Where Silicon Valley meets Easter
Thomas Mahon
Nothing speaks more clearly about the moral vacuum of the digital revolution than the concepts behind the Singularity and the Internet of Everything (IoE).
Sight and sound can be digitized beautifully, as we know. But you can’t digitize aroma, taste or a warm touch.
And we will always be analog, organic creatures of nature, who sweat, belch, fart, have ear wax, belly lint, toejam…. And need to exercise all our our senses.
The digerati have made the same fatal mistake the early Christian did — to be embarrassed about the body and its functions. And thus try to deny we are Mother Nature’s children.
We are organic beings, products of an organic world, and putting an IP address on every tree will not slow down deforestation; nor will retiring to an artificial, virtual world let us escape the environmental damage going on to support the massive energy needs of the bitcoin economy.
We are being played for fools. Trump tried, but he was too inept to pull it off. Smarter people than Trump are having more success.
“Slow down; we’re moving to fast” into a realm our bodies, minds and souls were never designed to survive in.
Like my patron saint, Doubting Thomas, I was never clear exactly about what happened on the first Easter. But I do believe that what the others — Peter, Andrew, Matthew, John, etc — saw was not a hologram, an avatar or a virtual image. But something organic, analog and nature-based.
When we lose sight of that, our punishment is not to shovel coal in some dystopian, infernal afterlife, but to know we risk leaving our descendants on a barren, dying third rock from the sun.
Go in peace, to serve each other, especially the coming generations.
Text: © 2021, Thomas Mahon
Photos: As credited.
