sortakasten

"I think sometimes of the Voyager Golden Records, spinning endlessly into eternity, a cry into the void that features a selection of carefully curated human experiences in an attempt to communicate the vastness of Earth’s history and culture to other beings. The offerings, selected by a committee led by Carl Sagan, include a photograph of a woman in a grocery store, the sound of footsteps, a sampling from The Magic Flute, an image of an astronaut in space, a human heartbeat. The process of picking and choosing what to include must have been agonizing and fraught, limited not just by storage considerations but politics, pressure, and cultural hegemony. The result is a highly fragmented, erratic, selective view of what it means to be human, more a testimony of our limitations than of our potential, a reminder that archival work is not neutral, and a powerful case for diversifying the way we preserve information. "

the darker implication of the malaise is the reality that it is all by design. a few hundred years ago certain powers aligned against the people. overloading from birth to the point that it is a luxury, a privilege, to even consider the state of the world. in thinking about all of this i can't help but drown in a kind of survivor's guilt mixed with impostor syndrome— i can(t help but) think about these things when, outside my window, there's someone that's negotiating with themselves on whether to feed themselves now or pay bill later. and somewhere, someone even more educated and in an even more privileged position considers the same for me.

but at some point up that ladder i want to hope someone with some weight will think about the rest of us all the way down and throw a wrench in the system that stacked us in a vertical maze to begin with.

amongst the reasons i've theorised, the ubiquity of media (specifically, nostalgia-driven and self-referential media), where no one seems to age or "mature”(whatever that means). the other side of the theory involves, of course, capitalism. the oppressive conditions that might lead us to turn inward, seek distraction and perform a "simpler” time perpetually— to willingly blind ourselves to the crippling realization that we grew into a world much more hostile than any previous generation had to face. i miss vine, btw. dab and all that.