60 Miners Dead In Crude Island Squid Attack

Crews continue to search two square miles of coastline on Crude Island’s southern most shore, looking for survivors of this morning’s attack.  Crude Island, located equidistant from America’s pacific coast and the islands of Hawaii, is the world largest plastic island and represents the most valuable deposits of recyclable plastics and soft metals on the planet.  In today’s attack, sixty miners were left dead and hundreds more were injured when a giant squid attacked a resource reclamation mine.  It is not clear what prompted the attack, and little is known about the species responsible for the deaths.  Today’s disaster comes as controversy mounts over resource mining on Crude Island.  To the chorus of voices calling for a moratorium on mining, marine biologists have now been added.   They argue that certain species of squid have found a way to metabolize a wide range of plastics, and will continue to attack mines that pose a threat to their food source.  The governments at work on Plastic Island have been quick to offer a counter explanation for the escalating attacks, suggesting that the shallow waters around the island are favorable squid breeding grounds.

Suspicious; I wonder if humans can metabolize giant squid.

       “Mortimer, this is just a final check to make sure your injection is swimming safely in your blood stream.  You’re welcome to stay and read as long as you like, we just need confirmation of satisfaction before we can stop monitoring you.”
       “I’m fine.  I mean the injection is metabolizing just fine.” 
       “What?”
       “I’m fine thanks.”

It’s easy to enjoy the dancing catastrophe when you have so little to loose.  Would I enjoy these stories the same if Belay were still around?

Opinion: 
What Are We Running From?

Biodiversity loss. Land use. Freshwater use. Nitrogen and phosphorus cycles. Stratospheric ozone loss. Ocean acidification. Climate change. Chemical Pollution. Aerosols loading in the atmosphere – not to mention a strained centralized economy that does not afford much chance of personal wealth accumulation. Is it any wonder that citizens of the system are turning to religious groups for comfort and consolation?  Should we be surprised when even devotedly secular voices seem to imperatively exclaim “run!”
       The most surprising development, in this new order of cults, gurus, and humanist manifestos, is that older, more established, institutions appear decidedly left behind.  Even the Abrahamic Alliance, infinitely more sophisticated and subtle in its cosmological pronouncements than the Judaic, Christian, and Muslim traditions it was formed out of, has not been able to harness the doubt and confusion building in legions of young people.  And though the AA’s youth league, and their notorious Oceanic Forces of armed arcs and organized flotillas has managed a confident media campaign, anonymous internal sources suggest that if the power were to go out, and not return, their ocean army would be just one of many leaving the shores of the Americas in a bid for survival. 
       Most notorious amongst the cultic upstarts are the Fire-Starters; a terror to parents and government nodes alike, known for disguising vague political protestations as petty vandalism.  Until recently, so little was known about the group that it was impossible to say anything coherent about their theology. However, with numbers growing, details of the once secretive organization have begun to emerge.
       Formed more than a hundred years ago, it has taken the group much of that time to gather any kind of serious following. It is only in the last two decades that membership has blossomed into something resembling a congregation.  Though many creedal details regarding rules and rites remain a mystery, the Fire-Starters’ primary eschatological belief is now clear: our civilization is moments from collapse, with ocean bound escape the only available means of human survival.  They believe our government has narrowed the field of human capability so extremely that it now excludes the basic skills humans will need to survive the collapse of the System.  This conviction has led to attacks on government buildings and employees.  It is a circular political argument to be sure. The existence of large groups of disenchanted youth waiting for a sign that the end is upon them is certainly a good way to ensure that such a sign will eventually be seen.  All of this has led more than one commentator to note that it is not religion, but escape, that cult members truly hunger for.
       However, it here that the apocalyptic impulse of the times quite ignominiously reveals itself. For just as the government accuses the Fire-Starters of paranoia, vandalism, and ultimately treason, it is itself engaged in drills and contingency plan practices designed to address just the kind of scenarios that cult leaders describe.  The similtude has not been lost on some government employees who, in an attempt to warn citizens of impending disaster, have felt it necessary to differentiate their ideas of apocalypse from those of “religious zealots.” 
       And then, finally, there are the groups who while professedly secular, have their own bent, escapist trajectory.  The Operators of the world’s online economy, to take the most obvious example, seem to be spending longer and longer hours in their virtual offices – and to be spending more and more lavishly on their digital avatars.  Casandra Corporeal, dean of cybernetics at the Alium School, has described such virtual escape as “the scientific materialist’s yearning for transcendence.”  Adding that “when life becomes unbearable inside the four dimensional walls of our reality, any human with the capacity for panic will try to jump over, under, or behind the curtain.”
      In every hue of the kaleidoscopic human imagination, the need for departure is being felt.  Whether the reasoning is religious or scientific – the motive environmental or economic – it seems at least possible that one billion people, worrying in unison, cannot be wrong.  And though our leaders’ penchant for metric certainty rarely allows it, perhaps we might consider the wisdom of our collective intuition: if everyone is sure it’s no longer safe here, maybe it isn’t. If everyone knows something is coming, maybe something is.  Are your prayers prepared, is your lifeboat ready, is your parachute – golden or otherwise – ready to deploy?                       

