I liked his short reflection… (I really liked the humble honesty of confusion and insight together). I think that the assumption of an increasingly clear view of the past is questionable one… do we assume there will be no more dark ages in the future? No more information bottle-necks? Do we assume that ‘post-truth’ will not provide one of the strongest obfuscations… more opaque than any non-purely random keyed encryption? Do we assume the ontological lens of the future will even be able to map onto the meaning of our own times (since we don’t even have a word for the flhedrv’ling around which some possible future’s culture will be based, what with the bio-social differences in embodiment now to then)?
“We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”
—Septimus Hodge from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia
The question of what to do with the panopticon is excellent. Cory recomennded Ken MacLeod’s Intrusion a few years back, and I found it to be one of the most in-depth meditations on what happens when virtually all levels of human agency, from individual, to supra-state governance rely of pervasive surveillance as part of the day-to-day.
