Radio Open Source is calling for Blogs of the Union (BOTU)posts. So here I go….
Ten years ago the internet was a new and innovative technology that was going to change our lives as it entered into mass culture. Today I doubt most citizens of this union could imagine a world without the internet or wireless technology. What was once cutting edge is now banal. No doubt when we reflect on our lives many of us old enough to remember the Jetsons wonder why so little has changed, but I believe that is a false perception, for when the future is the present it fails to elicit awe. We may not live in an age of flying cars, but we live in one where Google has made old-fashioned erudition obsolete. Today we can foresee a day when total knowledge of our personal genetic code is within reach. We have even sent a probe to the outermost planet. The rate of change that we take for granted in our lives was unimaginable even a generation ago, and it seems likely that the rate of this rate of change is increasing ever more. We should appreciate the lives we lead because it seems likely that our generation is the bridge between the vast epochs of man’s past when he was still a creature of his nature, limited by the tools that evolution provided, and the post-human future when the melange of bioengineering and cybernetics consumes us. Let us give thanks for the affluence that technology affords us. And let us look to the past and cherish who we were as a people, for it may be that we will be the last who will be able to relate in any fundamental way with the experience of what it has meant to be human for the last 50,000 years. We are the end, and hopefully the beginning.
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