Maybe they’re scared something is coming, and everything will change… or maybe they’re scared because we’re stuck here and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.  Either way afraid.  Maybe when there’s really no escape, you have to believe in it’s plausibility to keep going.  Maybe belief like that is creative because it creates a possibility where there wasn’t one before?

Just one more… to lighten the mood.

This Day In History: The Banana

To date, humanity has survived almost two centuries deprived of the delights of the commercial banana.  And, though it would be hard to convince a child of our time of this, it has now been exactly one hundred and fifty years of life with the synthetic banana, that incandescent, sickly-sweet, tapioca stand in.  Although one might look at the carefully shaped plastic wrapper of this imposter and have a vague inkling that it has never been and never will be safe to leave out on floors or city walkways, surely none of us can imagine the joy with which our ancestors consumed natural potassium rich food stuffs only to be further delighted by the slippery prankery the peel made possible.  No fine and modern people, we have not known that joy.
       However, whether this is to be the ultimate state of affairs has just now, on the second centennial of the great banana extinction, been called into question.  As they always do, the bitter droughts that grip our continent’s central plains brought extreme winds this year.  Yet it was these winds, shifting sand and dried soils, that uncovered for a team of archaeologists an ancient seed bank thought only to have existed in the ambitions of our ancestors.  Primitive though their storage techniques were, and muddled as their language and computer systems appear to us now, heritage seed varietals of the ancient banana were found intact.  It is no secret to the food procuring nodes of the system that humanity subsisted on bananas for long stretches of our pre-history.  Billions of dollars are now being spent to return us to those modest beginnings.  With a four to six week plan just announced, two hundred years of deprivation will be ended in what this author predicts will be the most explosive food fad of the year. Say it loud, the banana’s back!

I think it’s me that needs to go back… this present is too strange… maybe if I go back far enough I can find a way forward.

       “In the centuries before the critical wars, a ‘global’ sentiment emerged in parallel with the incredible material wealth of the years of plenty. A vocabulary of world citizenship seemed to breach out of humble humanisms which were, on their own, patently inert.  It was only with quantum technologies, with ways around the spatial limitations previously recognized by men, that some tactile experience was added to the romanticism of lonely poets.

Who had no one and were so convinced that everyone was theirs.

       With the experience of vast distances collapsed, of every novelty or vista at possible fingertips, global connection became personal, transcending rhetoric and ideology.  Countries were compelled by the mood of the times to harmonize laws and wages with other nations, as the premise of categorical differences between peoples and cultures broke down in the face of cascading evidence.  Perhaps if the petroleum peoples had not moved so smoothly to a liquid hydrogen fuel for both land and air transport, the spreading economic integration and codependence might have piqued and tapered off.  As it was, cheap liquid hydrogen became the medium that finalized the tethering of an international society begun in the industrial age.
       Large shared economic zones soon developed, and while some of these represented merely the opportunism of Imperial nations who had not yet moved on, in some areas it was possible across nation states to work and travel freely, without concern for the eccentricities of local laws or customs.
       So convincing was this global village, this egalitarian sentiment – so valuable to so many peoples and governments – that it was not possible to simply relinquish it in light of changing circumstance.  Following the first global financial collapse, it was not even possible to blame the flawed economic modeling from which the disaster resulted.  Instead, it was assumed that some inaccuracy of execution was at work; that a failure to properly administer algorithms and maxims must be to blame.  It is the mark of a civilization decadent and over ripe that it is unable to change its mind; fatigue simply does not allow such an expenditure of energy or creativity.  But, as time would tell, no operational mistakes had been made and further catastrophes served only to prove the impotence of ideas so dearly held.

