Hey I just read your excellent post above and thought I'd respond with my own joyous ode to modern life, cheery stuff, ha ha!

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Who Are The New Frontiersmen?

I am excited by the term frontier, for whilst it evokes the notion of a fertile, vast and virgin terrain, it also hints at the possibility of a dangerous feral zone, a place of unknown threat. When I think of our collective future I use this word, it’s tainted optimism and cautious promise is applicable to many of the realities I can conceive for our descendents, those humans who will exist in strange new frontiers of technology, society and experience never before even imagined. These essentially utopian realms of potentiality are incredibly seductive but volatile; untamed dream spaces that are as inexplicable and unpredictable as they are transcendent.

We live in an age of changes that are profoundly extreme and apocalyptically irreversible. The genius that be applied to cure a disease can be used to build a bigger and better weapon, a digital self could be liberated from corrupted flesh but then divorced from a beating, loving heart. We set on a bold, treacherous journey into distant, unmapped actualities, blinded by our hunger for conquest.

When I think about what is coming I keep meditating on the same questions; that will define these new frontiers and what forces will shape them? Why am I discussing this?

I want to contextualise the piece of writing I have written that will follow this introduction. I am worried that I’d appear negative if people were only to read the treatise on freedom on it’s own. It’s doomy, I know, but I just want you to understand that this need to explore the darkness is founded on a belief that the darkness is best perspective from which to appreciate the dawn. I expect great things, but my optimistic nature is tended by a very real fear – the fear that if we don’t realise that we are in control and begin to actively shape our shared future, all the worst (and often most powerful) of our guiding desires could birth a version of reality so hideously distorted it no longer resembles anything a sane human consciousness could possibly hope to exist.

AND SO -

At what price this stupefied freedom? This dead eyed, easy whore of slot machine satisfaction; this religiously enforced hegemony of dreams and ideals shrink wrapped to attain a commodified, sterile perfection and sold back to us on mass. What blunted horizons are we hurtling towards, soured, half-lit home lives animated with dull emotions, a spectrum of human emotion nullified by the by the gentle but constant hum of impending doom. The same steady hum that is the unifying sound of mediocrity, of idling civilisation, of perpetual stale comfort. It’s the omnipresent air conditioning, the car idling, the refrigeration unit, the stand-by whir of a life promised but never quite really there. It’s stalled on the pages of a magazine, glinting playfully in somebody else’s retouched, winking eye. We know that sound as well as the bone rattling tones of fear that are played out in the melody of dissatisfaction to which we are regularly roused to dance.

Lets waltz again so that we can learn all the right moves before a gun is punched into our flabby middles. Dance through our bunker lives lived through the screen. Terror is the new mantra, the hyper patriotic anthem to which we stand and salute. All for our freedom, the freedom that is apparently threatened on all sides, the noble leash for happy dogs. Our freedom that is nothing but the glint of a once proud vessel that has sunk into the murky ocean of other people’s greed.