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July 22, 2007

How not to do it.

I was jus' thinking. Aboot the way time passes so quickly these days, like a wobbly old bike, downhill, no brakes. Like a theory on a slippery logarithmic slope:

Yet unlike McKenna's generation (and BTW, I think the dude's quite high, more on that in a bit), my generation appears either too confused or too comfortable to progress culturally with the same dread urgency. Or maybe it's just ME. Sometimes it feels to me like the cultural zero point was sometime shortly after the summer of '68 and that all we have to work with is like some shattered, mirrored, crashed-to-earth elevator where all you can see is just fragments of the same played out Self pushing the same played out buttons. "Were gonna bring a case of wine. Hey, lets go mess and fool around, you know, like we used to." Fucking cosmically, soul-ending-ly... boring.

Fuck you and your HTML skillz. Fuck your predictable capitalist ringtone optimism. Fuck your pharma-California. Fuck indie insecurity. Fuck the major pretense. And fuck sadness and the sad ones. BORing.

Anyway. Sorry.

Unfortunately, what I'm getting at is boring, too: that there is so little cultural progress, even as we speed towards some Kurzweil-style technological singularity. Think about what's happened since 1997. Besides the onset of endless war and apocalypse, of course. Since 1997: Google it on your iPhone if need be. When I think about all that Happened between 1965 and 1975, it's staggering. Maybe it's just the romantic.... wait, romantic's the wrong word... maybe it's the treacly perspective of the soon-to-be-middle-aged, but dang man, we haven't come so far since Alanis and Jewel and Titanic and Princess Di and Biggie. What? Hanson? Oh yeah.

God. I absolutely HATE cranky-whiny blogs, and here we are. Lemme try to reel it in, or exit before I bore you any further with this indulgent self-loathing.

So yeah, McKenna's high -- (Just not as charmingly as Timothy Leary was: I actually interviewed Leary on the phone once for this mag I used to write for and it was kinda terrifying. He cemented the word "luddite" into my vocab. Then he died a few years later and has since been blasted up into space or some other brilliantly egotistical bullshit) -- The world won't end on 2012, consciousness will not shift, nor veer, nor pass out on the continuum coffeetable. We're all tired of waiting. We'll just go on failing upwards.

YOUR FRIEND,
DANA

posted by dana at July 22, 2007 03:25 AM

comments

Dana, have you read Kurzweil's book, "The Age of Spiritual Machines"?

His projected time line of where technology may head may seem inane, but it seems to be slowly happening.

posted by: cant_army at July 22, 2007 05:42 PM

No I haven't yet read that one, but have spent a lot of time lurking KurzweilAI.net and generally checking duder's ideas out, hence the reference. I was obsessed with AI for a while (not the bad Speilberg film, but rather the speculative tech behind it).

I don't think his timeline is silly, it seems kinda on-track, but I guess I feel skeptical about any expectation or estimate of future salvation. This is maybe less what Kurzweil is talking about and more back with Mr. McKenna (whom I'm fascinated by, really, if that wasn't clear from above). These types prophetic beliefs strike me as, I dunno, irresponsible? Or just pipe-dreamy, like Zeppelins. You know how, back at the beginning of the 20th century, the consensus was that we'd all be in airships by now in a pollution-free hyper-utopia?

If not irresponsible, than in some instances, downright scary, like the apparent trend in higher world-power structures to manifest Revelations, right now.

Prophecy is fun, but it's kind of like romantic passion. Once it fades, yr faced with the reality of making reality work. Or something like that. I sound like a pedantic asshole.

Thanks for reading btw.

posted by: Dana at July 23, 2007 09:55 AM