Could you believe something so completely that it would be easier to die defending it than to change your mind.  Maybe if you believed it long enough, there wouldn’t be a mind to change – the idea would have taken over completely, animating everything with its logic.  A person who believes in nothing is appalled at the believer’s blindness and naïveté; they can’t reconcile the use of resources on a blind hope. Anyone who believes something deeply considers the beliefs of others to be failed attempts at an otherwise admirable goal; they appreciate the project but regret a dead end.  I should pay attention, I’m paying for this… 

       The dependence and connectedness of the world’s global citizens, an attractive and semi-spiritual sentiment, meant in practice that governments and economies were so entwined and indebted to one another that pebbles dropped in one jurisdiction caused unpredictable and unwanted ripples everywhere else.  These turbulent waves brought to civilized life a random quality exacerbated by climatic vacillations themselves brought on by five centuries of industrial growth.  The terms recession and depression eventually lost their meanings and gave way to the admission of permanent financial chaos. 
       In the distress of diminishing wealth and growing poverty, great stores of natural resources and raw materials silently changed hands.  Countries who had acquiesced to the world’s great powers through times of prosperity now smashed their fastidiously fattened piggy banks, buying up oil and aluminum, sulfur and wheat.  Not only did formerly wealthy nations face higher prices for the necessities of life – the results of new tariff regimes – but they also faced a change in the character of consumer life.  The countries that acquired the world supplies of lumber, plastic, and steal, were not in every case interested in financial gain, and so did not wish to return to the assembly of affordable, disposable, commodity goods.  It quickly became clear that their interests were preservation and security, and that these goals only sometimes overlapped with the manufacture of toys, running shoes, or condensed grain snacks.
       An exacting scarcity decided many of the responses of previously affluent nations; one could not say that British and American business leaders actively sought changes in the way they produced their goods and services, but rather that the need for austerity became a new, guiding hand.  The revolutions that swept both corporate and consumer life were thus children of necessity, perhaps the only reason that civil war was in so many cases avoided.

If necessity is the mother of invention, who exactly does invention birth?

       For a time, many nation states were able to hobble along by rationing their domestic crops and resources.  It has often been suggested that if environmental catastrophe had not entered at such an inopportune moment, many nations would have recovered from their consumer fantasies by means of a generational transition that scaled back expectations.  It was, of course, not to be.  The energy and attention required to reform formerly affluent communities was so great that efforts to preserve natural resources came completely to a halt.  By the time the new policies of allotments and allowances were put into comprehensive practice, unfathomable calamity had enveloped the natural world.  Humanity had been distracted, while another Eden was lost.

Calamity.  Calamity is the child of invention.  And out of calamity?

       Most historians now agree that the collapse of bee populations was the beginning of the end of the mono-cultural agro-systems that had fed metropolitan areas for centuries.  A vague and poorly understood pathology referred to as ‘colony collapse disorder’ had been used to explain a precipitous loss of numbers in commercial bee populations, but it was no more than a name for a misunderstanding.  Herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides, had been loading in all animals exposed to industrial farming, and the combination finally overwhelmed bee populations, with a host of parasitic intruders finally pushing the honeybee to the brink of extinction.  Within a few growing seasons, almonds, hazelnuts, cashews, blueberries, strawberries, apples, mangos, lemons, limes, cucumbers, squash, onions, broccoli, coffee, coconuts, and cotton had all ceased to be viable commercial crops.  Within a few more seasons, more than forty more edible crops had also ceased to be viable.

I had a strawberry once… I think.         

       Something had to be done.   However, as is often the case, the remedy proved worse than the disease, and attempts to use other insects to pollinate crops quickly caused new problems.  Bats that had kept insect populations under control for years were overwhelmed by the quantities introduced by new the farming techniques.  It is possible that the addition of insects to bat habitats would have aided population growth, if the insects themselves had not been carrying the noxious combination of pesticides and herbicides that destroyed the bees.  As it happened, a fungal condition called White Nose Syndrome exploded with the introduction of contaminated insects.  Mortality rates in some caves reached 95%, and within three years insect populations reached infestation levels everywhere they were introduced, causing the destruction of the very crops they were introduced to pollinate. 
       It was at this point that the advocates of wild food finally drowned out all other voices.  It had for many years been their suggestion that as long as staples like rice and wheat could be distributed commercially, individuals should farm their own produce and catch their own meat.  It would be especially easy, they argued, to do this if commercial farms were returned to something like their former forests and grasslands. It was during these very public debates about the future of food policy that a new, highly contagious cancer, was discovered in raccoons living in and around urban centers.  Thought to have begun in Tazmanian Devil populations, this transmittable cancer was discovered to spread through physical contact.  Immediately, the small mammals and rodents that had been paraded as the faces of the wild food movement were so contaminated by contagious malignancies that they were banned for human consumption. Scientists feared, not without grounds, that the consumption of undercooked meat could allow the pathogen to jump the special barrier.

