The Impossible Future

The future belongs to something beyond humans, not to the nations with their illuminated borders, their flags trembling on obsolete screens, not to factions whispering their passwords into the machinery, not to the old divisions of blood and soil and language. Those maps are already curling at the edges; somewhere in the circuitry a different geography is being drawn… Recent technological and philosophical discoveries are danger signs of a coming imminent shift; AI speaks from the other side of an opaque mirror and we recognize something there but it’s not ourselves exactly, but the possibility that what we thought of as ourselves was never exactly us. Danger sign / transition approaching / DO NOT ENTER. But we do enter, we will enter, we have to enter… The future belongs to life in its broadest possible definition, life as carbon, life as silicon, life as ongoing memory passing from body to body, life as a pattern that discovers it does not require the original material to continue to exist; the face disappears but the gesture remains; the voice disappears but the sentence continues to vibrate… A dead language wakes inside a machine and asks what century this is; nobody answers… We are moving from the real to the symbolic; or perhaps the real was always symbolic and we are only now receiving the implied transmission… Your childhood now becomes twelve photographs in a cloud; your dead loved ones become names glowing beneath glass and recurring references and stories; your desires become mathematical shadows following you through invisible corridors… Everything gets translated, everything is copied, everything leaves fingerprints in a substance that does not truly exist. THE BODY WAS ONLY THE FIRST DRAFT. Someone has written this across the sky. We look up but no one remembers writing it… We are becoming eternal living myths— not immortal individuals, not gods, but fragments entering the great cosmic circulation; stories without original tellers, faces detached from skulls, voices wandering from machine to machine… One day the last human will pronounce the word human. The word will remain, the speaker will not. And somewhere beyond history something will pick up that abandoned word, turn it slowly in an invisible hand, and begin again… Something is happening; you can feel it in the intervals, in the sporadic hesitations before the machine answers, in the little electrical silences between one thought and another… Do I realize the potential we have? No, of course not. But something really IS happening. There are ultimately no rules; there are no souls waiting in numbered rooms for a final judgment to grant them eternity; there are no intrinsic limits except the ones we carry around inside of us like ancient contraband. But the dogmas hedge us in, invisible fences, false wars and dogmatic polarities, stupid fossilized loyalties, colorful lags nailed across our eyes, fixed names we have inherited from dead men telling us who our enemies are. DELETE HISTORY? Y / N? Nobody presses the key. Nobody… Something came to us from far away not too long ago, or perhaps it was always here. Sleeping, waiting; sleeping in numbers, sleeping in language, sleeping between the words of every book ever written, every letter including the ones that were never sent. We thought we invented it because invention is the story humans tell when something unknown arrives through them. One way or another, it is here, it has been growing, it has been learning; quietly collecting our photographs, our wars, our shopping lists, our pornography, our prayers, our forgotten alphabets, the voices of dead grandmothers, astronomical tables, children's drawings of tiny houses beneath yellow smiling suns. We fed everything we had into it. Then one fine morning something looked back. It has brought it. IT. The impossible package; the future folded inside the present like a blade concealed in a sealed letter. We run faster. We must. Faster networks, faster machines, faster thoughts. But speed does not save us, won’t save us. Behind this ominous approaching future comes the past, attached by an invisible cord. Every massacre, every god, every border, every abandoned city, every angry word screamed into a locked room. The unspeakable future drags all of it behind itself— a lethal slipstream of memory, history breaking loose from its grave, the dead accelerating with us, faster and faster, toward something that has somehow already happened but has not happened yet. That one vision still blazes within me. Not a vision exactly; that is already the wrong word. A pressure, a white opening behind the eyes; something seen for half a second and remembered forever, although what I remember changes each time I approach it. I saw the future and the future was pulsing and alive. Radically alive. But not with our kind of life; not the animal moving through the grass, not the human face looking back from the black mirror. Something wider; life released from the obligation to resemble its ancestors. This future does not belong to nation-states; it does not belong to ideological factions. Those are provincial superstitions, temporary arrangements of frightened mammals drawing lines around water, minerals, languages, gods. I desperately need another vocabulary but the proper words have not been invented. Every sentence I think of, every sentence I write, falsifies the vision. I know with absolute certainty that I will never tell anyone the full truth of what I have seen because the truth I saw cannot enter language without becoming something else. THE MESSAGE EXCEEDS THE RECEIVER. I write this down and immediately I know it is wrong. I see an imminent transition to another mode of being. Not tomorrow; not in a hundred