”What the 20th century valued in progress and what the 21st century has done for advancement has been at the cost of the most fundamental part of life: the human soul.” – Taylor D’Amico (Substack: Mother Academic)
I was recently reading Talyor D’Amico’s, ‘The Reclamation: A Name For Our Time’ and couldn’t help but nod along silently in agreement as I poured over their words. Consumerism, the high cost, and disintegration of universities has done us dirty. We are now in a time where terms like post-literate society and butlerian jihad are slowly sprinkling themselves into the conversations we whisper to friends. We complain about not being able to think properly and that our very ability to focus has eroded away to a mere glimmer in the void. We’re all feeling it, this erosion of self at the altar of technological and corporate supremacy. Simone Weil had a little to say about this;
‘For a thinking being to be free and sovereign for an hour or two and a slave for the rest of the day is such a cruel wrench that in order to avoid being torn in two, it is almost impossible for that being not to relinquish the highest forms of thought.’ – Simone Weil
But what happens when those precious last minutes of cognitive freedom are overtaken by A.I. slop, klankers, spam, misinformation, and a constant stream of meaningless dopamine hits? You either lose yourself completely or the mass amount of bullshit shakes you from your hypnotic slumber. We are at a digital crossroads where the last vestiges of our minds are being shut away from us, the last ounces of our creativity are being stolen from us, and we are forced into using shitty facsimiles for corporate profit. This is intolerable. It is anti-human and anti-life as it sucks up all the resources that make life possible to fuel it’s monstrous data centers.
Today, like those who have come before me and have shaken the cybernetic sand loose from their eyes, I too declare no more. Now is the time of ‘The Reclamation’. The time to peal back the scales from our eyes, not to fall into the past and all of it’s problems. But to know the past in order to make better decisions about our present and future. Not to uphold the institutions that have fallen, but to replace them with distributed non-hierarchical modes of learning and thought. We will no longer tolerate the enclosure of our minds. We will no longer tolerate the enclosure of our natural world. The crossroads are here, now, and the decision must be made by every single one of us. Do we walk forward and reclaim our world and our humanity? Or do we relinquish it all and let if fall like dust to the vestiges of a dying light? The time has come to choose. Let us come together to reclaim our minds, our world, our histories, our stories, our languages. Let’s make the world a place of curiosity, beauty, and creativity once again. Let dying cybernetic gods sleep, we have the world to keep.