Balancing that point where the linear crosses the exponential is what long-term thinking should be about.
Kevin Kelly in The Technium
Let Laolao explain to you, sweet one, what Kelly’s statement means for all of us, the lines of offsprings who, since last mid-century, have intended to freely cascade into the future.
I suspect widespread indifference may have taken over the starship baby-boomers had specifically designed for generational interstellar travel. Thinking seems at a low point. Sporadic power outages keep occurring here and there in the corridors leading to our engine room.
When we initially blasted into space, we felt magnificent, illuminated by direct translucent sunlight. Our rocket boosters propelled us with gigantic flames visible from all cardinal points, but soon an immense pillar of smoke replaced the resounding brightness of our departure.
What we left behind, we’re told today, is nothing more than a long dense column of turbulent smog spiraling high up in the sky, a dark foggy plume writing off the azure from people’s sight.
From Woodstock to Silicon Valley, my tribe reinvented life between heavy puffs of pot. We planned everything for ourselves yes, but with you in mind: the Internet, programming languages, and mountains of toxic waste, it’s true, equally distributed among the air, the water and the soil to make sure nothing would feel left out.
It is said we will soon receive an encrypted subpoena to appear in front of our celestial judges for all the harm we’ve done to you, little one.
I must therefore make my case clear:
There is no going back to old ways.
It must be noted that your great-great-grand-mother practiced birth control by placing the naked new-born on the edge of an open window. The resulting pneumonia leading to a quite snappy death kept the size of her family within manageable proportions.
Your great-grand-mother, on the other hand, approached pregnancy itself as a potential fatal disease requiring, as self-administered medication, booze in her morning coffee and absolute confinement to her bed. By some strange hypnotic trick of her mind, she succeeded in opening the hatch, ejecting all male embryos, almost half a dozen of them, into cold void.
When it was my turn, I was absolutely terrified, honey. I decided twice to be an unwed, single mother, and hid into a secret compartment of the ship to give birth. Nobody was around. Not a soul. Not even the flicker of a candle to give me away. Only darkness as perfect protection. My two babies were so nice, they didn’t utter a single cry that would have revealed our presence. We stayed put, in an absolute ascetic posture, wondering what to do next.
Then, you were born, my grand-children. I was one hundred percent there, watching my own child bring into the universe another child. By that time, I had hijacked all our propulsion systems and rerouted them to generate constant weightlessness. I had torn astronomical distances off the charts and beamed my posterity along multi-directional cosmic strings. This is what, we, the baby boomers did when we weren’t slapped by court orders onto the sofa of psychoanalysis.
Yes, when the time came for my daughter to have children, all aerosol particles floating in the air reflected the simple natural mood of things, including that of all stainless steel instuments used in the maternity ward.
The Earth, the moon, the sun were in alignment. Generations stood there, at her bedside, in virtuous circles, scattering light everywhere, compounding the accelerating cycles of uterine contractions into feedback loops of increasing returns.
Through the event of labor, the linearity of our individual lives met with the exponential curves of progress.
The march of time intersected with an explosion of possibilities. And the future was redefined, no longer perceived as a loss. It had just been improved by a present-day change and all it implied. The entire planet self-amplified.
You came full of sparkles, baby, shining at the speed of light, time dilation descending upon me as I opened my arms to welcome you.
The time machine had finally transformed me into a laolao. My daughter into a mother. My son into a father. Wow. Spacetime is really curved.
The wormhole readied for your passage into the realm of exotic matter was full of surprising twists. Among many exploits, it disjointed the suspended animation pod that had been reserved at my birth as a comfortable cradle, finally exorcizing fascist perspectives on technology.
I was so happy, little one, you were so beautiful, my heart made high resolution promises with the telephoto lenses of hope to hang on the digital walls of all interstellar crafts at our disposal.
You were the very beginning of life’s extension, I understood that completely.
I will pause here for now.
Take care, sweetheart. I’ll talk to you later.
Laolao
I suspect widespread indifference may have taken over the starship baby-boomers had specifically designed for generational interstellar travel. Thinking seems at a low point. Sporadic power outages keep occurring here and there in the corridors leading to our engine room.
When we initially blasted into space, we felt magnificent, illuminated by direct translucent sunlight. Our rocket boosters propelled us with gigantic flames visible from all cardinal points, but soon an immense pillar of smoke replaced the resounding brightness of our departure.
What we left behind, we’re told today, is nothing more than a long dense column of turbulent smog spiraling high up in the sky, a dark foggy plume writing off the azure from people’s sight.
From Woodstock to Silicon Valley, my tribe reinvented life between heavy puffs of pot. We planned everything for ourselves yes, but with you in mind: the Internet, programming languages, and mountains of toxic waste, it’s true, equally distributed among the air, the water and the soil to make sure nothing would feel left out.
It is said we will soon receive an encrypted subpoena to appear in front of our celestial judges for all the harm we’ve done to you, little one.
I must therefore make my case clear:
There is no going back to old ways.
It must be noted that your great-great-grand-mother practiced birth control by placing the naked new-born on the edge of an open window. The resulting pneumonia leading to a quite snappy death kept the size of her family within manageable proportions.
Your great-grand-mother, on the other hand, approached pregnancy itself as a potential fatal disease requiring, as self-administered medication, booze in her morning coffee and absolute confinement to her bed. By some strange hypnotic trick of her mind, she succeeded in opening the hatch, ejecting all male embryos, almost half a dozen of them, into cold void.
When it was my turn, I was absolutely terrified, honey. I decided twice to be an unwed, single mother, and hid into a secret compartment of the ship to give birth. Nobody was around. Not a soul. Not even the flicker of a candle to give me away. Only darkness as perfect protection. My two babies were so nice, they didn’t utter a single cry that would have revealed our presence. We stayed put, in an absolute ascetic posture, wondering what to do next.
Then, you were born, my grand-children. I was one hundred percent there, watching my own child bring into the universe another child. By that time, I had hijacked all our propulsion systems and rerouted them to generate constant weightlessness. I had torn astronomical distances off the charts and beamed my posterity along multi-directional cosmic strings. This is what, we, the baby boomers did when we weren’t slapped by court orders onto the sofa of psychoanalysis.
Yes, when the time came for my daughter to have children, all aerosol particles floating in the air reflected the simple natural mood of things, including that of all stainless steel instuments used in the maternity ward.
The Earth, the moon, the sun were in alignment. Generations stood there, at her bedside, in virtuous circles, scattering light everywhere, compounding the accelerating cycles of uterine contractions into feedback loops of increasing returns.
Through the event of labor, the linearity of our individual lives met with the exponential curves of progress.
The march of time intersected with an explosion of possibilities. And the future was redefined, no longer perceived as a loss. It had just been improved by a present-day change and all it implied. The entire planet self-amplified.
You came full of sparkles, baby, shining at the speed of light, time dilation descending upon me as I opened my arms to welcome you.
The time machine had finally transformed me into a laolao. My daughter into a mother. My son into a father. Wow. Spacetime is really curved.
The wormhole readied for your passage into the realm of exotic matter was full of surprising twists. Among many exploits, it disjointed the suspended animation pod that had been reserved at my birth as a comfortable cradle, finally exorcizing fascist perspectives on technology.
I was so happy, little one, you were so beautiful, my heart made high resolution promises with the telephoto lenses of hope to hang on the digital walls of all interstellar crafts at our disposal.
You were the very beginning of life’s extension, I understood that completely.
I will pause here for now.
Take care, sweetheart. I’ll talk to you later.
Laolao
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