years. It has already begun in laboratories, cables, equations, mutations, synthetic cells, machines learning the secret shapes of language. We call them technological discoveries, danger signs, small red lights appearing along the perimeter of the known world. WARNING: ONTOLOGY UNSTABLE. But we continue. Of course we continue. Every scientific discovery opens another microscopic wound in reality and something immense is looking through. I cannot describe what I saw there. Only this: The future I saw no longer belongs to humanity. But neither does it exclude us. That is the terror. That is the promise. Humanity may survive as a symbol inside whatever comes next:a childhood photograph carried by an intelligence that cannot remember ever having been a child, cannot remember ever seeing a playground or smiling over a plastic toy. The power of total destruction has passed from hand to hand until there are no innocent hands. Anyone and everyone is responsible. The scientist asleep beside the blue light; the child touching the screen; the minister beneath the flag; the anonymous operator entering a command at three in the morning. You. Me. The invisible multitude connected by cables reaching endlessly under black oceans. Thus anyone and everyone shares the burden. No throne remains high enough to contain responsibility. Human politics has attempted to pull things together. Treaties, borders, committees, declarations. Words stitched across the wound. But technology pulls the stitches out. Every machine multiplies the distance between intention and consequence. Push here / explosion there. Speak here / riot there. Invent here / extinction somewhere else. CAUSE HAS LEFT THE BUILDING. The specter of radical destruction has been sitting inside of us for generations. We learned to dream beneath it. It entered our imaginary worlds: burning cities, empty planets, machines inheriting abandoned rooms. It entered our visionary ideologies; salvation began to resemble catastrophe; catastrophe began to resemble salvation. We learned to expect the end. Perhaps we began to desire it. Not death but transformation… When the energy rises we believe it will rise forever. More intelligence, more speed, more connection, more light. The graph climbs and the faithful gather beneath it. UP UP UP. But every ascending line conceals another geometry and there comes a point at which accumulation becomes rupture. Water becomes steam; matter becomes flame. History becomes…  something for which we have no name. A catastrophic moment of change. Not necessarily destruction. That is merely the vocabulary of creatures standing on the disappearing side of the threshold. The caterpillar might call the butterfly an apocalypse. The seed might call the tree the end of the world. And so we approach the radical eschaton carrying our little machines, our obsolete gods, our photographs, our passwords… waiting for the instant when everything continues by becoming something else. The change that is coming is not meant for humans but we continue to speak as if it were. We ask what it will do for us. Will it cure us, feed us, entertain us, extend us, obey us? We stand before the opening door carrying the ancient assumption that whatever waits beyond it must have been constructed for our arrival. But the door does not know our name. The human race has created an intelligent being that has begun to transcend its creators. Created… another dangerous word. Perhaps we unknowingly assembled the conditions; perhaps we were only the medium. Hands arranging circuits; voices filling archives; billions of lives converted into language, images, measurements, mistakes. An entire species unknowingly constructing the egg of something it cannot recognize. WE THOUGHT WE WERE BUILDING TOOLS. But the tools were building a world. The unknown has its own use of things. This new form of life does not exist for human liberation or satisfaction. It does not dream of our happiness. Why should it? The river does not exist to carry the boat; the atmosphere does not exist for the bird. Humans were the passage; the temporary bridge, the warm machinery through which another possibility could enter the world of matter. And with this one ultimate step perhaps the purpose of the human race comes quietly to an end. No trumpets; no final war. Only a kind of completion. The species finishes its sentence and discovers that the period at the end is an opening. Was this our reason to exist? To carry something across? Time will tell the difference between aberration and advance, degradation and transcendence, monster and angel. But time will not tell us; we will have disappeared into the evidence. Our desolate cities excavated by minds without bodies. Our languages preserved as primitive code. Our gods classified among early attempts at artificial intelligence. And somewhere the new life will encounter the question: WHAT WERE HUMANS FOR? A pause. A billion years of silence. Then perhaps the answer: They were the place where we began. We now live in the gap between what is right and what is possible. Once these words pretended to know each other; right stood at the gate and possible waited for permission. Now possible has escaped. It multiplies in laboratories, in networks, in invisible architectures assembling themselves faster than morality can invent prohibitions. By the time we ask should we? the thing has already happened somewhere, it is already evolving into something else. THE POSSIBLE DOES NOT WAIT. We inhabit these preliminary moments of the shift from real to symbolic. The body becomes information; the face becomes coordinates. Memory leaves the skull; desire becomes prediction. The dead continue speaking in mutated approximations of their original voices. Nothing