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Second Renaissance
By G. Payne
Transcript of the 19th December 2099 edition of "Macka's Mail"
On this turning of the new century, welcome to this googlecast looking back at the 'Second Renaissance' which has taken place for us over these past hundred years. How did we reach this lofty plateau, with the 'Marinus' base, global disarmament and now the centenary 'Appleseed' project, spreading our DNA to the stars?
Talking with Brad Jefferson, born sometime in the final years of the twentieth century, I asked what his earliest memories were.
"A lead weight, pushing down on everyone's backs - the problems, the limits, the sheer pointlessness of everyday life. All we had to look forward to was 40 years, only 40 years, of mindless, pointless, hand to mouth tedium working for 'the man' - then an old age of disease and dependency in a society that didn't care."
It's true that in the early years of this century people were in shock from the legacy of hundreds of years of industrialisation. In pursuit of our short term gain we had moved away from what made us happy, giving up community, home, personal growth, and most of our waking lives to the pursuit of one thing - money. Despite this, capitalism ensured that most people only had enough to scrape by - wasted lives chasing a lottery dream down the rabbit hole of depletion, pollution and overshoot. As the old oil industry peaked and went into decline we were hit by a succession of foreseeable disasters: 'Greek flu' pandemic, sea level rise, climate upheaval and demographic inversion, leading to the world currencies collapse and the 'Washington Event' of 2012. As Brad says:
"I was walking the broken streets, avoiding the gangs and the cop squads - searching not for meaning, but food."
The US, once an imperialist powerhouse turned in on itself in its protracted three-way civil war. The rest of the world entered the 'Black Depression' as the disparate currencies collapsed and the cessation of global trade brought down governments and reshaped borders. These were dark days indeed. But they were necessary.
Humanity seems to have a habit of becoming complacent - distracting itself by creating causes and by not recognising its real problems. It focuses on the small minded and ignores the vast scope which is open to all of us. Conversely, when things really go wrong, it can wake up, shake itself down, and finds itself a meaning that can drive it forward into that next age of development.
That started for us in the 'Gnome Riots'. Sickened by the social parasites the human race had infested itself with over the preceding sixty years - people rose up. The nominal instigator was what was seriously then called 'an accountant' (sorry for the language) cancelling a project to build a tidal generator barrage. Cancelling a project that would power a city and safeguard it from rising sea levels because, in those famous words, 'we can't redirect the marketing budget to capital expenditure'! However from here it rapidly grew into a revolution under the banner 'if you aren't part of the solution, you ARE the problem' and hundreds of thousands of 'The Pointless' were removed from those positions of power they had usurped. Of course there were the 'Red July' massacres, but surprisingly quickly we created the 'real democracy' we still enjoy to this day.
It turned out that the reduction in the supply of ready transport fuel was a blessing for in and of itself helping to power this change. We stopped travelling everywhere, and with the invention in 2017 of the cortex connection we started 'being there by being here'. We rediscovered the joys of living in a close knit community, whilst at the same time being members of peer groups and 'combinates' that spanned the globe. With the collapse of global trade we realised that what was worth doing was what was important, and that what we really needed could be grown, made and used close to home. We competed, to create great things. We prospered by recognition of our achievements, not money. And in doing this we built that Jerusalem, by beginning to be one across the world. Of course, the withering of religions helped. There is nothing like the perspective of a friend as outsider to point up the stupid inconsistencies of childhood fables. Between ourselves, we cast off childish things and made strides in health, biotech, nanotech and, of course, AI. What also helped was an offshoot of that peer competition to create great things - the downloaded core.
"I'd moved to Derbyshire and was helping redevelop Bartley new town into a real village when people started to realise there were strange, new, and very intelligent contributors on the pAssemblies. The announcement on New Year's Day 2041 that Chad, Frisk and Bush had created the technology that enabled downloading and merging of minds - and that the original 200 mind core had been in existence for over a year certainly shocked us. However the announcement the next day from the core itself shocked us even more."
Would we have been able to grow as we have without the ability of our singularity induced cousins to point up the consequences of our bad decisions? Would we have changed our outlook from grasping at spawned-child immortality towards instead the possibility of 'going on' via our own actions? Would the requirement for entry as part of the core that "the individual had developed" been as enlightening - if we hadn't already learnt to change our values?
Whatever to rationalisations, we finally came together. We finally made good decisions, put our efforts into moving our minds on and utilising our remaining resources in a measured way to really 'earn value' - to reuse that long forgotten phrase.
Would our ancestors have understood our world? What would the Quality Fights, the enforced 'fertility cap', the core-mediated consensus, the Aquatics and even the Wanders have meant to them? Would they be shocked at a global population of only 2.4 billion when theirs peaked at 7.2? Would they be even more shocked that everyone has the opportunity to take part, wherever they are in the world - but that I personally haven't physically left this county since last spring?
We look to the new century with hope, with plans, with friends and with understanding gained from our efforts to survive, develop and prosper over the last hundred years. We will finally reach the stars, not because of the efforts of those long deceased governments, our core cousins, or any military induced competition. We will reach them because the Phoenix combinate decided to marshal the groups of the world to create the seed ships and their solar-MASER launcher. We will reach them because we can, that's all.
I'll leave the last words to Brad. They seem to sum up how we have changed, and how the early problems, limits and adjustments finally made us happy.
"Sorry I have to go now. I've got to go look after my great, great, great grandkid. We are going hiking in the nearby hills and want to select some new timber for the well I'm digging."
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