I think we're living in the dreamtime. Our time is one where there are reasonable paths to a decent life for most people, where all but the most authoritarian nations recognize and enshrine a form of individual freedom that was unheard of only a century ago. Our time is one in which there are still untapped reserves of natural resources waiting to be used, reserves of natural beauty unspoiled by the extraction of natural resources, the whole world is full of life and living even if it's not as healthy as it should be. Our time is full of social upheaval and uncertainty, but hope, too.
I think the dreamtime will end soon. I think our world and the things we're used to are headed for a collision with a set of utterly unfeeling and inhuman forces which will smoosh everything we care about into flesh colored greek yogurt. I think one day people will look back on our time and consider it almost unbelievably better than what they live in. I think the seeds of these forces are already sewn, in industry, in the threads of philosophy that dominate political discourse, in economics, in the behavior of mass groups of people in aggregate as their ways of thinking and communicating become increasingly faster and more strange with the advance of technology. A massive civil war between humans who want to remain real and humans who want eternal AI powered full dive VR heaven, or unchecked automated data center construction by an infinitely powerful yet still unfeelingly stupid ChatGPT, or a set of simple misunderstandings by careful and paranoid and very powerful people who have the ability to order devastating attacks on the entire world, or maybe all of the above and more. The world is fragile. The fact that we have avoided some kind of disaster that made everything permanently shittier for everyone is a miracle which we owe largely to luck and providence. I go to bed at night not worrying about this vision of the future, but knowing that one day it will be too late to worry.
Pic related is a recording of a radioactive source which I thought looked like some kind of baleful demonic eye, something completely inhuman and impossibly damaging to all life and which we very feasibly could poison the entire world with if the right sequence of events occurred. That's kind of where my head was at when writing this post.