the ‘dangers’ of a free-thinking and free-acting humanity, lurk both in the cities and in the consciousness of those who were their victims, or whose forebears were their victims. Great soulless architectural horrors, at once brutal and bland, formerly housing those dedicated to controlling peoples’ beliefs, movements, money and work activities, are similarly derelict.
Historians have written accounts and analyses of the civil wars that sporadically emerged out of the mass psychosis of the early 21st century, and the many mad ideologies are now recognised to have been the cause of the problems they claimed they were fixing. Now they exist mainly as curiosities in university libraries. The world has come to understand that healthy culture, freely arrived at, is the precursor to good government, and not the other way around. And humanity has re-asserted its superiority over the algorithm.
As a result, people are living in direct contact with reality, finally freed from the ever-constricting bubble of virtuality that for so long coalesced around them. Education is cultivating ‘free range humans’, and even the battle between nationalism and globalism has given way to new forms and possibilities of nationhood and international co-operation (bottom up, not top down) that could not be seen in the heat of the earlier ideological wars. After long decades of attempts, from American ‘greenbacks’ (a halfway house) to ever-reinvented local currencies, to the earliest forms of crypto and crowd-funding, money has found its rightful place as a token for positive human exchange, created and controlled by those involved in those activities and exchanges - and thus no longer operates a ‘systemic enemy’ to healthy society.
Even in the middle of the present storm one can sense that this day is out there. It does not matter to know exactly when it is coming. It is enough to know that it is. It is enough to know that we are free to participate in advancing or retarding it.
Indeed we are all of us, with every attitude and action, already doing so.
Your comments are much appreciated Steve. That's exactly how I felt it - a vision simple and obvious but needing, in the light of how much time we have to spend drawing attention to various horrors, to be said explicitly!
Beautiful vision
as simple as it is obious
and so necessary
x S