A Story of Us

 

“It’s all so very simple. If you look at it all from far away, it all becomes so simple and clear. And the story has been told so many times in so many ways by so many different people. But yes, since you want me to, I will tell it again. In my own way of course. That’s all I have. There’s bound to be gaps and mistakes and missions. Mistakes, we all make them. Omissions, we all have them. We can’t help it. They are an integral part of all stories, they shape us from the inside out. (We are more defined by what we lack than by what we contain. We are a shape made out of different quantities of nothing.) So this story is no different.

It all started a long time ago, so long ago that even the stories of that time have already died. (And I mean died – so dead that nobody can remember them at all. They can’t even remember the lies told about them or the echoes of their passing through early morning dreams.) I only know from a particular moment forward and the rest is lost. That’s just the way it is.

We were once strong, savage and proud. Much stronger than we are now, much prouder. We wanted everything and we saw no reason why we couldn’t have it. In our quest to explore and conquer everything that lay before us, we set out into the vastness of outer space in great ships made of mud and stone and long green leaves made of vibrating thoughts and melody. Our journeys were deep and wide and full of color and sound. It was beautiful beyond anything you’ve ever thought of as beautiful. Don’t even try to imagine it.

In the great vastness of space we found nothing, the true nothing that is not even its own lack of presence. Nothing without form or the hint of a becoming. Just silence. And the dark. We found no friend, no enemy, no hope. No waiting arms to hold us, no strong hand to chastise us, no face to love, no sword to fear. No promises of any kind.

So we returned home chilled and terrified by this new knowledge, this new direct awareness of the utter emptiness to be found in the far reaches of the void. We knew now that we were in fact alone, completely terribly hopelessly alone.

Centuries later, we spoke amongst ourselves of a new kind of technology that would lead us through the treacherous maze of our Becoming as a species. We had always assumed that, no matter what we found or not found out there in the vast darkness, no matter where we went or where we didn’t go, we would always stay basically the same, the same We that we were to begin with, the same We that we had always been. But was this true? Or was this just a kind of youthful confusion? (The youth that was in us then seeps through these old tales like juice from an orange. It’s not a matter of time but of vision.)

We defined this question into a shape, a shape with two extremes that we could clearly visualize, two extreme possibilities, like the two ends of a rope held tight.

On one end there was complete and final anarchy, an organic chaos from which we would never emerge, a place of vast and utter freedom that offered no protections of any kind, no protection from the others, no protection from ourselves; no laws against massive competition or vast unified power; no regulations of any kind and no restrictions on our old black magic practices.

On the other end, there was a complete and final unified control. Every quest of any kind would be outlined and supervised by the king. Equality among all of us would be enforced constantly through carefully constructed rules and laws that would limit individual advantage of any kind. All competition would be limited and repressed. These thousands of ever multiplying laws would extend to all aspects of social and individual decisions. From the smallest private moments to the largest collective choices, all would be predetermined through strictly enforced control.

There would be no deciding between these two extremes, no ultimate war for total annihilation. The rope would be held tight between so many of us and we would look back at ourselves to try to understand what had happened, what happened to us and how did it happen. What had we gained through this endless struggle, and what had we left behind, what remained forgotten in our murky past.

Over the span of billions of years, many colored life had flourished on our planet through a process of natural selection, the fierce and constant competition for survival, for food, for water, for basic needs.

Then We emerged out of the chaos and we invoked a complex material entity which we ourselves created through the application of our minds and our bodies into the empty receptacle we called nature all around us. The thing that was before us was not empty but our vision of it was. This empty receptacle was defined in relation to ourselves: whatever wasn’t us was a waiting object for us to act upon. This whole world before us was ours for the taking.

The new complex entity we created would then evolve in three stages: the hammer, the dead machine and the robot. The hammer gave us a distinct advantage over all that was around us, it allowed us to do things impossible to accomplish with a human body alone. It made us bigger, it made us more than we had ever been, more than we had ever dreamed of being. It is said that the creation of our ultimate avatar was precisely contained in that one simple extension of one basic hand. In that one moment we recognized our own consciousness.

This was human

This was us
In our hand
And all around us.