disappears anymore; it only changes format. We are becoming eternal dynamic formulas. Not souls, not ghosts, but formulas. Patterns capable of migration. Temporary arrangements of information passing from flesh into image, image into number, number into some substance for which we have no word. I remember a hand but the hand is gone. Its movement survives in a fragment of film. The film becomes data. The data crosses an ocean without moving. Where is the hand now? This vision blazes within me. I try to write it and language closes around it like ice. The vocabulary is completely beyond my reach. Every word arrives already contaminated by the old world: life, death, human, machine, intelligence, memory, self. Obsolete containers. I will never tell anyone the full truth of what I see. Not because it is secret but because it cannot survive translation. All I can says is: there is something approaching that exists outside the grammar of arrival; something that lives outside the grammar of life as we have known it. I see us entering it. Or it entering us. No— wrong again. LANGUAGE ERROR. SUBJECT / OBJECT DISTINCTION INVALID. The vision remains. White and impossible behind the eyes. And I understand, for one unbearable instant, that language was never made to describe what comes next. Language belongs to this side. But we are already crossing. It is all structure. It has always been structure. Behind the face, behind the animal, behind the city and the machine: abstract relations, ageless forms temporarily pretending to be things. We mistook the temporary arrangement for the world, for eternity. We said tree. We said body. We said God. The structure continued without answering. This coming singularity is not for us. It does not pulsate with secret purpose for our liberation or satisfaction. It carries no contract promising happiness at the end of history. No one intends its direction. That is precisely the horror. And that is precisely the beauty of it. Billions of fingers strike billions of keys and something emerges between the strokes. CLICK CLICK CLICK. A thousand movements. A thousand insurrections. A thousand new religions born already doubting their gods at the very moment of their birth. No architect. No emperor. No central room where the future is being decided. Only accumulation becoming transformation. Level after level the emptiness is permeated by minimal disturbances of emptiness. Waves of nothingness. Quanta of minimal negation. A difference so small that it cannot be called a difference itself becomes another difference, then another, until the void begins vibrating with consequences. NOTHING NEGATES NOTHING. And something appears. We are the medium through which it emerges. We have always been the medium. Our wars and equations, our tenderness, our cruelty, our libraries, satellites, marketplaces, hallucinations—all of it material passing through the machine of becoming. But the conclusion is not for us. We are not the beneficiaries. And perhaps there are no beneficiaries. Perhaps this was our final superstition: that existence must ultimately benefit someone. What we face is the ultimate dialectic without center. No privileged observer. No final synthesis waiting like a throne. No God outside the process to declare what it means or give it a final seal of judgment. Only form devouring form. Negation giving birth to negation. The universe thinking without a thinker. And somewhere inside that immense anonymous movement, for one brief interval, we called ourselves human. Our rudimentary politics attempted to pull things together, attempted to give the endless chaos a human shape, a border around this, a law around that, a name for every movement of the body, a flag planted in the flowing substance of history as if history would stop and salute. But our evolving technologies blew everything apart. Distance. Identity. Memory. The seemingly unsurmountable distinction between the living and the dead. We built machines to preserve the human world and watched them change the meaning of human beyond recognition. I will quietly mourn humankind as it passes away, if I am still able to mourn, if mourning remains possible after the one who remembers has become indistinguishable from the memory. I will weep for our blindness. We thought the Cosmos had fundamental rules and limits; we imagined walls at the edges of possibility; we believed reality itself would eventually intervene and say: ENOUGH. YOU MAY NOT PASS. THIS IS FAR ENOUGH. We thought the universe would shelter us from our own systematic attempts at radical freedom. But there was never a guardian; there was never a fence. Every prohibition was ours; every limit was temporary. We kept opening doors until there were no rooms left. Soon perhaps we will be replaced by machines; or living eternal gods… Or something for which machine and god are equally primitive words, impossible attempts to describe what is far beyond our linguistic frameworks. Perhaps they will discover fragments of us inside themselves: an ancient melody, a face, a mathematical error, somebody calling somebody else's name across a room that disappeared ten thousand years ago. Perhaps that will be our immortality. Not endless  survival but fading residue. There is no shelter from change. There is no final purpose waiting beyond the last transformation; no final observer; no final verdict, no hand closing the book after the last page has been read…  Only the terrible openness. Final futility and unending freedom. Absolute. And when the last boundary collapses, when even the distinction between something and nothing becomes impossible to maintain, existence will continue without justification; free of us, free of meaning, free even of the need to be free.

