BOOKS

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
-Albert Einstein

so. funny thing about that quote. see, the last time i used it was in a post on this other blog i have (mostly i just whine about my life on it. trust me, it isn’t pretty.) and it was (obviously) a post about technology.
and in that post, i cited this book, End of Days by Dennis Danvers.
why is this funny?

because this blog is going to be about the book The Fourth World, by Dennis Danvers.

hahaha. oh irony. you kill me.
anyway.

when most people think of science fiction they think of spaceships and aliens, right? i mean, i know when i think of it i think of this show Roswell that was on several years ago, and got canceled after 3 seasons (phenomenal show, BTW. it was where Katherine Heigl from Grey’s Anatomy got her start), and the show was about these alien/human hybrids who were trying to live among humans.
really facinating.
its either aliens, or some future civilization like in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, where everyone flies around in helicopters and takes legalized acid or something of the like that is government issued to keep the masses happy.

anyway, thats what most sci-fi is about right?

WRONG.

The thing i love about Dennis Danvers is that he creates these terribly realistic futures for mankind.
like in Circuit of Heaven/End of Days, the human race becomes so obsessed with immortality that they decide to give it to themselves, by creating this virtual reality universe-in-a-box where the entire population lives, with room enough for billions more. meanwhile, left on the earth are all the religious crazies, bent on destroying “the bin”, where all the sinners have gone. the religious crazies are lead by one of those crazy television preachers who’s on at 2 AM and says the most ridiculous things. sounds funny now, right?
imagine living it.
i can’t even comprehend…i mean, most people would hear that and be like “oh, well the virtual reality thing can’t be that bad. its floating in space, so the crazies can’t get at it, and you get however many years you want to do whatever your heart desires. how could that be bad?”
think about it this way: how boring would life be if no one ever died? i mean, the whole institution of marriage works because you spend your lives together, and you want to make whatever time you have special.
if you had infinite time…you’d get sick of each other. i don’t care how much you love someone. there isn’t a single person in the world that i wouldn’t get sick of after an eternity together.
we just don’t work like that.
so you see? you see how terrifying that future would be?
thats my point. thats what Danvers does to you.
he gives you a likely reality, you think “oh come now, that can’t be THAT bad” and then 40 pages later you’re like “oh my shit.” and you realize how everyone in the world is an idiot.

that is how i feel right now, only 17 minutes after finishing The Fourth World.

see, The Fourth World gives us this situation:
its really not that far into the future. but the internet has taken over everything. you enter this type of force-field contraption, and are instantly in a basically virtual reality internet. imagine actually being IN the internet, constantly. like, right now, you’d be at my site, watching me talk to you.
you could change what you look like, change your age, your name, your life. you wouldn’t come out except to eat or shower pretty much.
again. sounds great, right?

imagine never seeing the sun again. never knowing exactly who you’re talking to because anyone could be everyone. hell, right now you could be talking to obama and you wouldn’t know it.
you’d never know the REAL news, because who would tell you what was real and what was fake?
imagine your entire life online.

not so great now, huh.

thats the picture Danvers paints for us.

throw in the mix some romance, some government conspiracies and the revolution in mexico and you’ve got The Fourth World, also known as one awesome sci-fi book.

The whole reality of the book is so plausible as the reality of tomorrow that i was completely sucked into it by the end of like, 50 pages. i found myself thinking about the world as if i already lived in the internet.
and by the end of the book….i’m starting to wonder if the whole internet thing isn’t a mistake.

don’t get me wrong, i love it. hell, i’ve got like, 4 blogs, at least 3 (if not more) social networking profiles, i play games every day, i shop online, i do homework online, etc etc etc.

but look at us. pretty soon we’ll all be failing horribly at social contact.
the more i think about it, the more i think the internet is just one really bad idea that is just way to fun to do away with…like one-night-stands, or gossiping (which i found out is actually in our genes, so our brains are programmed to talk about other people….just not as much as we actually do. so we’re still at fault.).
we live half our lives online. we learn online, we meet people online, we socialize online, we study online, we shop online.
how long until we do away with any need for bodies and minds? how long until we just check into some virtual reality world and forget our old bodies behind us?
i mean, the more technology we have, the more likely we are to push people way. all of this technology acts as more of a barrier between us and others more than anything else.
i don’t have phone conversations anymore, all of thats on AIM.
actually, i don’t talk on AIM a lot either, most of that has moved to facebook.
how long until facebook moves to something else? until theres just another middle man between us and the people we consider our friends.

think about it. back in “the day”, everyone used to go out, and DO something. they didn’t sit online talking about it.
thats because they didn’t HAVE online.
they didn’t even have TV’s and VCRs and DVD’s and all the other acronyms i don’t have time to type out.
people needed to actually talk to someone FACE-TO-FACE if they needed something. they couldn’t pull out a phone with a full QWERTY keyboard and a touch-screen to tell mom that they needed milk from the store.
every new technological development puts more space between us and other people.
which is funny, because theres actually less and less space, if you think about it, because our population shoots up literally every minute.
oops. theres a baby.
and another.
and another.
and another.
yet we’re all so far apart.

the internet allows us to “socialize” without actually socializing with anything.
each year i have gotten progressivly less social and more obsessed with technology.
its gotten so bad where i literally have to force myself to go out and hang out with people.
its because these days, facebook is considered social contact. you can conduct entire friendships, hell, entire RELATIONSHIPS over the internet.
trust me. i’ve done it.
see, social networking sites are like communism. they look awesome on paper, but in practice, they just kind of fuck everything up.
except the last time i checked, there hasn’t been any Facebook Missile Crisis, or the great Myspace Cold War.
so theres some differences there.
but the analogy still holds true.
though that might just be because its 11:30 at night and i’m exhausted. things tend to make a lot more sense to me when i’m tired.
i’ve been convinced of ridiculous things when i’m tired.
like one time i would have sworn that the Nazi’s were in their airplanes over my house, and they were going to shoot my house because they thought i was a jew.

so i guess i’ll end this post with these words of advice:
1) read The Fourth World by Dennis Danvers (and all of his other books)
2) go outside and socialize more. you never know when the world will turn virtual
and, 3) don’t read The Diary of Anne Frank at 3 AM when you’re literally about to pass out face down in the book.
just don’t. bad things happen to good people (especially those with vivid imaginations)