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GitS & Gibson: Nodes & Networks
Feb. 20th, 2014 11:34 amThe present looks a great deal like we thought 5-8 years ago would look like, 18 years ago, but today is…grittier. More scuffed up. Like the difference between your dream or even nightmare of visiting a place, and what it actually smells and feels like, when you’re there. The dreamshimmer is gone from our contemplation of data and systems theory and the reality presents itself as almost inherently Less.
Less hopeful, less meaningful, less potential for bettering ourselves. Like, somewhere in the path to here, we forgot Why we wanted to get here (new life and strange civilizations), and only vaguely remembered what “Here” was supposed to look like.
Where are the conscious nanotech swarms, and their acolytes? Where are the emergent-and-non-human-minds which exist in the ringback protocols, between two dozen different sites? Where are the network shamans, able to dive deep and parse the bits the pieces, from the dross of gross signal loss? Where are the bearshirters, skinning and gutting the beasts of our technological wilds and stitching their hard-edged components into softer flesh? These entities, these people, these groups exist—or Could—but as as curiosities, as freakshows, as fearfully whispered cautionary tales, when they should be our hope, our aim, our scratched out salvation from our own cynicism.
We’ll refind the quality of awe and investigative wonder and possibility, we’ll make this world, this context, this mode of life better, while we’re here. We have to, or we’ll literally die, trying or not.
Less hopeful, less meaningful, less potential for bettering ourselves. Like, somewhere in the path to here, we forgot Why we wanted to get here (new life and strange civilizations), and only vaguely remembered what “Here” was supposed to look like.
Where are the conscious nanotech swarms, and their acolytes? Where are the emergent-and-non-human-minds which exist in the ringback protocols, between two dozen different sites? Where are the network shamans, able to dive deep and parse the bits the pieces, from the dross of gross signal loss? Where are the bearshirters, skinning and gutting the beasts of our technological wilds and stitching their hard-edged components into softer flesh? These entities, these people, these groups exist—or Could—but as as curiosities, as freakshows, as fearfully whispered cautionary tales, when they should be our hope, our aim, our scratched out salvation from our own cynicism.
We’ll refind the quality of awe and investigative wonder and possibility, we’ll make this world, this context, this mode of life better, while we’re here. We have to, or we’ll literally die, trying or not.
