All We Gave Up, All We Have Left (or Back to Paradise)

Sister Rose, Father, Mother, Brother Julian:

once, they were whole.

Father, Mother:

once, they had one another.

Sister Rose:

once, they had them.

Brother Julian:

after it all, he still had myself.

Once, each one had everything, from the wind in the forests trees to the water in the fast-moving rivers as well as the far expanse of the mountains and their high, untouchable tops. Once, they had their naked, shoe-less feet running swift and free in the endless shores of sand where, beyond all beyond, stood the tall and short grass with the cool stones and pebbles beneath. Once, they had clean air they never feared to breathe. Once they had sunlight that stung the eyes and kissed their cheeks. Once they clouds that were everyone’s - all at once, without question; demand, or price.

Once, they had a shared planet. Then, the Technicals arrived.

They were innocent at first, like a bear cub or a fox at your back door scrounging around for attention, for food.

Then, after The First Great Crash, when political parties could do nothing but turn on each other and become obsolete in the ways of The Old, the Technicals conjured up the The Solution: a network of networks of networks, layered atop one another by their billions of invisible hands that would one, connect us all and two, lead us to ascension. With the world in turmoil, the world welcomed them. They were the new light in old night of nightmares. And of course, they obliged like the heroic saviors from the future they curated and crafted themselves to be.

But, they insisted, to rebuild...we need new industry to turn rubble into a digital, immutable, state.

To that end the Technicals offered what every human being had always wanted and needed: a foreseeable path to instant connection wrapped in the illusion of security by an endless void of knowledge, content, and conversation.

Or, God.

They were offering a fresh, new interface for a relationship with a world millions thought to be broken inside, outside - for all inhabitants; a reborn network reinforced by the ideologies and religions of old into a new framework of thinking, believing, where everyone could know your name, your likes and dislikes, your dreams and greatest fears. And you, if you wanted, could know theirs too. The Technicals convinced them there was no future without them and we all believed it.

Why? We started to ask when the connections began to taste more like poison than candy.

Why must we know everyone?

Why did you take the natural thing that made us feel as one and give us instead what you manufactured?

Must we feel as if we are everywhere all at once?

Why must we never be untethered?

Will it always be this way?

Is there no other?

The Technicals knew they didn’t have to offer a reply. They couldn't be reached. They couldn't be found. They could only be seen. That's what all the money was for.

Like sharing a Guinness with a friend after a long day, the Technicals presented themselves as one of us (they were anything but) sustaining the belief that, perhaps one day, those who followed might become like them.

The chance to be your eras all knowing God, the Technicals told us, is coming. For the chance to progress to the point of no return and feel confident in never looking back, is coming. For the chance to look past compute and into the eyes of your own eyes and find eternity, is coming.

And we, blinded and desperate at the cliff’s edge to which they had led us, obliged, now obsessed with what they gave us, and in that obsession, we handed them the control and power to make themselves gods. We poured every second of our lives within everything they gave us under the guise of rediscovering ourselves and connecting with strangers, with commerce; with an algorithmically curated life.

We stopped sleeping. We stopped making love or think to own our own property or look at each other in the air. We ceased to taste the sweat upon our highbrows and rid ourselves of the burdensome but wholly necessary tow of guilt, of shame, of hatred, of self-loathing to reach forgiveness. We traded this and the rest of our lives away in exchange for the lie of being a part of something that we couldn't even affect, that we couldn't ever change – that was never even real.

Division by algorithm became our new shared reality, and we wielded it for the Technicals like a sword, like a cloak‑and‑dagger, like a battering ram. And we did it with an ability we already possessed: the power to share experience and stories for maybe a better tomorrow. But they, the Technicals, wanted to use stories and narratives for something more nefarious – control.

The Technicals were not stupid. Worse, they were the smartest people in the world, trained at elite institutions alongside others equally obsessed with harnessing mass (the sheer number of people), channeling their energy (their will and motivation), and coordinating it with their like-minded peers. They understood that experience had always been a natural currency conferring status, trust, attention, and influence within communities. And those communities were no longer small. They were global, shaped and scaled by the very digital social platforms the Technicals had built and now controlled.

And Julian, oh' brother, and Rose, his dear sister (not so much their mother and father), and the rest of humanity, were suddenly, unknowingly, willing to give it all away in this newly invented status game of likes, dislikes, shares, and commentary.

Like children, the world allowed itself to stumble into this beautifully constructed garden stock-filled with every species of flower – tulips, orchids, peony’s and zinnia’s – and cast in the glory-be-to-God sun of suns with no clouds in the sky (unless desired). It was the greatest trick since religion. It was the greatest lie since the Egyptians called the sun Ra. A beautiful lie but still a lie concocted by the Technicals in the form of a return back to paradise the Christians Adam and Eve were cast out from. This time, this return, was reversion and reconstruction of a digital paradise, no longer lost, the Technicals said, but found. This was their promise, this was their oath, their commitment.

Years later, it hardened into the world's - and theirs - unyielding and inviolable decree.

And for what?

For the sake of showing the world who we were, that we existed, that we were present and insisting on being heard, we performed even the smallest, most insignificant acts: making our meals for the week, standing in a protest, announcing a baby’s gender, dropping a new song on an old playlist with ten followers, announcing a new but lost love even when both knew it hadn’t been true from the start never. Those kinds of permitted voyeurism consumed and consumed and consumed both our energy and the world’s, stripping away the world most didn’t even get the chance to fully know: our skies, our rivers, our forests, our land.

And they needed more. Industry needed to expand. The Technicals were not finished. They were never going to stop when they realized we couldn’t stop storing every second of our lives, every want of our souls, on their servers for “safe keeping,” allowing us limited access for a fee to share what we couldn’t even remember if and when we wanted. The Technicals found their new product – the illusion of omnipotence and digital eternity. Or, as the Technicals put it, “Infinite Scroll.” And we were buyers.

Then came Hyper-Centers, the brain and heart of the Technicals power, where everything was created, stored, and trained for the eternal iterations. "They are the computers," past analysts wrote, "we use but don’t touch...anchoring a fast-growing segment of both digital infrastructure and economic development" eventually taking what was left of Julian and Rose’s dying world for the sake of the Technicals new goal, Acceleration. This was a new evolution of networks within every country's ecosystem and digitally chained populations to entertain to pull data to then write their story as if it were their own to control them without even knowing it, surveilling millions upon millions of terabytes - captured and organized - for the good of the Technicals computationally proclaimed “good.”

Again, this must be asked - for what?

For who, when Father and Mother were there by the fire dying from the once pure waters of the lake?

When did their contact become not enough, sister? Brother? What happens when even death and mourning became something to subscribe to? All for a distraction from daily conversations? What is the value of the next-best thing surrendered when the choice itself was never even made by us?

No more, Rose whispered, taking her dying parents hands by the fire of their home, she no longer willing to cry any longer.

No more Hyper-Centers, said Julian, looking to the horizon stained with the drone of fluorescent and LED lighting. We must be rid of them.