2. Hyperstition

Okay, can we review? It’s a lot to get your head around, at first. Some of this might have struck some of you as somewhat unexpected. We’ve had some time to get situated, though, so I think we should begin.

We’ve been living in a virtual reality. No, nothing sexy, or even really all that interesting. No one’s actually asleep in a pod; the bullets can’t be stopped in midair. It’s sad, it’s weird, and unfortunately, it’s not a metaphor. This false reality has been integrated into not only our waking (working?) life, but also into our fantasies, into all our potential futures. There is no ‘outside’ we can visit. Our imaginations have been foreclosed on. Everything is too fragmented to make any sort of sense of, or mount any sort of coherent defense against, and it’s only getting worse. Sorry.

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Understand. This is bigger than climate chaos. Bigger than executive bonuses. Bigger than oil. Advanced techniques of alienation have been perfected and deployed in the interest of transforming all life into mobile units of value, labor, and purchasing power.

We have been forcefully detached from ourselves and each other, our history and our future, left utterly alone, floating and toiling in this dream-like state. That’s us, OUR TOURIST. Experiencing reality always as second-hand, never fully in control. Reiterating harmful patterns and unconsciously maintaining cruel systems. Looking at the colors, listening to all the pretty songs, always forgetting. Frozen in place, we watch as this gruesome *KXSSHXXSH* progress devours the planet, and attempts to escape. We might work for it. It doesn’t matter. Some part of us might even enjoy it.

So what is to be done? Not only in the face of such utterly hopeless circumstances, but also about the effects that this violent separation has had on us? Are we so damaged as to never recover? Can we ever return to what we left?

Do we even really want to?

Where do we go from here..?

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This brings us to the central subject: time. How can we even begin to talk about time? We seem to have worked our way all around it, but fell short of ever truly addressing it. How do we make peace with the unpredictable speeds at which it sweeps us along, and the irreversibility of its flow? The past is constantly disappearing from our view, pulled under the tide of this invisible ocean that surrounds us, from the moment of our birth to when our fragile perceptions of it finally cease. The rest remains fixed in place, our little lives spent in an amnestic state, future-memories coming to us in small and highly subjective bits of data here and there.

We are not given a choice but to obey the laws of thermodynamics. Time travelers, all of us, our ride hitched in the direction of entropy, from the beginning all the way to total chaos.

Where can we ever go, besides further?

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NOW that we know where we are going, and what exactly is at stake, the question becomes something more along the lines of, ‘What should we bring?’. Well, for starters, bring something to write with: pen and paper, instruments [musical, scientific], brushes, wet clay, a pointy stick for the dirt. Leave your wallet. Bring more questions, but leave the ones that have easy answers. Bring theory, and best practices. Leave the cop you’ve been carrying around in your head, zap his ass with a ray gun before you go. Bring awareness, especially of change. Bring science. Bring fiction.

Bring faith in the unexpected, bring the desire to see what comes next. Bring a friend, or two. Bring sugar for the gas tanks and the concrete and the coffee. Bring fungal networks that spread before they fruit. Bring a compass. Bring eye protection, and plenty of water. Bring beliefs, leave doctrine. Bring hypotheses, and the means to test them. Bring not only the willingness, but the need. Bring not only the need, but the want. Bring all of our dreams. As if we had a choice.

We’ve already begun, the hard part is over. The hard part is yet to come. Maybe at the end, we go back to the beginning. Maybe at the beginning, the end comes back to us. Just a little bit further.

Just a little bit further left to go.

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