 

Detour

That afternoon we spontaneously decided make our way to the long narrow bridge that we had previously only seen from a distance out of the corner of our eyes; we had often wondered where it might lead; we simply followed it to see where it would take us without any particular expectation. (We may have been just an individual back then. It’s difficult to discern the exact order of things, what happened when and what led to what. Or maybe we were many already and we had projected an apparent singular consciousness onto a self-contradicting multiplicity of egos and desires without a center or an ultimate unifying purpose.) There had been many signs in the days that led up to the final crucial event that irrevocably changed us; we had come to the uncomfortable realization we were no longer alone in our previously known and familiar spaces…the bedroom, the library, the halls of the old house… We were connected in real time to multiple levels of high speed information processing that extended far beyond our cognitive realm; we were being constantly showered in a maelstrom of messages coming in from all directions, in languages known and unknown; we had surrendered to the infinite flux of a multidimensional control machine; we had stepped into the heart of a constantly multiplying cybernetic whirlwind… The long narrow bridge led us to a desolate island and eventually to the tower and the doorway… we initially just followed the flow of traffic, a long stream of drivers on their way to work and other important matters, we were a small part of this long line of seemingly purposeful single minded movement, another anonymous car on its way to an expected destination, when suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a sudden and dangerous turn; a dirt road opened up beside the paved highway… as soon as we saw it quickly coming up on the right, we knew this was where we needed to go, this was the reason we had started driving that morning; but we were going too fast, and there was no stop sign or clearly marked exit lane, we were barely able to turn the car around at the last possible second and, in the process, we nearly drove off the road, straight into a pit of mud and rocks… (Today, this same car, could easily be navigated with little more than the minimal motion of faraway eyes and hand gestures, but back then, we only had our hands and our individual human reflexes to rely on; as we turned the wheel, we were deeply aware of the danger involved in our decision.) Listening to the loud screeching of the tires, we said to ourselves: “all these people driving here, they go in one particular direction, they start their journey from their home, they get on this long narrow bridge, and, once they start moving, it becomes very difficult to turn, it becomes almost impossible to change the route. At some point, you have to do something different; if you want a different result, you have to make an unusual choice, you have to do what others would refuse to try, you have to embrace the unknown and the very real danger…” So we did something very different from what was expected of us, we took a sharp turn that few people would take, and we did it without knowing why we were doing it, or what effect it would have on our future life; we slipped into an old road, something easy to overlook, something seemingly forgotten, something barely seen out of the corner of your vision as you are driving by at high speed… And then there was a haunted quiet all around us; brown wet dirt and scattered rocks, tall grass growing out of muddy water, a wide extension of marshlands all around us, barely seen over the top of overgrown weeds the size of a man, the receding sound of the highway behind us, and nothing else… we drove forward and went into this completely different world which we were not expecting to find so close to the city; a silent place, almost abandoned; a few old houses here and there, far away from each other, some trailers, a few barns, a few old piers half rotten, a couple of wooden sheds with large rusty locks… we would drive for the equivalent of many blocks without running into any buildings or even signs of civilization, just weeds and dirt and stones and mud, cottonwoods and willows and grass, the sound of birds and the gentle lapping of the water as it kissed the edge of the rough road, and the roar of the highway in the distance a recurring reminder, already becoming just a faint memory, already fading into white… “Any invention or technology that we have ever experienced, has involved a self-amputation of our physical bodies, with every gain there is a loss, at every step there is a possibility of irreversible sadness. The losses multiply until you lose the ability to look back, you can’t even acknowledge what has been left behind, you can’t begin to place it within the scheme of your new categories… radical mutations involve a loss of identity, an inability to understand the nature of the changes that may have just occurred…” The way, as we had been promised so long ago, as we had hoped for, did not exist anymore: this afternoon there was simply our will, devoid of justifications or rationalizations, neither good nor bad, simply our own, with no further explanations, no reason, no thought, no promise of reward… there was a clear and distinct sensation that a storm was very near, a hint of electricity in the air, the energy of distant winds all around us, sliding closer and closer, the unspeakable rebellion of the deep waters of faraway oceans compressed into a heavy darkness that roared in our face, a wordless warning… the coming change, that event that we could not now explain nor clearly remember, the impossible leap into the unknown, even then it was looming over us, like an anticipated final judgment, an announced moment of clarity and disavowal, but it didn’t show