Trade has been replaced by currency. Paper replaces coin and credit replaces paper. Digitized debts, prioritized and intangible, will enslave us all.
Credit scores and social security numbers. Name: last, first. Everything everyone ever did on one big database floating in cyberspace.
Our identities, fragmented and tangential as they may appear, will continue to drift further and further from our bodies. Our bodies are made increasingly obsolete by the automated manifestations of mechanical knowledge. Function and intention will collapse onto one another as our socialized reality is reduced to the head of a pin. Strike here, anywhere else is failure.
People will cease to fan out and will continue to stack and compartmentalize. your pastiche will expand beyond the confines of your mind and body and will dissolve into the meta-sphere of digital mush.
The illusion of choice and opportunity grows as our connectivity becomes more and more schizophrenic. We are communicating, but with whom we cannot be sure. Live streaming audio and video, mutual masturbation, tracked and codified by the illusory means of liberation. We are reduced to ciphers, all which was once essential to the person has been outsourced, improved and dissociated.
Living has become not only an imitative process, but also an adaptive one. We imitate identities that are successful. Whether dissident or steadfast, personalities themselves have become microcosms of a greater hegemonic process of consumption. We adapt to fit into the metaphysical schema of “what is,” (empirically) as a means of survival and distinction. As time progresses adaptation (to the word around us) becomes a mere imitation of the imitative average. Pop culture is a growing collection of imitable identities. In this way popular culture, the spectacle, the public, has become hypotonic, so bloated that it has no choice but to grow. We inversely become hypertonic, so drained of particularity and meaning that we can only contribute to the larger sum. The quantification of said contribution (to the faceless whole of pop culture) is the currency with which identity will be assessed.
The greatest value a person can have is therefore not intrinsic or even directly communicable, but is in fact accessed through a circuitous displacement in the matrix of the simulacra. It is not the vivacity of the object/idea but, much like a star, the luminescence of said object/idea in space.
The future: bleak
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