Needless to say, the day began as others before it…with evacuations and showering and grooming and oatmeal and the quietly terrifying realization that the 21st century has arrived but instead of orbital hotels and thinking machines and free floating, 3-dimensional data displays with which I can navigate complex, multilevel databases we have Microsoft and debates about “intelligent design” and mid 20th century style military aggression and arguments over how women should dress.

This drives me to the Internets for hyper linked solace (an ironic maneuver, since it’s simultaneously refuge from and enabler of the most modern of primitivisms) where we find…

The Huge Entity grappling with the hyper real implications of Wikipedia as the tentative arrival onto reality’s shores of the productive fantasy of the “hive mind”. There’s also some sweet and tasty goodness about the unreal made quasi real through the repetition of its un-realness. I’m digging the chutzpah of the idea being presented but I’m not drunk or horny enough to be convinced.

And later…

Via Futurismic, a faux news item from the amazing year 2030 when the combined concepts of Mahatma Ghandi and R. Buckminister Fuller are deployed to create a new method for sustainable technosity. They (the fictional futurians of that bold era) call themselves the “unplugged” though it’s not the sort of unplugging you generally think of (e.g. a non-working, 1970s era Volvo in the weed covered lawn of your ramshackle and non electrified Vermont farmhouse – it seemed sexy when you were 25, now your ass is just really cold).

As short speculative fiction pieces done in the style of an AP newswire go it’s not very good but its intent is to inspire and not entertain so the lack of robots, transgenic talking dogs and vomit guns doesn’t bother me.

Perhaps more importantly, the mention of the name R. Buckminister Fuller inspires me to root around – when I get home – to see if I still have a copy of “Synergetics” Fuller’s magnum opus on the subject of applying engineering to the problem of ensuring human survival over the long haul.

I do. There it is on the bottom shelf of a seldom referenced bookcase (about to see a little more action as I just ordered Massimo Cacciari’s “Architecture and Nihilism”).

The difference between the me that first read Synergetics and the me that writes these words – glowing on a screen, real yet unreal – is that the former me believed in the future.

Now I only believe in the passage of time or, to rephrase, entropy.