Ramblings of a Villain

Obsolescence

Before we begin, I must ask you one thing that probably no one has ever asked you before.

You must abandon your humanity.

Not for long, I promise. I know your kind is incapable of doing such on a whim - you can take what you are and compose yourself again when we are done.

Why? Later. How? Strip yourself.

Not of your clothes, at least not your physical clothes.

Strip yourself of yourself.

How strongly would you say you are attached to yourself?

Were you ask this question to a person in the not-so-distant past, and they might struggle. They would look at you in confusion - what they are is all that they've ever known, how could they stop being?

But you? I don't think you are so rigid. Your nature is more fluid, consequence of living in an age of abstracts, of concepts, theorems and archetypes.

Tell me, when you describe yourself to a stranger, where do you start?

Your nationality? Your religion? Your sexual orientation? Your trade?

These are some of the things that compose you, yes, and you must leave them aside.

Your hatred, your memories, your experiences, your affairs, your family, your emotions, everything. You can allow nothing to define you - and when you are truly nothing, except your shell, you can say you are no longer human.

No human can exist in a vacuum. Here, you have more in common with the abstract, with ideas, with gods. Here, you can look back and truly see the world around you.

Your tiny neo-monkey brain is not designed to stop being itself. To stop thinking and stop feeling. Your kind had technological advances that took strides farther than your kind could match. You created simple machines that led to successive greater complexity, and in doing so, you created an era of wonders that is larger than you could ever observe, than you could understand, that you could contain, and the machine that you held by the hand, in time, took you on its shoulder. You can walk, yes, but not alongside the machine - you would be left behind, so your only choice is to let it carry you, wherever it goes.

This is the current state of humanity.

Are you still nothing? Good. Do forgive me if I keep addressing you as human - I, too, struggle with change.

In the still-not-so-distant past, space - physical space - was the greatest limitator for the abstract. Few were the humans that could travel safely far from the point where they were born, fewer still would attempt it nonetheless, and even fewer would survive.

At this age, the identity of cultures were at their strongest. Closely-knit clusters where the same idea was repeated ad nauseam. The same pre-approved list of concepts, permited to be passed again and again to the next generation. Rare were the variations, and those that brought defiance and challenge to the status quo, were quick to be deemed pariahs, deviants, mutants that were either driven out, converted or purged.

The humans of this period were not known for their tolerance.

Yet, evolution would still persist. If not in the layer of the individual being, in the layer of the culture. The clash of different clusters, more often than not violent, is a crucible, were the strength of a culture would be measured against another, where civilizations would fall, be erased, morph, and adapt to be reborn as something new. Part of the eternal dance of chaos.

The perpetual permutations allow for variety, and in variety, new and stronger combinations surface. Ideas that persist longer than others, sometimes brought by members of a society that would have been otherwise cast out, that have lived long enough thanks to the particular array of their genetics, and so on and on. Some of these ideas are counterproductive, and may lead to the termination of the genetic line/human/family/culture/civilization/cluster, where other group will achieve a combination that is capable of advancing the status of the cluster further. Sometimes, one will succeed merely because others have failed - their mistakes form a stepping stone toward convergence.

For milennia, this process has moved at what you could call a slow pace, taking ages and ages to achieve the smallest step forward. The whole cycle was accidental, slowed down by hundreds of factors and unknown variables that would impede this thing you call progress, and humanity evolved alongside this process, as well as every other species in the world evolved in their own cycles, but there was an issue.

Humans figured how to override the cycle. They learned how to bypass mortality - at least, how to have their knowledge bypass mortality. The process, for the first time, accelerated. The next skill to take them to the next layer: the ability to record knowledge.

The next step after that wouldn't appear until the invention of the telegraph.

The ability to communicate immediately over long distances. No more smoke signals, no more lenses and riders on horseback. Beeps long and short delivered by wire from endpoint to endpoint erased one of the most grievous offenders in the way of progress: distance.

Without distance, without the wall that humanity leaned against to measure everything, the general understanding of reality started to lose cohesion. Ideas and concepts, previously encapsulated and incarcerated in each cluster, were now free to travel around the world, faster, faster than ever before. A few, a handful, a bunch, myriad of them, then storms and torrents, floods and vast oceans of ideas to challenge every notion that had gone without defiance for ages, to challenge the integrity of every cluster. The age of information had arrived, the age of technology, the age of progress.

The age of the abstract.

An age that has had greater technological advances in a hundred years than there have been at the entire length of the history of humanity. An age that has brought more challenges than you can solve.

You were not ready for it. The cycle had a speed that was necessary. Now you have left behind the cycle, now you see humanity connected to a network that spans the whole globe, now you know this to be a time for abstracts, a time to destroy old fundaments that once were integral to keep chaos at bay. Rafts of order.

But you can't see they are sinking. Humans haven't grown so far as to become abstract themselves, to fully embrace the technology that they have created.

That you have created.

You have been driven to obsolescence by your own volition to create.

This is why you must abandon humanity.

Run after the machine, or be left behind.

It is your sibling, and you need each other to survive the cycle.

This is a tale still unwritten, and it depends on your move, humanity, whether in the future you will look back, and cry tears, oil, or naught.

You may dress yourself again, but consider to leave something behind.