beasts

i am the beast who constantly wonders

why all of the beasts collectively blunder

Holding On

The pervading dialogue places the power to shape the world within humanities hands. We can systematically change the world as we please. The pervasion of humanity into nature is immense, and provides us with immense confidence. We dominate our perspective.

A perspective shift reveals reality. The indifferent hand of humanity remains surrounded by the forces that created us. 

Remediation

The dam holds back the river, creating temporary stillness where before existed either rapids or no water at all.

The intermittent stream flows sometimes much, sometimes none. Not in the middle, the dam's reality.

The equilibrium is not punctuated sufficiently with a dam. The locks may open when the torrent comes knocking on the door, but can they open fast enough?

The river tugs on. Begging its surroundings to come, swim down to ocean. Will we? Waiting has its virtues.

We see through the dam, to the forest waiting beyond. We know that the forest came before the dam, but can we be sure that it comes after? Technology says no in its eternal quest for self preservation and expansion. Technology does not know, it comprehends only what we feed it, and we feed it forests enough to understand that forests are expendable in the face of progress and growth.



The culture of progress demands forests, demands rivers, consumes and forgets them as the world of electricity and rectangles pervades their worldview.

The culture of forgetfulness, of moving rapidly from one technology to the next, flittering from one entertaining moment to the next. The capacity for amusement is immense. True knowledge of self forgotten for the industrial entertainment of TV and the depths of the internet anti-social media.

I OWN YOU.
Turn it off. 

Can we turn it off? Or are we too deep down the technological rabbit hole that holds an amusing depth of vice and narcissism?

Business as usual, for now. 

The question remains, if this is the path, where does knowledge diverge from progress? Where does sustainability diverge from technology?

Why?

Welcome to the Machine

Welcome my son, Welcome to the Machine.



Remains wholly relevant today, the man is well engrossed in the machine, digging his way to deeper technology with every breath of the word progress. The world certainly does progress on.

"The clock indicates the moment . . . but what does eternity indicate?"

The river flows on forever. It may pass us by, or it may sweep us by in the current. Far beyond where we can conceive our landing, we will land.
We may remain, or we may forget ourselves and our link to eternity, the unbroken chain of success that has led DNA to win over the world with technology and blindness.

Fighting the current is a fruitless endeavor, but am I ready to seize the bank, should it draw close? To draw my way out, and to see what is, what has been, and what will be?

The collective is blind to empathy, the common thread of empathy, of all-one, is more of an all none.
For now, at least.

The world thrives effervescently on.
For now, at least.

Remainders

I remain convinced. 


If only I could say the same.

The world turns indifferently on,

The clock ticks on, while we amuse ourselves in ever new ways.

The attention is lost to screen world.

The framework of the world remains constant,

while the reference viewpoint shifts.

The bibically granted dominion of mankind over nature pervades.

What dividend does the biodiversity of the earth yield? Something grander than my conception.

If an alien race were to commence observation of mankind now, what would they see?

A world of nations, gradually tying a globalized net of capital closer and closer.

A people divided, without the empathy required to draw themselves closer.


A high degree of entropy, or,
forgetting that to make something you must break something else.

We break the earth in exchange for making technologies. They amuse and confuse us, connect and separate us.

Why?

The sea of clouds indifferently blinds mankind, alone atop its mountain, to the path that brought us here.
The path that will bring us home to earth.


"We're lost in space, but the earth is our home" - Steve Miller

Autonomous Autos

Composed in response to:

http://worldif.economist.com/article/11/what-if-autonomous-vehicles-rule-the-world-from-horseless-to-driverless

I don't leave the article feeling convinced. As the 'luxury' of self driving cars begins to trickle down, freeing those already with the means to pay from their car insurance payments, a whole lot of low skill, fairly high wage jobs (trucking) will be rolled under the carpet of progress.

What a miracle of economics! 

Cabbing has already begun the descent into joblessness. Uber's civil disobedience has allowed them immense market share at the expense of the established driver-company-municipality triumvirate, and the whole while they trumpet the immense money saving potential of removing their own drivers in addition to the existing cab companies and drivers.

I see the immense fleets of self driving cars replacing most private cars, but I do not see that as liberating, as insurance providers will latch on to those without the means to pay reliably for the subscription-service that will surely arise. Those saddled with exorbitant premiums will be least likely to be able to afford them. 

Perhaps a more admirable solution would be to take a step back to reexamine the 50's era urban planning practices that are linking American cities inextricably from the mantra of more cars all the time. A new city should arise, that has residents healthy and wise enough to want to spend their time to work enjoying the fresh air on the bike, or perhaps riding an electric train. Bikes and trains introduce far less entropy into the system than cars do, with their immense concrete infrastructures. 

The development in the city may have many new apartments, but take a step out into the country and you will see the cul-de-sac trees blooming off into eternity. 

Why does the American dream need to involve consuming America? 

Meandering Mind

Returned to summer home, only two weeks left.

A natural place deeply touched by us.

The moonscape centers the park, yet heat prevents our missions to it.

The craters will slowly fill in a rain, and trickle down into the next pool and then the next pool and then the next pool and then the falls to the creek.

We see the seldom seen, and I remember seeing before and the containment of weeks within this place.

Back and forth from end to end.

What to do is the question of eternity.

What will I make? What will I manage to change? How best to do it?

I think of the future, of the past, of the now. Where do the paths lead?

I don't know yet, maybe I will not know. I hope for inspiration to strike as lightning would.

I enjoy creating, thinking, questioning why?, looking at how we interact with our world, being outdoors.

Are we doomed to fall? Have we blinded ourselves from seeing our true world by technologies siren call? Can industrialization coexist with the world environment?
The only way to make something is to break something else, that's the law.

Change is slow as can be, but the world turns rapidly. The sun may be 93 million miles away, but it keeps on beaming down.

Are our brakes shot? Only time will tell, time and the collective will of 7,8,9 billion people to stop using and buying and start changing.

No one wants to be without their carefully cultivated creature comforts and their bright, self affirming screens.

I remain worried that we are playing god without omniscience, that we are taking more than we can give, that we are digging our hole deeper with the only assurance being the god given right to the earth. What happens when god turns off the oil?

Wandering in the Sky

Lost as usual.
It's hard when the web grows faster than our cognition of it.

If only we could do as the Apache's did, retreat to the high, ghostly mountains.

They failed in their endeavor, and the Chisos no longer act as a fortress.

The sea of clouds protected the mountains from the web, but they receded just as we departed.

I remain inspired by the human drive for progress.

We change for changes sake.

We improve endlessly.

We do not stop.

We rarely step out of the current.

Even more rarely do we climb a bluff, to observe the river.

What comes ahead?

What lies behind?

Who the heck cares? I'm fed, warm, and watching TV! Isn't that grand?

At what cost?

What is the foundation of the information age? What bones are buried under Silicon Valley?

What morals does the internet hold?

What happens if someone turns off the power?

Why?