Monday, January 17, 2011

PEOPLE WATCHING


Legend has it that the Native Americans first photographed by white men believed the camera was stealing their souls just as their lands were being usurped in the westward expansion. The clairvoyance of these early inhabitants was matched by their ability to dance among the girders to construct the nation's first skyscrapers without fear of falling.

In the early 21st century the development of the cell phone made photographers of everyone. An internet application called Photosynthe allowed a global collation of uploaded photos to form a virtual world as solid as the density of photographs taken. Governments, always afraid of the citizenry’s learning of their duplicity, developed surveillance techniques enabling records of public events to be seamlessly complete both visually and historically.

By 2052 the only reason to leave one’s house would be to take pictures of reality. All social interactivity was conducted over the internet by organic computers ingested by the users as symbiots. Reproduction decreased to the point that the birth rate was a matter of concern for the survival of the specie who’d abandoned their bodies, volunteered their souls and integrated into the matrix of vicarious prosthetics once only found so complete among rabid sports fans.

In 2114 there were two distinguishable species of human, the dormant and the awake. The awake lived and played in the reality the dormants only dared to dream about. The lack of reproduction among the cybernetically isolated dormants resulted in a world view shrinking with fewer and fewer picture takers going less and less far from home. The awake kept track of the dormants’ limited world of interest to inhabit the places they’d abandoned and return to natures ways undetected.

Let there be enlightenment.

6 comments:

ETERNITY KIDZ said...

Nice trip into the future you've got here.
You should check out the comic/movie The Surrogates. The movie was lousy but the concept is interesting.
Although I like yr Awake idea more.

Brian Miller said...

here's to being one of the awake...

troutsky said...

I think I'm awake but so do most folks. Hey, Ubuntu says aynrand.org is an untrusted site. Is it really safe?

troutsky said...

I went on and listened. It fits in perfectly with your whole "dormant and awake" dichotomy so I see the attraction for you. She categorizes humans as those who think and those who don't.

This model, which liberal meritocracy is always in danger of slipping into, has larger ramifications. As a justification for inequality it has always served power well and liberals such as yourself have always been complicit in this ideology. Freedom is dangerous and the modern Ayn Rand, Glen Beck, is the perfect example.

That's my honest reaction friend.

Ducky's here said...

The Buddha said, "Just describe me as the one who woke up."

Yodood said...

Trout,
I appreciate your effort but somehow fail to understand your opposition to the dichotomy just because it can be corrupted from awake/dormant by extruding it through your wobbly reality tunnel into haves/wannabes.

I realize our goal to be very much alike, but you consider mankind as a real conscious entity whose welfare must be tended with one cure for all, while I consider the individual cells in your entity being their own oppressors by willing themselves to behave within laws designed to control the most dangerous anomalies among them. I am against top down intelligence at least as much as your railing against the machine seems to indicate you are, but we vary in that you want to change the machine's design and I want people to realize how fat and dormant they're getting by depending on any machine as a necessary life prosthetic out of the growing fear it will quit pumping their heart if they really question its values.