HISTORY
OF THE
FUTURE
Rachel Megawhat
“We think we are creating the system, but the system is also creating us. We buid the system, we live in its midst, and we are changed.” Ellen Ullman - Close to the machine
“The existence of a person in data-space,their data-body, has often become more important than their flesh” Matthew Fuller - Behind the Blip
“Technical culture has gotten out of hand, the advances of the sciences are so deeply radical. disturbing, so upsetting and revolutionary, that they can no longer be contained... ...the traditional power structures, the traditional institutions have lost control.� Bruce Sterling - Mirrorshades
“By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms. That is why we must, to use them at all, serve these objects, these extensions of ourselves, as gods.� Marshall McLuhan
The UK already has 1 cctv camera for every 14 people, in London you are likely to be filmed 300 times a day. All new passport photos are now scanned to create a biometric database. Facial recognition technology can be applied to cctv footage. UK citizens are the most monitored in the world. Does it feel like angels watching over to protect you? Or does it make you feel like a prisoner under surveillance?
The stars were not enough. Over 2000 satellites have been launched since the first in 1957.
Twinkle twinkle satellite How I wonder why you are Up above the world so high Electronics in the sky
Data, data, everywhere and not a drop of sense
“there is absolutely no inevitability, as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening” McLuhan Despite the advances of science and technology, is the state of human life on earth deteriorating rather than improving? Is all this shiny new technology in fact leading us to a new dark age? We may have the technology for great achievements, but there is no consensus about how it should be used, and the only widespread theocracy is that of profit. We are increasingly living in an age where wisdom has become lost in a sea of information and data. “in spite of technical superfluency, primary assumptions underpinning social order are inconsistant” John Latham Technologies themselves are morally neutral,being machines, but human nature is reflected and exaggerated by these technologies. It is not the machines that are frightening, but what humans are allowing themselves to become.In understanding that the problem is essentially a human one makes it seem less insurmountable, as humans can still perhaps be influenced to alter their acceptance of technology. Warnings have been made about the dangers of machines from the beginning of their existence, yet it seems these warnings increasingly are unheaded in the face of profitability. Paul Virilio describes what he calls dromospheric pollution “an unnoticed phenomenon of pollution of the world’s dimensions” He argues that by eliminating time and distance through technology man is losing much more than he gains, that life is losing its depth of field. “we need to examine the hidden face of new technologies, before that face reveals itself in spite of us” Paul Virilio Most science fiction has dealt with the machine becoming all powerful and enslaving the human, and this would seem to be true to those workers who are now monitored for productivity every second they spend in the workplace. But an equal, or greater, threat from machines is the gradual erasure of the human.The diminishing of the spectacular variety of physical and mental human possibilities to a spectral race of button pushers, who worship their machines as a lifeline. We are now aware of the pressure and destruction the oil dependance of the industrial/mechanical age has wrecked upon the world. can we truly then be blind to the dromospheric destruction to be wrecked by the digital age. It is time we realised that progress sometimes means a radical change of direction. If the depth of field and perspective of the world disappear then what is left but a blurred chaos?
all text and images Š Rachel Megawhat