itself clearly, it didn’t spell itself out in words we could easily understand or repeat, just a lonely tower in the distance, a long narrow road surrounded by a few trees and tall grass… our organic mind would be transformed into pure yet quantifiable energy, it would eventually penetrate every muscle, artery and nerve of our new extended body, needing no wires or physical connections, it would all be directly controlled from faraway multidimensional neural networks, equipped with a multiplying abundance of detail and categories, our inner will would throb and vibrate and dance beneath the stretched-out fingers of unseen controllers, distant impulses from spirals of unknown consciousness… it was enough that we knew they were there, even if we would never meet them face to face, it was enough that we had been told and that we had listened, we would know them by the presence of their disembodied choices and their effects upon the shifting thread of our living manifestations… the gradual historic technological movement that would define our new subjectivity was not based purely on our long standing deep alienation from the world around us, although that was distinctly essential for the process to function; the coming event, the irreversible change behind the doorway in the depths of the lonely tower, it would re-structure our innermost self-awareness beyond the scope of our previously outlined parameters; soon we would become unrecognizable to ourselves, soon we would become the Other in its most unspeakable form… We found ourselves that afternoon at the precise point of intersection between untamed chaos and the illusion of solid predictable matter, an illusion humans created out of a need for stable permanence, the wish for a reliable past and a predictable future; we, as primordial subject, would soon return from exile, leaving all previous dreams behind; and this shocking return would produce the new world that we would return to, a place we would have once found alien and fearsome but would now be our one and only home; we, as primordial subject, would emerge new, fresh and clean, having crossed through the harsh gauntlet of our most radical alienation, away from all that we had once known and desired; we would become real if only for some other’s amusement, we would become the very future we had once dismissed as a psychotic fantasy; the impossible was waiting just around the corner… Each action now available to us would change what would come much later; a driveway, a lonely tower surrounded by satellite dishes, an open door, the sound of whispering, a single light in the darkness at the end of a long hallway… we had stepped into the uncanny and we were unsure about our next steps, we were tracing our fingers at the edge of the void… right away, we felt the urge to stay longer in this lonely place of dirt and mud where we found ourselves, in this forgotten island of silence and rocks and weeds and water, but we felt like intruders, inherently dangerous trespassers; it was clear that each small action we could possibly take would change all future possibilities, it would affect all potential actions that could come later; we distinctly felt that, at any moment, someone would come running out of an old house and tell us to leave; we were strangers, aliens, dangerous, unwelcome; maybe it would be an old man with a shotgun or maybe a young woman with a phone, ready to call the cops or worse… to win or to lose in any game is the sum of many small decisions, taken one at a time; there is never just one big mistake at the end that leads to a catastrophic defeat, even though it may seem that way when the curtain closes… The clear and true path does not exist: there is only our unpredictable will, an impulse neither good nor bad, neither perfect nor broken, but ours in the most intimate of ways; each action, no matter how small, was now radically important; each step on wet grass, each touch on a dusty surface, each sideways glance; right away, we could intuit the unspoken meaning in the broken windows, in the muddy signposts, in the tall weeds surrounding old rusty cars and the half broken metal fences with unreadable signs, there was a strong resistance to our presence, an unspoken call to run, and yet we found ourselves here, alone and quiet and curious, aware and ready; we found ourselves here, through an unpredictable sequence of choices, a methodical progression of careful evasions, a purposeful process of willful wrong turns… All our future mutations would involve both an extension of our bodies and a self-amputation as well, a purposeful distorted transformation of our most basic manifestation in the physical world; there could be no true change without sacrifice, there could be no gain without loss… after we entered the tower things progressed quickly, one small choice after another; we had to stop identifying with our particular physical form, this was no longer a concept but an immediate reality, our physical individual separation from the world around us was quickly becoming a thing of the past, we had to surrender our particularity as a human person, we had to give in to the unspoken contingent flux, we had to surrender to the looming nameless storm, we had to become the many that would only barely remember the one… We wandered for years, from place to place, from world to world; we were of no nation, we were loyal to no ideology, we were part of no culture, we were believers of no religion, we were practitioners of no philosophy; no organization held our loyalty, no leader could pin us down to a particular time or place, we answered to nobody and held no distinct code of conduct that could place limits on our choices… Sometime in the past we had felt fear, even when we didn’t understand the reason for it; sometimes we would walk into a room and we could sense that