By Zachary Wilkinson
Having moved through time, we have plucked from the tree of existence, fruit for nourishment, leaves to cure our ails. We have snapped the brittle branches to heat our shivering souls and when the heat was not needed, we pounded rhythm from those very same limbs.
So social are we humans, that we did not do this alone.
At each step on our journey, we have passed information from mind to mind, whether by grunts and gestures, songlines or sketches. Our ancestors shared stories for survival and developed complex language to teach to their children. The very first lesson.
The greater the information we have been able to share and the faster we have been able to share it, the more we have been able to achieve with our time here on Earth.
From first speech came carvings and writing. With writing came laws, measurements and history. Suddenly, we possessed the ability to learn from those who existed deep in the past, and hear what they had to say.
Our transport took us far from our homelands and information sailed or steamed along with it. The printing press, to print tomes carried by the engine, and then the wire. Electricity and the connectivity of us all means that data can be transferred from one end of the Earth to the other in an instant.
There is more information available to us now than there ever has been. Too much for any single consciousness to comprehend, but that is OK.
We have long since uploaded into digital pools, where corporate interests ingest information like a blue whale consumes clouds of krill. Our machines too have moved online, so that we can harness the compute power of military-scale devices not even in our country, to turn them on our own people and bombard the minds of the meek with advertisements for clothes and holidays, diets, devices and even love. Tell me ten things about yourself and I’ll show you the love of your life. Give me fifteen dollars a month and I’ll show you more.
We have not peaked, I don’t believe, but there must be a limit. With unfettered, unfiltered, instant sharing of knowledge there would be no possibility of telling a lie, or a joke. There would be no reason to tell stories, or communicate with one another at all. This can never be the end goal.
If you tune in to what’s been dubbed ‘the algorithm’, whatever source you choose, you will find food and drink carefully curated to shine, crinkle and crunch under acrylic nails. Food is ever changing. It is culture. It is the blending of families, neighbours, immigration and even invasion. It is natural to change and if the algorithm is the new nature, then I suppose we are doomed to swill in the same bucket as the rest of them.
But I don’t feel that way. Not here. Not Yet.
I will eat my beautiful biryani from the lady who has not published so much as a menu online. I will phone the pizza place, and pick it up myself, and when I drink too much at the bar with my friends, I will soak in a bowl of pho that can bring my shattered soul to tears.