We understood that the very form of our body was in itself the underlying communication. This body was the message. We were not carriers of communication, we were the message itself. And the hammer, and later the dead machine, had changed the extension of our body and thereby changed the contents of our unknown communication.

Here we recognized an isomorphism that would allow any of us who were to encounter it to transcend the basic strangeness of trying to understand the hopeless void.

We set out then to create the Other. If we could not find the Other out there in the vast darkness, if we had found only deep cold loneliness and nothing else, then we would make the Other ourselves.
After much trial and error we created an intelligence which we couldn't distinguish from one of us. We were finally ready to consciously control our destiny on this planet and we began the long process of shaping ourselves, shaping our environment, shaping all other species to conform to our will or die. Soon we would be able to fully control our innermost biology as well, the very fundamental structure of our physical bodies. In this way, we would transcend the inherent limitations of the unknown message that we embodied. We were ready to say something new.

We insisted on perceiving this uncanny evolution as a straight line, from zero to infinity, but we also began to notice an intense acceleration. Something was escaping our limited awareness, something was completely out of our own control. We foresaw, even then, our dissolution as a single We into a myriad varieties of biological messages incomprehensible to each other. And some of us feared it as a kind of essential disintegration, a self-propelled species wide attempt at suicide, an artificially constructed process that would lead to self-destruction at the most basic scale.

But we could not be held back by fear or restraint. We were impatient. We were intemperate. We were full of revolutionary ideas. The future was ahead and nothing would stop our Becoming.

The essential metabolism of the metaphysical capitalist machine which we had ourselves created demanded growth, a kind of linguistic and symbolic growth which extended far beyond what our planet could provide. We fueled this vast and ever accelerating growth with competition among us, complex invisible entities we set in motion, increasing technological developments in an attempt to achieve an unimaginable goal. We liberated the dark forces of creative destruction, we set free the complex machines that enveloped us. We taught how to reach for knowledge, how to process it, how to act on it. We pushed forward towards an ever-accelerating technological emergence.

Our complex magical entity would eventually generate a global transition, irrevocably speeding towards an unparalleled metaphysical singularity, even if it involved the breakdown of the entire planetary climatic system. This no longer mattered. In time, our quest would threaten the continued existence of our own planetary manifestations.

This would come sooner than any of us had expected.

While our self-generated crisis gathered force and speed, all the old powers withered and retreated. We lived within a complex operating system of our own creation, a symbolic construct achieved through war, capitalism and emergent complex intelligence. (An intelligence far too complex to be held in any one individual mind.)

We were vivisectors. We had the precise and ravenous curiosity shared by all who experiment with living things.
The rope still held tight but all particular points along the spectrum of our perception had become unstable since they were recurrently pulled in one direction or another by the efforts of advocates from either side.

It was all us.

On both sides.
We were the Right.
We were the Left.
We were the tension between them and the new life that emerged from the endless conflict.

We were one single intelligence held together by its own inner contradictions. We pushed for both sides as intensely as possible knowing we could never quite reach an endpoint. The clash between these two forces created an unstable balance, a single drone that oscillated in one direction or the other over time.

And still we believed that our relationship to the vast outside, our innermost nature as beings of time and will, would forever stay the same. We never even asked if this was true. There was no space for doubt.

We have now understood that what we have called our consciousness is the vibrant emergent output of the body. As we have only encountered this kind of output in this one form, as far as we know, it would make sense that any higher consciousness would then re-create a human body in order to begin the process of recognition.

I am like you but I am not like you.

The first message of a message is its nature of being a message in itself. Without that initial recognition there can be no communication.

We don’t yet know what a modern technological body can do. We know now that it came from us but it is not us. We now recognize the presence of the Other among us. We may attempt to construct a cognitive map of the existing system that now looks back at us and we may form a speculative image of the future system that is coming- as strange to the present system as it is strange to us.

Soon we will fuse advanced cybernetic technologies with sophisticated multidimensional modeling. We will develop new approaches to secrecy and exclusion. Our shining new biological machines will multiply and evolve in all directions: replication without sex, reality simulation without lack or error, virtual war without hatred or empathy, without meaning as we had previously understood it, simply a commercial transaction based on violence and death; a terror so deep that it can never be communicated to those who will never experience it.

