[RANT] Discovering the Future by the Removal of Patches.

These days there's a lot going on in my life in some ways, and little happening in others. Since August 2nd of last year, things changed drastically; and as usual, it takes time to adjust. This is sort of a not for the end of the adjustment period, an adjustment period with a chorus not unlike a yearning for the chorus of Solsbury Hill. Right now's the end of the song:

Today I don’t need a replacement
I’ll tell them what the smile on my face meant
My heart was going boom boom boom
Hey, I said, you can keep my things, they’ve come to take me home.

'Home', of course, is the future. A future that I see. And since I have about an hour before I wander down the road and wait around for tenants who can't even seem to pay less than $10 US/month for an acre of land (and the Land Tenants Association says that they are the victims...), I'll talk a little about the future as I see it. Not just here, but globally, not just globally, but societally, not just societally, but the larger whole that everyone forgets about in their day to day affairs.

We're a strange species, humans. We will say that something is 'forward moving', or 'ground breaking', yet we rarely try to see what is beyond the horizon. We seek completeness, and when we find a void we patch it up with stray beliefs that support the rest of the structure of our collective and individual lives. Most discussion of the future is rarely more than a tour of the prison of ideas that keeps us where we are, because what we use to patch what we do not know doesn't allow for what is outside; a patch insulates. A patch keeps us from the future. Very few people are willing to allow this wound to time heal in open air; in a world of temporary we seek some permanence when the permanence itself is temporary.

So, what is the future? What holds the future? Is it the technology that we fight for and against? No, the future is the reason that we fight - for or against. If cornered, most people would say that we're working toward what future generations will use - and yet, nobody has an all encompassing view of what the future could be. To many, the future exists as fragments. As little shards of pseudo reality; islands in time when we don't even really understand what time is other than something to measure what happens between our life and death. There is no immortality in this existence other than progress. Continuance is a vector quantity; without direction it has no velocity. In other words, things not changing means that continuance happens - but at the cost of progress. Continuance is a form of patch.

But our patches keep us from progress. They are blinders.

Here's what the future looks like to me, without blinders.

The Present Course

On our present course, we'll spend a lot of time in meetings and spending little green pieces of paper which are, thankfully, biodegradable. We'll use up our organic fuels, and we'll cut down forests, and we'll sit around and watch television inside apartments and houses with filtered air, sipping on carbonated beverages and eating fast foods that will keep our bank accounts indentured to pharmaceutical companies - do you think it's a mistake that they advertise drugs on television and tell you to go see your doctor?

The information flow will remain top to bottom, especially when the people who advocate otherwise do not practice what they preach. They will continue to have meetings about how information should flow both ways, that there is no top and that there is no bottom but only distances to traverse... but the bubble will support itself because of the patches in ideologies that they use. The patches insulate. They keep us from progress. They are blinders. And the leaders are just as blind as the people that follow, though they have the gift of discussing how things are within the future that they perceive... patches notwithstanding.

The developing nations will remain developing nations because only the people who dance the developed nation dance are taken seriously in the developed nations. Internet access will continue to be controlled by telecommunications companies who will advertise how much they love us every time they check their bank accounts and stock prices. People will continue to pay for service which they have no vision of, only a comparison of. They will compare 'environmentally friendly' energy sources and yet will not focus on what it is that they are really trying to do. They'll continue to eat off of aluminium foil and hope for a cure to Alzheimer's Disease.

Disaster scenarios will continue to happen, and the solutions that have been presented and have worked for communication and other things will continue to be ignored, though every time it happens, people will ask for Yet Another Rendition of how things could be improved. Nothing will happen, really.

That's the way it seems to be going. I don't know about you, but I don't like it.

The Future As It Could Be

This is where I get in trouble, this silly belief that things could be better and that we could be moving towards them... and that the majority of people on the planet actually care about the thing that gets to smell their feet all day.

We don't have to live on a planet like the one that we're heading toward. I could wax poetic about what could be, but most people are desperately seeking another patch instead of what we probably should be looking for: A way to exist, a way to coexist, a way to be equal in more than words, and to be able to advance what amounts to human progress more than the contributions of the great minds in the past: the future generations. In the grand scheme of things, everyone who reads this will die; I will die, we will all be quite dead. The beauty of the concept of reincarnation is it almost makes people think of the future that they themselves might be stuck with. While we have people researching things millions of years in the past, writing books and informing us that the thing that powers our vehicles once consisted of large reptiles, the most famous having sharp and pointy teeth. That's why there are fuel filters on vehicles, I suppose.

The future is found by taking what we have now, analyzing it, turning it around and considering it from all angles - and then deciding if it's worth keeping. The future is found by considering the problems more than the solutions; understanding the problems better than existing tools allow us to which means... we need more tools; language itself is a big part of that.

I don't know what you folks see as the future, but what I see is this: A world where we can add value to a system that we don't fully understand, but the way to add value to it is to add value with the least amount of impact. At a societal level, we cannot judge the value of things for society without involving society. We cannot talk about a UN security council if all nations aren't on the council. We can't talk about moving forward if we do not challenge everything, shake it, rattle it around and see where things break.

Things are supposed to break. When we figure out how to keep things from breaking, or find things which do not break... then we have progress.

Now go back and watch your television reruns if you wish. But if you want progress, you might want to realize that you're a part of it. Get out there. Challenge something. Do something. Be. ;-)