i had a bit of a reality check moment while doing the washing up just, i’m more like sarah conner than john - for the majority of you, that live here on steemit you’ll probably understand the reference, the terminator films. for the last five years i’m probably been deluding myself that it was my job to fight the good fight and add my voice to the inequality of systems that don’t have a data field that fits the 80’s digital native, the ones that went through the dark times of technology not living up to it’s promises to the marketing hype and chamfered edges of todays technology.
i’ve never known another film so good at dipping around in different temporal time zones and still pull it off, sure it might have some errors here and there but i do love the cause and effect of actions, our actions as humanity on the future, having to travel back into the past to fix things so they won’t happen in the future - terminator did it, the borg tried it, doc and marty had a few attempts too, what would you do if you could go back in time? maybe buy a bit of stock in google or bitcoin early eh? :)
the game has stayed the same it’s just the players playing are different, a new marketplace for the older heads to build upon, for those without technology legacy to convince and upsell product illusions too.
for the last three years i guess in some ways i’ve kinda assumed i was the educated and forward planning information passed down from the previous generation to me, i was the john in this story, i had to be the next link in the lineage of my parents story, that we would bump society forward a little, lead the resistance against the machines which let’s be honest, have actually in real life enslaved us at the expense of choice and privacy, which we gave away to the shiny free providers of the connection drug of choice.
but really, i’m more like sarah, no, i’m not trying to craft myself as a bad ass with an underground bunker of weapons cached so john can come back or go forward and be armed and ready to go against skynet. i don’t mean that, although let’s be honest, time travelling and coming back to an unknown time and be armed is probably sensible.
no what i realise is that i’ve been strategy planning mode for the last three years, away from the system, john is really ella and i’ve got to both educate about the good and the bad, the future maybe futile for humans, good or bad, access based on identity and income, who knows what the variable will be in the future, good genes, a legacy lineage or the best person to adapt to the toxic fields of swill generations after us could be working in to keep the planet to some level of survival, we simply don’t know.
you see i wanted to go fast, i wanted to pack everything in, the system didn’t have a data field that could accept all the variables of what i was trying to achieve, i was not a student of the university business model, playing the game seemed futile and like infecting source code at my lowest level, it felt wrong in my stomach, like i’d eaten something out of date, that actually trying to ride the crest of the tsunami wave of the new was more inline with how i understand life around me, maybe it was reaching out early in life via penpals or using modems to connect to BBS systems in sweden when i was a teenager and looking on maps where that was, understanding that the sysop of the server may not actually be a girl but a man pretending to be someone else, today we have ai bots that handle our initial chat questions as they data mine our sentiment over clothing choices, logging time of data, speed of reply, slowly bit by bit adding digital data to the idea of what it maybe to be part of the human condition.
i was the kid in the blue neon socks at the end of the stage, late to the group shot of the choir for the school year. i always thought i was the john conner, the boy realising that his world was bigger than he thought, that the position that he was always told to hold was actually different from the future reality, one day gaming at an arcade the next being told that you need to stay alive otherwise it effects my future and that of my mother generation.
i guess we all need that human desire to feel uniquely different or at least be at peace with the character we are, it’s easy to bracket ourselves, anchor who we are in things we see, almost sign off on them like a delivery from A to B and then never revisit it — i’ve found in life that markers can come from all directions, at different times and you either choose to act or conform and deal with the fallout of never making the leap, the leap is often a challenge anyway, distance, financial, lack of future vision if making the decision will be the right one - the older i get, the more softer the fallout becomes, just being present becomes the connection, it’s your current dialtone.
but we do have to consider the future version of the sarah conner character we want to be, where does technology and humanity cross over, will we notice the difference, are we already living a pre processed ai version of humanity where we have to have wars to change economies, did the wachowski sisters nail it with the dark skies theory of stopping the machine from solar charging or will we even get there?
maybe i’m just down for the fight, maybe the journey to the final boss character is the game. maybe we have been playing each level exactly like we were meant too anyway just using cheats and hacks to get us through to some kind of self absorbed level up powered by distraction and the notion of financial success bondage. either way, i hope you’ve trained along the way, you will have many battles with mind and body before the final showdown.
i hope you’ll be there as part of the resistance, even if resistance is ultimately futile.
http://socialgandalf.com/legacy → pinterest epic wins pinboard → i was a brand advocate for nokia, 1000heads, verisign → won a vloggie for involvement in node666 (san francisco 2006) → on television for time team history hunters 1999 (burton on trent) → sold me.dm to evan williams (twitter) in april 2011 for 5 figures → went to phil campbell, alabama to help repair/recovery/help raise money month after a tornado ripped through the town (was on sky news, bbc news, al jazeeza, nightly news, alabama weather channel?!) → CNN for sxsw 2013 about austin south by southwest event → video chat with robert scoble from rackspace → i was in a music video can you spot me? → won the digital derry contest for 5k euros to kickstart web tv studio → did project work with sleepydog indirectly for nesta (responder) → crowdfunded digital signage concept called the pi street (do it for steem?)
