thought sprawl

how long can our intermittent generational obsessions with outer space last? the 1950s featured retro futurism, the 60s brought us the space race, the 80s created space odyssey, and the millenium chucked us the internet. each generation holds their own deep charm and fascination with the technological advancement of their era, evidenced in periods of future-obsessed media that sprawls beyond scientists and academics into mass imagination. these moments emerge in whimsical costumes, horrible visual effects and a distorted future of a green alien-filled space saucer and girls in silver clothing. popular culture takes on a new aspirational identity, dreaming up a future as a way to define their own time, on the brink of what feels like riding a wave of great progress for human kind. 

just as our parents, and their parents and their parents, we are the most technologically sophisticated generation that ever existed to date, and that feeling is wild and fills the world with things like psytrance and sci-fi but also black mirror, and that's a lot to shoulder. how long does the magic of what we've created give us such a cosmic feeling before we - and the generations which came before us - start to see with open eyes again the physical realities that hold us, like how the wall paint is peeling and time and flesh and gravity are binding in this world, before we even ask how our innovations are radically changing everything. 

ultimately those physical realities are a relief, a tether back down to earth. when the web connects us to endless realities unknown, our mind-bodies are what we actually have, what indeed feed us and move us and make us feel alive and lovely. those physical realities brought us masterful poetry and art that lasts the ages, pinned up in this timeless shared mindspace, our map of the evolution of ideas. hand by hand, mind to material, these relics are pure, holding our cultural stories in the same world in which those stories unfolded. the world of information today - its constellations of internet profiles, chatter, and an infinite spiderweb of links - democratizes the power of knowledge while saturating this power, asking people to curate their own narrow view of existence, a sure benefit in the short term taken over a long view of history. 

images by beeple

in the meantime, i look up, i take my notebook with me, i see the sunflowers through the window, and the paint is peeling, and i am checking for everyone - i havent seen any aliens yet.

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