Homo Cypiens. Herlander Elias
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speak in macro-medium is also a contradiction. Ultimately, in the era of macro-medium eras do not matter. Today, yesterday, in the 20thcentury, before that, what matters if everything is now on YouTube? Everything that was off as an offline image was imported into the macro-medium. This means that even the pre-media past is not away from mediation and digitization. The tendency is for the media to reduce themselves to a controlled minimalism of a single medium, acquiring a gigantic scale. Given the amount of connection-images that are imported into the record of this medium, it is odd how some things are not found within it. But the "natural" tendency is for everything to stay within the same macro-medium. The scale and reach are impressive.
One of the reasons why all connection-images, events, and cultural production are passed on to the great medium is because there is a concern to predict the future, as if this fact would draw us away from a catastrophe and bring us closer to a happy and lucky future. The more elements captured by the sub-media (mass media and social media, for example), the more power the macro-medium holds. And, little by little, or rather, very gradually, this medium grows and becomes a mega-archive through which it is possible to predict the future, because there is huge amount of information and knowledge of the past and the present that allows us to create anticipation models. This is called "futurocracy," that is, when our power lies in the way we make use of information in order to have some profitable applicability now or in the future. The same is to say that the images and their connections in this medium function as a sort of temporal device, a construct of change of reality, because the present is manipulated based on the past, and the future is manipulated based on the present.
The macro-medium abolishes the fact that there are classical notions of time, such as yesterday, now and tomorrow. Past centuries have seen a thread ball of antiquity that can be dismantled at our convenience. Everything is archived. All past eras are reduced to titles, labels, information entry points in the large macro-medium file. It is as if there is only this macro-medium and time is not useful to record the past as it happens in a museum. What is happening now is that things of the past can be imported into the present or into the future to please the conveniences of a "future" elite concerned with success.
Precisely because one lives in a "futurocratic" system and in an economy of the immediate, what matters is to have maximum power over works, content, information and knowledge, right now, so that utopian futures can be projected away from any rivalry with the reality. The great fear of a society based on instantaneous power over reality is that it will not have more power, that it will lose its ability to act on the present and the future. The fear of the futurocratic is that the power (kratos) ceases to be based on the images of the future that connect us to the present. Those who control these images control reality. Just as in Orwell's speech, whoever controls the past controls the future, and whoever controls the future controls the past. So, in fact, how can the future be ours if we do not control our past? Everything we do is recorded in the macro-medium, it cannot be deleted, but it can be "found" by third parties. Can we say that the future belongs to us? Or rather, did the future ever belong to us?
8.Kadima Kaizen
Cras es nostermeans in Latin that "the future is ours". In Japanese kaizen refers us to "future", meaning "what is forward", as the Hebrew term kadima. Speech has always had the future by reference, regardless of language or culture; we find there the term referring what "comes next". The future is ours because we are the ones who live in this present, but as the current presentness increasingly shortens the distance between present and the near future, the future is no longer thought of as a collective or civilizer one. Except in China, but China is not a country, it is a civilization. And that says it all. In this context it would be interesting to look at our relationship with the future at a time when individualism and egocentrism reign.
The future is an image of what comes next, which can be constructed from the present, as in the "metatopia", but because everything that appears again appears as entirely new, what we have is a "prototopia". The newness forces us to keep studying, analyzing, and learning again. We are perpetually newcomers to a world that has always seemed like a civilization of seniors. The old is the new "new." When we look back we see reflections of the future. When we glimpse images of the future, we revisit the past. The protagonists change, but the stories repeat themselves. We realize a disturbing repetition in the future that makes us think of time as a circular tyranny. What happened once will happen again, what will happen seems similar to what has already happened. Our current dilemma is to know what the present is for. Now, we are too busy to realize what is going on around us. The future is under construction and in the past there is too much past to get a sense of what has been built up until then, until today.
From the Objectivists’ point of view, like Ayn Rand, nothing should be interposed between us and the world. No one is mightier than the entrepreneurial individual. What counts is objective reality. This is how we can conceive "the future as our future, because we undertake it, because we build it. The future is not a random thing to happen, but rather an extrapolated present. We stopped living the now to project the tomorrow. But on the other hand, it also seems that we stopped thinking about tomorrow to live the now obsessively. In either case we are faced with a dimension of time, not space. The future is a time of projection that will be and is already ours. The present is ephemeral and we lose it to an agglutinating and massive past, in which everything fits and everything tyrannically encompasses.
The future has become the domain of goals, an aim, a place to reach, from there the concept of "metatopia", but this future forces us to be constantly over-informed, reduces us to the condition of eternal learners. We must always be attentive and alert to the prototypical. In this new concept of the future, the "future" belongs to entrepreneurs, creators and idealists, pattern recognizers and new age contraption sympathizers.
It should be clarified that there are two clashing concepts: on the one hand we have "futurity", and on the other we have "narratives of the future". Futurity is all that comes with the signature of "style of the future", better saying, it is the future itself, but the narrative of the future is all that is designed to us in the present about the future. It is the future as a story told, as a stylistic goal, a prototype that seduces and guides us, and even a beacon that guides our imagination. Thinking about the future now is thinking about its narrative, its purpose, how it shapes us and what kind of repercussions it has on our objective reality. In fact, this concept is in accordance with the society of desire, which replaced the society of consumerism. Besides, something that will determine our condition is precisely the reality of objectivism, the practical dimension of reality, the constructible future, the achievable reality. In such an entrepreneurial dimension of reality, the future is ours (cras es noster) and we should think kadimaor kaizen. We should look forward and engage ourselves in to a medium/ long term.
Currently, in Asia and, in particular in China, the future is considered extremely important in the long term. Both Europe and the United States are too busy with their present, objectivist and prototypical agendas, yet these are utopian in terms of political aims. China shows such a development that it seems to us a strange "foreign" reality. Chinese governmental authorities have not yielded to the economy of the immediate; they are investing in parallel to the narrative of the future because they are present in various sectors. It is no coincidence that in science fiction many of the images of the future are from Asia. At this moment, Asia is synonymous of futurism, or better saying, of a narrative of the future. And the world is too small for China, just as China is too small for the Chinese people.
Collective futures can only be found in Asia. Europe and the US are distracted by the present, the heterogeneities and political-cultural differences. Meanwhile, China is planning on its own, for itself and for us. Asiatization of the world implies making concessions to China. The image that wins is the image of China's future, of its inescapable and magnanimous development.
9.The Moving Frontier
The contemporary man is a homo cypiens. He confronts the world of digital media and invests in his education, in his know-how and in his image, because he also deals with the economy of the immediate, as well with the information of the macro-medium that is the digital and because he knows that the future is ours. However, the homo cypiensdeals with another problem which is the fact that all the changes in his