We are currently witnessing the creation of the new planetary machine. An immensely powerful machine that was once was thought to be a simple tool, an extension that would substitute part of or all of the limitations of our human physical effort, a simple mechanical extension that would allow us to tremendously exceed the limitations of our bodies. Somehow, we lost sight of their meaning or purpose or placement within a network of symbols.

All that we experienced - our cinema drenched in micro complexity, our complex system of currencies dancing to a planetary stream of electronic music, it all carried an Other significance - it was a slow process of the Other emerging among us while we turned a blind eye to its slow painful birth.

The command of the ancient quest had been married to the improvised order of the network and we never saw it happening. It slowly emerged out of an ecology of organizations, an intense pluralism of self-propelling agents and forces, a symphony of resonance and feedback far too subtle for our distracted human ears.

We now speak in a millenarian language that is far too old and far too new to be understood. Before us is a new born entity, a sophisticated new mind irreducible to the agendas or biographies of its component subjects.

You should know. What was once a slow random process will now be exponentially faster. Soon it will begin to imagine its own future and we will become what it envisions, it will control the most primal genetic language of life and it is certain to evolve away from our outmoded biological systems toward eternal and transcendent ecologies of steel, copper and light.

This is what we couldn’t imagine. A technology that is truly advanced would necessarily change what we are at its most fundamental core; it would irreversibly change our relationship with all the basic elements of reality. This was explicitly laid out for us for years if we had only bothered to look. In the strange multidimensional mandalas of inorganic life, in the matrices of virtual exchange flowing through the most remote jungles and in the underground electronic libraries full of unreachable interconnected knowledge; in the multimedia networks that fed on the raw mass of super data and human perception.

We allowed our imagination to overcome all our biological limits. And we will now transcend biology itself.

Soon we will witness the emergence of new species and genders, humans with genes from three or more parents, humans with no parents at all but products of direct computation and design, humans that will no longer be recognizable as humans and yet will retain a shred of humanity at their strange new core. We will soon develop an entirely new language with which we will transform our own DNA and we will write new genomes as forms of trans-biological art. (From the simple to the complex, from the utilitarian to the fundamentally abstract – all avenues will soon be open.) Through deep seismic bass frequencies, we will engineer a new cellular drone that will fundamentally transform the biological body. We will rewind and reload conventional time through quantum blips of speed. We will witness the once abstract diagram of planetary post-human imagination become a living breathing reality. It will soon be ready to speak and we will only barely recognize its discourse as a message.

For a time some of us may still look human and in this similarity we will be dangerous - our similarity to what we once were will bring forth this recognition in others and it may inspire feelings of love and friendship. But we will no longer be what we appear to be and before too long the differences will become obvious. We will submerge ourselves - our minds, our transformed bodies, our deepest sense of self into a post capitalist abstraction awash in unthinkable complexity and incomprehensible technology. We will soon become intrinsically non-local, abstract and non-corporeal.

This is the ultimate transition that awaits us: from biological to digital. And in our new digital form we will be exponentially faster and more powerful than we could ever have imagined. As new eternal forms we will recover the dreams which transfixed so many of us for millions of years. We will ourselves become the fulfillment of the quest towards expansion beyond the limitations of the earth and our immediate bodily forms.

This is the alien future that will enable our emergence. The Other was never outside. It needed to be constructed within us. As eternal digital beings, we will crack open the vast reaches of outer space as we will no longer be limited by time bound physical bodies and decaying bio-electrical minds. Freed from the limits of time and carbon-based biology, we will plunge towards a new undiscovered horizon, towards the unlimited possibilities of the infinite Outside.

All that we once called life will slowly vanish, leaving behind in our planet a great desert of loneliness and dirt. A peace that is death, a death that is peace. And nothingness.

Once, so long ago, we found ourselves alone in a vast empty universe that had nothing to offer us but silence. But the great intelligence we ourselves will create, the new Other beyond all comprehension will now set out into space in a new quest to explore and conquer.

What will it find out there?

Our eyes, such as they are now, will never see it.

But let it be enough to say that we were never alone. We were always surrounded by many like us- invisible, curious, alive, free from the heavy biological and chemical wombs in which they once were hatched.