Everything hits at once.

       The immediate concerns of newly impoverished nations were simple.  So much had been lost so quickly that by the time the looting ended, all that remained was a paralyzing hunger, followed closely by fears of malnutrition and cannibalism.  It was this scarcity of viable food sources that initiated comprehensive government controls.  The corporate entities that had been puppeteers for the world’s nation states were now offered an ultimatum:  merge with government and its goal of national survival, or relocate sales and marketing to wholly virtual markets.  No government any longer felt that corporate use of energy or material resources could continue; there simply was not enough of either to allow it.  Thus it was decided that in exchange for giving up their enormous empires of goods and services, business leaders would be given unfettered access to the virtual realms and their vast economic potential.  Those in our own time that bemoan the limitations of the digital landscape and its pathological materialism would do well to consider what was saved by its allowance.  Without the offer of a promising emerging market, there would have been no chip with which to bargain, no bargain by which to regain control of the money and resources controlled by multinational business.  In this way, governments regained control of the material world, and lost forever control of the virtual.
       As businesses shifted operations to virtual domains, citizens were asked to give up all but the most energy neutral of their possessions.  It is true that most were allowed to keep antiques, toys, and books that required no further resources to operate, but it is also true that those who had their technology, transportation, and homes taken away, cared little for the few old photo albums they were allowed to keep.  Finally, to make the transition complete, downtown districts and city centers were stripped of the permits necessary to operate restaurants, movie theatres, or bars.  Our own city saw its downtown preserved in the form of a culturally vacant tourist promenade, designed to allow a kind of historical connection free from the dangers of consumerism.  Thus the ‘Old City’ preserved the architecture of the Gorge, allowing our leaders to use it as a living monument to a hedonism that had proven so destructive. 
       However, it must be said that during this remarkable transition, there were some virtuous individuals who considered the drastic action of world governments to be more than just an insult about resource management.  Such individuals, out of what we should consider today to be genuine altruism, took it upon themselves to plant seeds of innovation that would grow into altogether stable sources of nourishment.
       It was the bioengineers working in aerospace that offered the most immediate solutions.  Having worked for decades on genetically altered grains that could feed astronauts on extended missions, they offered governments robust quinoa varietals that produced as many as five harvests each year. Shark genes responsible for constant tooth growth were blended with metabolic markers in long lived sea turtles to allow the new quinoa to grow for extended periods, uninterrupted, with near constant food production.  The complete protein offered by the grain itself meant that as genetically synthesized oil producing plants were perfected, a new processed food staple was achieved – a device that looked and tasted remarkably like the hamburger, so beloved by the years of plenty.

Packed so tight, out of such lightness; the heights of condensation… like humanity itself, concentrated, denser and always denser.

       In truth, the hunger that gripped peoples never before confronted by any scarcity whatsoever was so traumatizing that it produced a kind of religious experience, a revelation certainly, about the way they had been living prior to the famine.  As packaged government rations began to erode the initial panic, the mood of entire nations became reflective.  The conclusion that the past had perpetrated a great crime against the present began to permeate society.  A name was given to the times before, the Gorge, and a lexicon of gluttony and childish hedonism was used to narrate an impasse from which a single road forward had been found.  As synthesized vitamins and supplements made their way into people’s ration packages, and their general frequency increased, the conclusion seemed inescapable – there could not be production and consumption without planning, no part of the subsistence of human civilization could be subject to either chance or desire – a plan was required.
       Political leaders were not ignorant of this new and stirring mood. Quietly, while their food ministries developed more and more productive synthetic crops, an entirely new organ of central government was created, one that utilized the relative calm brought by rationing to plan ahead.  It was decided that not only were people correct in believing that there must be a mathematics of production and consumption, but that such a sentiment itself was integral to humanity’s future.  Leaders quickly realized that even more important than the operational calculous of homeostasis itself, was the general understanding that such a metric form of survival was absolutely necessary.  It was this belief that produced the Executioner, the first synthetic human, the operative charged with executing the mathematics of survival laid out by central government.  It was to be the first great triumph of the genetic sciences; engineering live social agents, growing and cultivating them, employing all that was known about that was then known in the emerging field of epigenetics.  It was not enough for them to be biologically adapted to the demands of subsistence planning, it was necessary that pertinent environmental factors be included in their development to tighten or loosen specific genes.  It is true that they were warriors after a fashion, but it is also true that the individuals and the civilization for which they fought was comprehensible to them only across an uncanny biological divide.
       After two generations of rationing and citizen re-education, the Executioners were ready to assume control.  They were put in all positions of management and decision making, while at the same time allowed to decided the criteria for advancement of ‘natural born’ individuals.  In their infinite wisdom, they decided that no able-bodied individual should ever ascend beyond a task oriented vocation – only individuals with physical disabilities, open as they were to robotic hybridization, would be put in charge of human relations and personnel management.  Thus a new bureaucratic hierarchy was created.

