Thoughts about the future

       Today is October 9th of the year 2018, we are more than 7 billion people, earth’s economy is based on capitalism, few people have almost the totality of earth’s wealth and 80% of the world’s population live with less than 10$ a day.

       But humanity always tended in this way since few of our ancestors evolved from nomadic to sedentary. Soon a lot of nomadic communities adopted this new form of civilization and the reminders almost disappeared. Thus, we began to expand ourselves, accumulating knowledge, technologies and germs. With these new technologies we’ve learned and we are still learning how to exploit earth and manipulate nature. On the other hand, we are paradoxically losing our connection with nature, our spirituality.

      We, now, crossed the threshold of evolution the way we know it, our civilization is going to die.

      From an objective view we can imagine a dystopia and from a subjective and local perspective we can imagine an utopia.

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       What almost the entire humanity will do. We will keep losing our spirituality, to be selfish, materialist, ignorant. Thus we won’t pass the next level of Kardashiev Scale.

       If we succeed to colonize Mars we will only extend our decay but we will still reach extinction at some point. Even though technological progress is fast, our downfall is still faster. Therefore, in my opinion there are few chances that we succeed.

       We can also mention that human intelligence is decreasing right now and knowledge comes from putting together and processing different knowledge. We can also think about the standardization of thinking because we all receive the same input when we grow or develop our mind. Innovation comes from diversity, hence, there will be no more big innovation.

       Nowadays people want entertainment, easy and strong sensation, shock, quick hormonal release because thinking and recreating these “naturally” through a mind process is boring, slow and difficult. In order to get that, we take some drugs, like shocking news, watch and listen to music and film made to be enjoyed by most of humans, etc. These work for all of us because it stimulates our shared roots, the animal inside of us.

      In the future this will also increase, VR or any augmented technology will be a big part of this equation.

       

       The politic perspective of the future is not good as well of course. We live in an infinite loop since the beginning of civilization. We live in an oligarchic system. The same group of people control the legislature, executive and judiciary powers. Human right has always been oscillating, for some generation it’s better and some generation worse. We live in the illusion of democracy. We still work to make oligarch people richer even though mortality rate is way lower and world is way safer than before. This is not a conspiration, we do that because it was the easiest and simplest way to be safe, create knowledge and technology (in order to be more powerful than others culture) quickly in the past and now it’s less complicated to keep building on this system than making a new one.        

       In my opinion we will keep adding on this broken system until it falls and we all die.

       During its fall our society will be full of "digital refugees" unable to find work because they are uneducated and education system is too old for the future. Also, unable to adapt to the speed of the internet, they will become slaves of government and big companies. That will touch people with no degree as well as people with high qualified degrees. As we know “machines are stealing human works”.

      In some countries criminality will rise, people will be watched by big companies there will be no evolution because social interactions will be like in the middle age and some other countries people will be watched by the government like china nowadays, there will be no criminality, no diversity, no evolution.

      In this two scenarios language all around the world will be very poor. We will lose a lot of language diversity (we can also compare that with the loss of species diversity). The meaning of many words will probably be altered and also used to control mass by governing people.

       At some point we can maybe reborn? Reborn in a new form? And do the same thing all over again?

(To deeply understand what I’m talking about I recommend Noam Chomski and Jared Diamond’s books.)

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      In my opinion, the other possibility is to escape this society and build new ones, smaller at a human scale. It won’t stop the rest of humanity to kill themselves or even the people trying to be different. I don’t mean living like in the Neolithic (even thought that can also be a viable alternative for some of us). Today’s technologies allow us to reconnect with nature and spirituality, to have the time and the space to listen and look again at our surrounding environment and try to feel all the ecosystem we are living in. We no longer need to work we are evolved enough.

       So first, people will leave big cities, and start living in smaller villages/community and space will be better redistributed. People will be less packed. Each community will have to live autonomously or with very few trading exchanges between each other. And this is already happening, we can find many examples but for the moment most of them are still very “Agricole” and present some weakness. So it doesn’t sound attractive. (Some ideas : www.thevenusproject.com (Florida), www.auroville.org (India), www.ecovillage.org (list), https://fair.coop/en (the internet)).

      In the future I believe more and more people will follow this path and some communities will be very advanced technologically. But still this choice will concern only a non-significant number of people.

      For the moment our main society is the engine powering innovation but in the future these small diverse societies will also be capable of major innovations. Because life changing innovations are important, most of us need to evolve, we are explorers.

       Some points we need to highlight about what we are able to do now and that some people will do in the future:

• In this new way of living, people will know more each other, they will consider each other as human beings. They won't feel lonely in a mass because there will be no mass anymore.

• People will use technology wisely, they will use the maximum power from what they already have. They will use all of the technology in an efficient way.

• People will buy few things because they will be able to print or create whatever they want. Energy will be free because we won’t need a lot.

• Each houses will supply themselves with their own power. They'll grow their own food.

• Universal incomes will let people time to love, enjoy life, think and invent.

• Political system will be a true democracy thanks to the internet. Politic won't mean organizing society anymore but it will mean interconnecting people.

• People will share their knowledge and culture for free.

• There will be no more news but scientific publications.

• Stock exchange won't be part of these systems.

• We won't be able to speculate on anything, and most of all money. Money will be fair and stable and there will be a lot of different currencies. (Real example : https://fair-coin.org/).

• People's “goal”/values will be to love and get wiser.

       Moreover, to be able to make these changes we need to change ourselves as human. The concept of love will be the only believable thing because in the future we won't be able to distinguish what's real from what's virtual. Love won't be a one to one relation anymore, love will interconnect living species.

      We will learn how to control all of our primitive (animal) thoughts, we will transcend our animal state to become an open-minded living species.

                   The ending goal of humanity is not to proliferate physically and expand its numbers (to get offspring) but to uplift itself mentally and to make a shared thought/mind exist, all along its physical and biologic evolution. We can think about the idea of a self-evolving and thinking encyclopedia changing form. From paper to the internet for instance, from analog to virtual.

      That’s exactly what we are doing, evolving from Homo Sapiens to Homo Virtualis and beyond.

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Thoughts about modern art :

A brief personal statement :

Art doesn't need to be subversive to be art. By subversive I mean trying to destroy the basics of morality.

Art should be moral. Basic moral is universal. Art is feeling before explanation. To be original is not necessarily to be shocking. Shock is a way to make people forget the lack of originality.

Art is not egocentrism, narcissism neither anthropocentrism.

Art teaches. Questioning basic morality through art is waste of time.

From my point of view, expensive art today is not good. Art should be free. Speculation is bad.

Also art is used by rich people as a way of stocking their money the same way as real estate or ore (gold). They do it consciously or unconsciously because culturally they are used to it. These trades establish which art work is popular or not.

Thus I think art will stay the same in the future.

Personally I try to know the context (culture, geography, history, social class ...) of the creation of an artwork to try to imagine what the artist wants to tell us through his artwork. If I know the context and I don't feel and learn anything then I don't consider this as art. If I feel something but I don't understand why, I keep thinking, that's also art for me because by trying to understand I develop my mind.