I watch as the greatest dreamers of my generation bury themselves in conspiracy theories and religion selfishly focused on saving only themselves rather than all of humanity as a truly great generation should. We could be the last generation of those that toil like beasts of burden, the last one to not live our dreams because our access lays only at the limits of our imagination and skill but to do so we must take on the responsibility and create that world, not for us, not for our children but for all of humanity.
We live in an era of fear. An era in which our worst nightmares are broadcast over loudspeakers and mobile devices confirming everything that has gone bump in the night from the moment man crawled out of the cave. Legends, myths, predictions and rumors distorted to further a message, a practice as old as religion and government themselves but fueled by easy access to information.
When we awaken from a fevered sleep and we scramble to make sense of the shapes our fears take in our minds. In a different era we would ask our friends and family and maybe even check a card catalog at a local library but further back still we would ask our local wise men and women. In the past we still queried, we still sought answers but we more often came up empty. Now with a single well designed search we can find the other 4 people around the globe that happen to have given the visions enough credence to start a message board or blog and lead all willing to follow into dead ends and narcissistic madness.
In this era of artistic and engineering marvels we obsess over a coming communism, fascism or general doom that in reality is utterly in our hands to control and can only be birthed by the fear we are feeding it.
Find something you are passionate about and study it. Find something that is needed and create it. Find something that is misunderstood and investigate and understand it. Bring the music in your head to all of humanity, weave your stories, your myths, your truths, your facts, your wisdom give them birth and put them on the net. Do not worry if it is good, do not worry if others will understand just know that every wheel has spokes and not all spokes understand why they are compelled to do what they do but in the end they serve a vital function. In the end you may find in reality you were just bored.
We like to think we are towers. Autonomous heroes of our own design but we are dependent on one another because we are a social species and if we like our tech, our toys and further advancement toward mankind's ultimate inheritance which is all of the stars we will have to accept that not only do we need one another...we truly want one another because it is outside of ourselves that we find the answers to our own internal mysteries.
We stand on the precipice of all of humanity's future and I watch while the greatest minds of my generation scramble to buy guns and gold to prepare for a coming apocalypse that will never come for them. Those screaming about the coming end do so because it is their end that is nigh, not yours.
The end was nigh once for slavers and slaveholders and they predicted the end of all of civilization yet we still move on. From the moment the first bomb dropped on Japan that ushered in the nuclear era we have watched every generation that followed devolve into a useless intellectual exercise based on a myth that they and only they would survive...talk to the Seventh Day Adventists, the Jehovah Witnesses and a plethora of other religious cults and see how their predictions of humanity's demise has worked out for them in their dreams of a world cleansed of the rest of us.
Look...what if it does not happen. What if instead things continue to get better and not for a few but better for humanity as a whole? What if your nightmares and dark visions of the future are woven by those with a great deal more to lose than you and what if they weave these nightmares only to keep their own slice of the pie. What if we turned off the radio and stopped buying gold and guns? What if instead we started educating ourselves, our families and actually began investing in the future, a future that looks to be so very inclusive that all institutions of historical exclusion are freaking the hell out as they are drowned out in the digital maelstrom.
Living in their glittering towers looking out over humanity the leaders of industry and media are and have been losing control and as it is wrenched from their grasp they cry out of the darkness that someone stole what was rightfully theirs but you must understand that they are not mourning your lost liberty but theirs because the future is erasing what differences exist between the haves and have nots and information is flowing in rivers. Knowledge, information and truth flood across our digital highways in an unstoppable flow and we wonder why kings, queens and titans of industry cry out as their kingdoms melt and become as sand. We are a generation blinded by their dark visions unable to see the ivory towers barely hidden by the horizon.
Do not scramble into madness and solitude out of fear and do not believe that your demise is tied to the demise of any of the institutions you hold dear because those institutions will be torn asunder in the coming torrent of technology and power exchanges. Put out your hand to those that need to know more while you educate yourself. Build a community that can in turn build the civilization of your dreams and do it by creating the technology that can make it ubiquitous. Design to solve the problem, design to erase the need for labor, waste and the need for useless toil so we can all focus on that which is useful to all of humanity.
Do not shrink from fear, paranoia and conspiracy but instead confront it because it is a blight on the intelligence and creativity of a generation of humanity that can now choose to usher in a new age for all that follow or delude themselves into paranoid fantasies that are the only things that can derail it.
The place of utter dark fear is not that someone or something is in control and does not have your best interests at heart. The place of utter fear and darkness is that no one is in control and everyone is shit scared and making a mad scramble for everything they can grab and the evidence points to this truly being the case. To stop a stampede some of the crowd must ask why they are running. Why do they smell fear, because wisdom states that fear can feed itself without any truth at its core and then they must only choose to stop to again see reality for what it is.
We live in an era of fear but in truth this has always been humanities lot. Those who desire power ignore the rules of the framework while stoking the fears of a culture based on their mythos and cultural institutions to control those below them to not do the same. We are driven by fears both real and imagined but what about creating a new framework of fears altogether. A fear of not innovating, a fear of not trying to leave things better than when you showed up, a fear of not trying again, a fear of lacking curiosity, a fear of failing to see the most obvious and elegant of answers just due to a lack of creativity. Why should you do such a thing? We are pushing the envelope of what was once called science into what was once called magic and we are doing it all at ever increasing speeds.
As a child my vision of heaven was a place in which all of humanities information was accessible. I am reminded of this every time I boot up a browser or access a plethora of Web 2.0 and cloud resources. I hated my jobs filled with waste and tedious labor and I watch as they are erased from the face of the earth by better options like at home 3D printing. I questioned what it would be like to program a robot and later this year Intel will show me with a $1600 printable robot utterly customizable. I live in my heaven every day regardless of lifes petty frustrations I know that my work, art and concepts and that of my generations will push the limits of reality yet further and forge into a realm once reserved for concepts of a glorious afterlife but the more quickly we embrace our duty to all of humanity and all that come after the more quickly it comes.
We can be the greatest generation mankind has ever known. Those giants that built the technology and world that gave humanity their true inheritance, the stars but first we must stand up and stop wasting our time.
