So I skipped a day of writing. I feel quite sluggish. Maybe that is because I am looking for employment at the moment and it makes me anxious. Fear is a great depressant.
I just finished watching "the terminator - genesis". It was very entertaining. I think it was made for people like me in their 30s. Extra effort was put into giving the scenes an old-school feel. At first, I couldn't shake the feeling that the storyline too was very old and outdated. The conflict is based on rescuing Sarah Connor, who needs to give birth to John Connor who will save the world. While the idea of skynet is becoming more and more real to us by the day, the idea of hope dying with one single person is becoming a problem of the past. Cloud computing ensures that anything uploaded can be copied an infinite number of times. It will be automatically backed up. Most of us (including me) do not know where and how many times. In a more poetic sense, once a piece of information or idea is manifested, I multiplies and travels.
We sometimes feel powerless about this phenomena. Before we know it, our dear AI's have uploaded our holiday pics to our company dropbox. Without our company knowing, we have seen invoices and spreadsheets which were for accounting's eyes only. I am typing on my secret blog, in fear of the public eye while secretly hoping that someone I will never meet in real life will stumble across it. Our digital age has made us dumber and smarter than any people before. It divides us and glues us back together as one superior mass. We have been through a few crisis in the last seven years. I recently heard on planet money (http://www.npr.org/sections/money/) that every time we recover from a crisis now, companies hire back less people than before because they found ways to get certain tasks done with the help of softwares. While some of us are made obsolete by digital tools, others seemed to have evolved into untouchables. I recently finished the book "anonymous". They speak of the "hive mind". An organism which is not made up of one or even seven people, it is made up of an uncountable, unorganised mass of people in undisclosed places in the world, with undisclosed identities and genders. While the book features key players, we are unsure of some of their identities until the very end. What impressed me the most, beside the fact that a lot of them seemed to be no older than 17, is the fluid structure of the organisation. The head of the movement seemed to be an idea rather than a person. While there were members who took the roles of organisers and leaders, their arrests and disappearances did not stop the movement from continuing. In some way, they themselves could have been a figment. Their human persona was secondary. I thought of terrorist groups like IS. They too live off an idea which calls them to action and sprouts new members all across the world. The recent white recruits make them harder to categorise. Maybe they too are in the process of becoming faceless. While I do not understand the motivation of IS and, in the same sentiment, refuse to label anonymous as terrorists (as I do not see uncovering of information as a crime), I feel that some of us have evolved like cloud computing has evolved. A more relatable phenomena may be crowd-funding and all the social media communities which give rise to some many famous ordinary people and enable more of a democracy than we have seen on centuries. Perhaps while we are becoming more and more useless as individuals, we are building communities which are more flexible, more capable of immediate reactions and more powerful in their actions. Maybe they are more democratic, but maybe anarchy describes these systems better. These systems are leaderless. This system will walk and think even when it loosed its head, because its mind does not sit in the head. The mind sits in every tiny cell of its giant body.