Nothing to See Here

When you think about life, when you used to see the buds of the acorn, and then the acorn – the little triangular pieces thrusting upwards, outwards, overlapping in a distinct pattern. And you could see the relationship; when you would think about the on-off switches, set by infinite variables, you would bask in the glory of it, the glory of life.

Then came the code, and it was like, oh, it’s just a code. Nothing to see here. That’s when we realized that life wasn’t about biology, but information. All of our concepts of life and its behaviors were now being conferred upon information, not matter, as its substrate.

The virtual palimpsest was a paradox at first. Copies upon copies of copies, pieces taken apart and put back together but having been exchanged with identical pieces of another. Put simply, though, it was just the concept of a thing – a thing as based in matter – becoming a non-physical thing, an idea. There were no more things, or at least not much that mattered. It was all ideas. And ideas don’t require a physical platform, they need only a mindspace.

How do you build a culture on that? There is no more ‘building’ in the sense we of timespace had known. And so our cultures as well dissolved and diluted, too meager an entity to compete in this world. Culture needs layers of age and decay; it mimics the biological even in that sense of growth-from-poverty. To the point, he who relies on his body to house his mind, his mind will always behave as a body and according to the rules of timespace.