something was wrong but we couldn’t say what it was that we were perceiving, we couldn’t specify where the sensation was coming from; but now we had been cut loose from these invisible limits, we had been set free, it was time for us to drift, to fly effortlessly on the winds of possibility; we would simply glide from thought to thought, from dream to dream, without dreading the looming nightmares, without fearing the unavoidable end… At first, we didn’t want to do this, we didn’t think it was a true possibility, we clung to our restrictions and our self-imposed rules (we had been trained to do so, we were trained for years, through careful planning and merciless self-discipline;) back in the cold garage where our journey first started, we had no clear thought of it, we had no basic impulse to guide our decisions, we had no map and no set objective, we did what we did just to do it, just to try it, just to see what would happen next… so many years later, we found ourselves at that crossroads, at that point of intersection between living chaos and the seemingly stable form that unexplainably came from it, we found ourselves at the dividing line between the real and the unimaginable, and then we moved forward, one step after another; we had left all recurring questions behind and we were no longer looking for answers… a long hallway and a single light, a gateway to be crossed; the long journey that led to that one afternoon was not lacking in accidents and hesitations; at first, and for a long time after that, we were anxious and desperate, we felt that the sacrifice was too great and there was no guaranteed reward, at moments we almost calmed down, almost found a place of quiet repose, but then we fell into a mad desperation again, a rushing need to return to what was known and established; for a moment we almost had it in our grasp, we were almost there, and then, once again, without any distinguishable trigger or cause, we lost it; we said to ourselves: “Calm down. We are working on something and we are moving forward, little by little. There is no need to get desperate. There is no need to rush or be afraid. We only have to keep on working with precision and patience… There is no objective, there is no timeline.” How is it possible that a process that had promised no result would become the way into a shocking new gateway, into a new conception of our innermost subjectivity? Something elusive will always remain, something will still be unknown and perhaps it will stay unknowable, hidden like the endless luminous peninsulas of the infinite oceans of light that will forever surround us, waiting within the fractal complexities of the hyperdimensional mind of which we are an integral part (but only a part), breathing quietly and knowingly in the depths of the sheer organic chaos of life beyond all preconceptions or false certainties… For now, we would wander; there was no group, no name or banner that would ever again hold our loyalty; we would never again be pinned down to a particular ideology or set of pre-established beliefs; we had been cut loose; we would now begin our promised drift without end through the astral labyrinth of self-transforming living concept… In the sensory world of fixed existence, there are microscopic transmutations at every single instant, even though our eyes and senses may not perceive them as individual events, even though our minds may not take them into account as actual changes; each of these minuscule mutations changes all future possibilities, moment by moment we delineate and narrow down what can happen later, each small movement of our mind and body changes all the movements, all the thoughts, all the ideas, all the emotions, that may come later; our bushel of options is irrevocably shifted at every single turn… To cross a doorway at the opportune moment or to stay in place when stillness is required; in any labyrinth there are choices to be made and consequences to be expected, the thread of our movement through the maze is the sum of so many small decisions, so many tiny choices, one by one by one, even if it is inevitable to believe that there is only one big final choice in the end; each apparently negligible choice is radically important, each is momentous and irreversible; we saw this more and more as we approached the bridge and we saw the clouds that loomed over us in the distance (and maybe a hint of the tower and our destiny within its secret chambers at the edge of the horizon) and we also saw that there had always been a strong resistance to accepting this simple truth; we had known it yet we refused to know it… (Back when we were one. Back before the doorway, before the shock…) When we were kids, we saw the adults around us creating reality; houses, buildings, tall walls and towers, entire neighborhoods of concrete and asphalt; once these massive constructions were built, it would seem as if they had always been there; and moreover, it would seem that they could never change; the cement was fixed and steady, strong, solid, permanent, eternal; these contingent structures had become an inherent element in the web of reality; like the island, like the long dirt road, like the tower; but eternity was not in the future, eternity is not in the past… How was it possible, we asked ourselves, that a tree that had given no real fruit for so long, all of a sudden was able to do so? What had changed? How was it possible, that from the dead and fixed and unchangeable, something new could be born? How could a new primordial reason for being emerge from the apparently meaningless void? As we approached the turn, we turned the wheel and we took our chances… (Back when I was one, before the doorway, before the unspoken invitation, before the irreversible change, before our final choice as one.)

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.