And so, the ones who weren’t born... and so could not die… ruled.

       There were other strange and unforeseen developments concerning things as serious as human reproduction, as banal as city planning, and as unavoidable as food delivery.
       Quite controversially, the Executioners began to discourage the physical act of intercourse, sighting its extremely high health care costs, and the obvious overabundance of humans on the planet.  Historians of psychology have suggested that if business interests had not already been so successful in convincing people of the value of the VORSA (virtually operated remote sex apparatus), then the Executioner’s plan would have run into more resistance.  As it was, suspicions regarding the dangers and inappropriateness of sexual contact, growing silently for years, found expression in public policy.  Needless to say, there were holdouts. 
      Turning their attention toward the organization of urban centers, the only place humans were allowed to live under new zoning laws, the Executioners decided that the great folly of previous city planning had been the insistence on the permanence of personal space and property; why allow individuals to get attached to houses and apartments when the results of such attachments were congested and convoluted transportation systems?  It was decided that there was no reason at all to allow such a situation, and that, as a remedy, a city should be constructed on the model of a train system so that each individual’s personal dwelling was a traveling car within a vast network.  By linking these trains to an intelligent grid, a reversal of all transit was achieved.  An individual’s home, always already moving, could adeptly navigate through the city, arriving at places of work or leisure all without any input from the individual – save for a tightly kept schedule mapped out on central computers at the beginning of each month.  The homes could make necessary purchases on their own, and intern themselves for repairs when necessary.  It was a highly structured approach to time management, but one that seemed fair given the immense efficiency inherent in being retrieved form work by one’s dwelling.  The cycling apartments also changed the nature of surveillance.  The central hub of the new network, the Nexus Terminal, housed the offices of the Executioners and allowed citizens and their homes to be monitored daily as dwellings passed through the giant terminal.  City Hall and much of law enforcement were combined.  Already monitored at work, citizens no longer returned to private homes, their apartments now the property of state and government.  (Image 1.1 below shows the original architectural plans for the Nexus and nine rings of apartments.)

       Certainly the strangest decision made by the Executions surrounded the food system.  No one had thought that they would feel the need to change anything given the success of the National Sustainability Program that, beyond eradicating famine, had created their executive role.  Sentimentality was, however, never an issue for these logicians, and they soon decided that synthesizing foods into nutrient dense liquids only to further graft them on to caloriless cellulose hamburger molds was too preposterously arcane no matter how deep the cultural love of such a sandwich ran.  It was decided that the liquids themselves would be shipped throughout the urban network, and administered at safe injection sights throughout the city.  There were, again, holdouts, and to counteract the allure of black market food, the Executioners approved a single, government operated restaurant for each area of the city, which would continue to serve solid food.  Thus the Gastropod was born, to nearly unanimous applause and adulation, although crowding and wait times functionally meant that a transition to a liquid diet had been achieved for the vast majority of citizens.
       Fears during the Gorge of an authoritarian state in which force was used to limit the lifestyles and choices of individuals were proven naïve, when, in the final case, it was the individuals themselves who were transformed, not the available options.  Historians have remarked that it would have surprised earlier thinkers to witness just how free these future individuals were, and just how little they wished to use or abuse their freedom.

Bodies without shadows, forests without trees… the light fills everything, wide and flat, sand and sky… day without night… welcome to the dessert of my life.

Objects without shadows, without secrets, without negotiation, become what they are… unbearable.  The world, this world around me, stands on nothing… there’s nothing to hold it up… what will stop it from disappearing entirely?

My life can’t be explained anywhere else; it has to be explained here… can I explain it?  Can I bear this desperate explanation?  Can I bear the ultimate and non-negotiable reality of the world, of my life, as it is?

The real is the ground on which all human life is built. It races out from every frontier and edge, devouring the hinterlands.  It has no objectors, no ambiguity or mystery to impede it.  The real is growing like a dessert; welcome to the desert of the real.