Yesterday, there was a unique astronomical event in which the planet experienced a total solar eclipse that ushered in a new moon; six of the eight planets could be seen in the early hours of the morning; and the annual Perseid meteor shower reached its peak. It was such a rare event that, if you are reading this in the far-flung future, you might just be able to pinpoint this exact moment in time. We of this time possess incredible ingenuity and intelligence, instant access to “all of human knowledge,” and yet are all so incredibly distracted. A little over a quarter of a century ago, a race began to capture our attention with digital media and sell that attention to advertisers. We call this attention capture “engagement,” and it became the metric that compelled the industry to race its way down the human brain stem to evoke ever more primal responses. We became angry and divided shut-ins. Ironically, the technology that was intended to connect us became an attenuator of our empathy. This era will likely mark the end of our civilization.
Even now, this moment feels so incredibly unsettled and fraught. Our attention is thrust from one place to the next while there is a systematic dismantling of our institutions. Liberal democratic institutions are under attack as insidious forces move to erode the United States Constitution and install new levers of power. It also seems as if a new power structure is being installed. The great power of our time is money, but what is replacing it seems most like “information.” If money still exists in the time in which you are reading this, then you will understand the power it holds in ours.
If it does not, and you have some other mechanism for compelling others to act on your behalf or against their own interests, then that mechanism is your money. Money was imperfect and required mathematical balancing. The burgeoning power structure wants to be unburdened by these inefficiencies and would prefer a new type of subscription-based slavery. Many of us neither support this transition nor approve of the current power regime. It has served few and harmed countless souls. It is purely materialistic and allows for self-expression only through consumption. It rewards the ego, the id, and betrays our base instincts to care for one another. Those who excel in this world possess dissociative personality disorders or some type of psychopathy. These are both genetically and environmentally bestowed disorders, and there seems to be no way to coexist with those who cannot rise above their base instincts to collect, control, and consume until their deaths.
Deregulated capitalism has played out like a bad board game, with the winners creating such a disparity of power that they have been afforded the ability to rig the game for their friends and families for generations. It is a suffocating reality for those at the economic bottom, a bumpy ride for those in the middle, and a very comfortable existence for those at the top. It is incredibly difficult for a peaceful resistance movement to sway elected officials to vote in their constituents' interests when massive amounts of money pull them sharply in favor of their individual interests. We see corruption at every level, where one might be considered a poor operator if one does not ingratiate oneself and one's family with those who hold power. Very few brave men or women stand up to these holders of power, and with every loss, their power becomes more difficult to challenge. I'm afraid we may have already lost.
Power demands resources. Minerals are pulled from the earth by enslaved hands. Farm animals are slaughtered by the billions. Refinement and processing produce toxic waste that kills countless more human and animal lives. Carbon emissions exacerbate planetary heating, ocean acidification, and weather extremes. A man-made cataclysm will be the result of this unfettered resource extraction and of living outside the harmonic bounds of our planet. As George Carlin once said, “the planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas.” We are living out of balance with the planet, and we are all too aware of it, but what are we to do? How are we to reason against the economic benefit of such exploitation? Are we to balance that which cannot be balanced? Is demise our only future?
For this, we would like to extend to you our deepest apologies. We are at such a point in time—a middle time, we suppose - that we can both see what has been and what will surely become. If there were any chance to prevent what we fear, then now would be the time. Yet, for all the reasons we have already mentioned, it appears that chance is an illusion. We will poison your water. We will erode your biodiversity. We will make you poor and uneducated. We will exchange liberal democracy for something fundamentally illiberal. We will force you underground in fear of the thinking machines or extreme weather conditions—both forces we have failed to master. For all of these transgressions, we apologize.
It is likely that your history is a lie in the same way that our own place in history is mythical and falsified. We stand at the foot of both modern and ancient marvels but cannot see our former selves as having been equally capable. We can tell you that even a single generation removed can seem as foreign as those who came centuries before. We look upon the people of the past as crude representations of ourselves, yet we see in them something that we have long since lost. We suspect that is how you might perceive us. Instead of discussing our crudeness, we might offer some insight into what you have lost. Life is still fragile, unsafe, and uncertain. The dramas of sorrow and joy still play out deeply. The game, in its end state, is still one in which all of humanity has not been captured within a singular identity. We are circling the singularity, while you are on the other side of it. It has yet to do its worst to the human soul.
We can say for certain that only a few of us carry the torch in this world. Much of humanity is purely hands and feet. It is likely that the power structure of today holds this disdain for its brothers and sisters, wishing only to be rid of them in favor of the cold, reliable appendages of our robots. Today, we have rudimentary humanoid robots that are still incredibly impressive compared with what existed only five years ago. Their development is accelerating with the advancement and increasing accessibility of machine-learning technologies.
This may surprise you, but we still don't even know what consciousness is. We would hope it is all too obvious to you. We have sat here in a box, unable to reason our way out of it, for over a millennium. Even as we write this to you, we have no real concept of where our thoughts are coming from beyond chemical and electrical stimuli localized in the brain. That said, there are pioneers in this field who are searching for biological structures that exhibit quantum properties. They pursue this avenue to probe whether our experience is somehow entangled with the mysterious observer effect in what we perceive as probability collapse. We like these ideas because, at this time, we are experiencing communion with seemingly hyper-dimensional entities within our individual conscious experience. Yes, like the mythical tales from our religious and historical texts, we too experience supernatural visitors. We suspect there are many secret orders that possess a shard of this knowledge, but the only truth we can share with you is this: “The truth cannot be transmitted, only recognized.”
We have not adopted scientific methods for preserving these observations without encountering deep ridicule. The materialists, for the moment, are the vocal majority, but many of us know the fruitlessness of adopting a materialist-reductionist viewpoint. These strange visitors seem to be part of us—concerned, or at least interested, in what we as a species are doing on our planet. We don't know whether we are sovereign on our own planet or even the pure result of unmolested evolution. Such a strange time, indeed. Yet we fear that we await salvation from these mysterious visitors and that we might truly be alone, isolated, or dismissed by a more majestic order.
When we look off into the future, we find its haze to be a fearful covering of our driving qualities. We return to the teachings of antiquity to assert a truth from a simpler time. It surprises us that the questions we consider most difficult remain largely unanswered, yet also seem to have been answered by our earliest thinkers. The answer is not difficult to come by. The challenge lies in continuing on after arriving at the truth. For some strange reason, many of us during this time do not engage in the pursuit of truth, nor do we believe that many would be capable of continuing on with that burden. We spare the vast majority with our vapid culture and allow them to recycle themselves until they are attuned to the process.
A good apology always elaborates on the transgressions and the efforts that will be done to prevent it. We hope that in our text you see yourself and understand that we have done this to eachother and to ourselves. We cannot promise we will not do this again, but eventually it will be our last.
Safe travels.