Thursday 15 May 2008

The future has already been

After a weekly shopping trip.

The human species have reversed quietly to hunters - gatherers. It had been one of the great social achievements when we clever monkeys became farmers and breeders. Stable food supply helped to develop agricultural communities that over millenias grew and spread and eventually lead to our human infested world. But looking at today, how many people you know, who actually produce? Not only food, it's quite obvious that as soon as slavery has been discovered whoever managed to avoid backbreaking jobs by getting someone else to farm for him would rest and let his mind occupy itself otherwise. Hence cultural development, although how anyone would come up with some of the ideas humans are so proud of is beyond even my cynical mind. So what happened to the clever farmer monkey? Gone are the times when boredom lead to creativity. It more often then not leads to the sofa in front of tv these days and to the supermarket to hunt for bargains and gather edibles.

Another striking similarity- our pray prowling ancestors had to travel vast distances in search of anything to hunt and so often spent their entire lives on the move. XXth and XXIst centuries have seen some unprecendented immigration rates as more and more people leave their family soil, which they don't farm anyway, and set off towards the setting sun in search of something vaguely defined as 'a better life', just like our still hairy ancestors on the humanless plains of future Europe, hunting for their plce in the world, gathering whatever they believe they need to survive.

History is not a cyclical circle, it is linear. How could we miss bouncing off some strange opportunity leading to another stage of species development and going all the way back in the wrong direction...?

Tuesday 6 May 2008

Be yourself. And yourself. And your other self.

After spending a happy hour writing on my foras.

We are all schizophrenic. How? Well, be honest, how many logins are people usually using for all their foras, emails, myspaces and such? If it's always the same - cool, they only have one cyberspace personality on top of their real life one. If it's two or more and they have different avatars as well and maybe slightly different styles of writing - cool, they're like me and thousands other web users.

Here's a music forum where you will spend hours going into detailed discussion about your favourite song, here's a general discussion one where you admit, that sometimes you don't listen to any music for like days, here's an email from your science fiction obsessed pal with whom you blather for pages and pages about possible futures and there's your myspace profile in which you admit you don't really think much about what future holds for you. Here you are perceived as a geek, there as a party addict, somewhere else as a family guy.

Meh, of course you can say it's all the many sides of the same personality, but come on, let's go the whole way and call it what it is - we are all clinically insane. Thank gods for internet where we can safely indulge our need to be ourselves. And it is not only normal it's part of the net culture. So hows you today? And you? And you?