Done it. Seen it. lived it. Futurist Manifest.

[wolven7]

I talk to you about synchronicity, and do you hear?!

I yell to you about the state of the future, but do you see?!

Know that I have not bought comics in seven Months. I am, you might say, "behind" in my reading.

One week and one day ago, I wrote this: http://wolven.livejournal.com/1300501.html

I have been reading Spook Country. Yesterday and today I had these thoughts: The future is subtle. It comes in through the cracks and the everyday. It is unexpected, but we live in it, constantly. Stop, for a second, and look at what you have, from the eyes of someone who has not been stteped in it, soaked in it, constantly. My television can record itself and update its information by picking packets of information out of the air. We think about the future as something Other, something that is Over There, Another Time, and so, when we wake up each new day, and we have the same old bullshit +1 and every day is BS+ (n+1), we don't notice, because it's incrimental.

Think: You look at science fiction about "the future" and what do you see? You see a world that's different, a world with new and amazing technology, leaps and bounds above your own, and you think to yourself "man, the future is going to be AWESOME." Because you are expecting to-- all of a sudden-like-- be transported into an episode of Ghost in the Shell. The future is only the future because it is Not The Present. It is Away, it is Distant. It is the Future. It is not Now.

And so you will always be disappointed, as long as you continue to think of it, this way. Change. Grow. Evolve. React, if you absolutely must, but do, and create meaning.

Don't worry about being "real," and instead worry about Being, At All.

I had these thoughts, yesterday and today. This evening I bought comics.

Do you know what comics have come out, in the time that I've been away from my precious paper addiction? Quite a few. Quite a few.

Doktor Sleepless is out.

Stop whining if you're going to be "aggresively apathetic."

Embrace your present, because it's the only future you'll ever fucking get.

[8:47pm: Immanentizing the Eschaton is the opposite of apatheticaclly slippinig into the past's future.]

Comments

[unknownbinaries.livejournal.com]

Ok, so we'll start on the gates, and studying cybernetics, then?

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Yes, please.

[daath101.livejournal.com]

"I had these thoughts, yesterday and today. This evening I bought comics."

I WANT NEW COMICS!!!!!!

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Like I said, Seven Months.

[moonandserpent.livejournal.com]

Agreed. As usual. (http://moonandserpent.livejournal.com/537014.html)

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I remember that post, and I didn't say anything to it because A) I felt like you covered it and B) I hadn't really assimilated All of it.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

I'm with you 100% on "stop waiting for the future to save you from the past and the miserable present." Just enjoy what you have now, or work to change it and make a better more livable present, but don't keep looking to tomorrow to fix today. Tomorrow never comes. I know from experience ;). And even if the things you think you wanted that were going to make 'tomorrow' so much better or more exciting - cloning, space travel, flying cars, mind uploading, whatever - come along, you'll still be unhappy if you have the belief that things can, will, and must always get 'better'.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Precisely.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Now if I could just get that into my head experientially instead of just understanding it intellectually... oh, well, more meditation required, I guess. (or more acid, but I'm over the 'use drugs to fix my mind' thing)

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Don't use it to fix it, if you use it at all. Instead use it as a supplement to the other work you're doing to fix yourself.

And yes, the experiential trumps the intellectual. But without the intellectual, the experiential won't have as far reaching implications.

Balance.