Last night I picked up the newest issue of Adbusters and was inspired – I thought I’d share one of my favourite articles. It’s written by the founder of Adbusters – Kalle Lasn. It’s most certainly worth a read:
Looking back, future generations will see the first years of the 21st century are humanity’s great omega point – the moment when physical reality grew so unbearable and physical existence so unfulfilling that we began abandoning the physical world. We grew tired of the hot, suffocating air, the endless gridlock and the tedium of uninspiring sex. The virtual world was a respite: a cool electronic reprieve devoid of the problems hat plagued the natural world. We plunged headfirst into cyberspace where we chatted, played games and boldly experimented with second lives. Ecosystems were dying and our bodies were atrophying, but our minds were alive. We lived for the electronic epiphanies and virtual thrills of a purely cerebral realm. We abandoned our evolutionary home and became psychic hives of activity in cyberspace.
Meanwhile the glaciers were melting, the fish vanishing, the temperature steadily rising. And when we least expected it, history threw us an existential curveball: our virtual lives suddenly lost their shine. We grew weary of the buzzing, beeping and chiming, the tweeting, texting and poking… of sleeping with our iPhones on our pillows and of stewing 24/7 in our own individual juices. We started yearning for nature’s touch again… for the bloody bite of mosquito.. for a taste of wild blackberry… for the hot, furtive embrace of another human being… And we longed once again to roam free through wild grizzly country.
But we found we couldn’t go back. We had been gone too long, had neglected too much. The natural world, as we remembered it, was gone… perhaps forever.
This is the mythology of humanity’s Faustian bargain with the virtual world: In the difficult early years of the third millennium, we turned our back on our evolutionary home for a few cheap thrills in cyberspace.
But of course humanity’s story is far from over – the ending is still being written as we speak. There is still time to write of the heroes who suddenly sprang up all around us… of students who railed against tenure and shifted our economic paradigm… of hackers who turned their skills on the system, decommercializing knowledge and delivering it back to the people… of politicians who fought the status quo and gave birth to a new world order… of Blackspot entrepreneurs who turned megacorprate capitalism on its head… and of the poets, musicians and artists who kept tantalising humanity with glimpses of a new reality. They are the heroes who understand that all revolutions start with one magic moment – the moment when a small group of people come alive. The moment when that group, refusing to be crippled by anger or fear or to be paralyzed by lack of self-discipline, begins to act: quickly, swiftly, deftly and with a logic that anyone can understand. And.. as the story goes… these heroes not only saved the world, they had one hell of a time doing it.
Why don’t you join them?
-for the wild, Kalle
