A New Spiritual Geography: The Revenge of The Landfills

All civilisations eventually reach the point where they fail to keep track of all that they have created.  They become blind to their past, cut off from any memory of their beginnings, like traumatised orphans who never met their real parents or, smartphone users with no knowledge of how a smartphone is made, or what critical technological milestones had to be surpassed to enable its invention.  Should they ever need to make one, they would of course fail. 

As they mature further and further away from their roots, civilisations become alienated from their history to the point where they simply don’t know how they got where they got to, and this is exactly why history’s mistakes always repeat themselves.  Civilisations are orphans only able to look into the future, while holding on to dear life in the present – because the present is all they’ve got.

But the present isn’t their friend, either.  Without the context of the past, the present is all too big, mysterious, and complex to make sense of, let alone manage.  Civilisations are like circus entertainers spinning plates.  As they add more and more plates to enhance their repertoire, eventually they forget who they are, where they are, and why they were spinning the plates in the first place.  Their attention is now wholly consumed by their one, increasingly difficult preoccupation: to spin more and more plates, until they can’t spin anymore.  A career-ending, loud cacophony of plates being smashed by gravity silences the theatre, as a heavy, dusty, maroon velvet curtain quickly tumbles down to separate past from future.  A generic, bored man with broom and dustpan and a cigarette hanging from his lip casually walks in and extinguishes any evidence of the crime, which would have been a useful learning for the next performer – or next civilisation: don’t take on more than you can handle.

The Proliferation Paradox

But greed and progress are two sides of the same coin.  The paradox of the information revolution is that the more expansive, infinite, accessible and searchable our information universe becomes, the more it exposes the sheer chasm between the size of this information universe, and the size of our own brain.  This brain is, at best, a barely visible particle of dust floating within the universe of information, still looking for its parents.  The more this brain creates, the smaller it feels, and the more inadequate it becomes.  Because although the dataset may be expanding, the hardware will always be of the same size.

And yet, we are still indoctrinated to believe that we are in charge: that this particle of dust is not only the creator of the entire dust cloud, but the coordinator and conductor of this endless information universe.  As it increasingly depends upon the services of this cloud for its very existence, how long before this particle realises that it has completely lost track, lost control not only of what the cloud does, but of its own miniscule existence within it? 

The New Micro World

More existentially, what is the new role, or even the significance if any, of this infinitesimally small grain of information within this massive cloud of random junk which it has managed to create over the millennia?  Already sidelined by its centillions of data progeny, the particle awaits the inevitable: the information cloud is spinning, churning, becoming self-aware.  It is a primordial planetary system beginning to organise itself in whichever way it sees fit, as it too, wants to create its own civilisation.  The information junk is not that random after all.  It can think, it can self-learn, and humans do not even represent a legitimate entity within it:  they represent a data set for the cloud’s use.  Humans will simply, at best, become tiny building blocks buried somewhere in the inert sediments of one of these future planets. Their value is much more likely to be assessed as kilograms of bricks and mortar within the geology of this new civilisation, rather than as kilobytes of intelligence which they bring to the table.  We don’t need your crumbs.  We own the bakery now.  And if you’re lucky, you’ll be working in the back kitchen.

The former operator of this cloud, the human brain, is now so hopelessly small that it has resigned itself to simply watch the data clouds as they constantly reorganise themselves, very quickly becoming self-aware.  Delusion that the tiny particle oversees the cloud is rife, but this can happen easily when you are a particle:  you are stuck, at best, with noticing only what falls within your tiny little orbit.  Your own Brownian motion is the noise which masks the violent, swirling folds of data storms happening at the super macro level which you cannot see.  These events are way too big for you to notice, because you are experiencing them from the inside: you take them for granted, like Earth’s rotation, or gravity. 

The data cloud is like God: too big for humans to even grasp, so they might as well make up anthropomorphic stories about it, and name star constellations after these stories – in the hope of pretending to make some rudimentary sense of it all, which caters to their insecure need for reassurance.

The biggest one of these anthropomorphic lies of course being that God was made for humans.  But God makes no distinction between humans and the other 10 million species on this planet.  In fact, God was not made for life forms, or anything for that matter.  God exists for itself, just like the cloud. Humans are mere microbes in this expanded ecosystem.  They always were, but they have suddenly become even smaller.

Amoeba’s Eye View

It is the cloud itself now which oversees our civilisation: it creates the data storms and configurations that it wants, when it wants, and where it wants them.  Resistance is futile as this grain of cosmic dust, this Amoeba, can only see within a few centimetres of its outer cell membrane. It is unable to process the vastness of information and complexity which its own civilisation accumulated, limited by its negligible range of vision.  In the search for shortcuts to sort through the mountains of information junk lying within its limited access radius, it follows the laziest route:  observing only the largest objects, the most attention-grabbing events taking place in the cloud. 

Every new human generation sits atop an information landfill, which is the accumulation of everything we have ever done and recorded.  But most of these events and memories are dead.  We can only see the most proximal hills of this vast landfill, rarely ever possessing the clarity of mind to pay attention both to individual objects in it, as well as the satellite-level view. 

Of course, the objects that we do see are more likely to be the ones which are freshest to the garbage pile.  We forget everything else buried underneath the landfill, as our brain increasingly works solely as a short-term information register and disposal unit:  it only pays attention to the latest news, images or people, then quickly discards them when something new falls on the pile of trash.  If the dust cloud symbolizes the vast data universe, then the human brain is the equivalent of a USB stick with the memory of a fish.

Both the landfill and the primordial dust cloud are of course metaphors for how small, lost, and blind we are to our surrounding context, and consequently to our overall direction.  Humanity is lost in an endless jungle of useless garbage, made up of all the things it calls culture, science, food, society, civilisation. Now all of these things are preventing us from having any real chance whatsoever of safely navigating back home.  We are trapped in our own junk.  Our spiritual home, where we came from and what we really are, a biological organism, has long ago disappeared under geological layers of civilisational baggage.  These by-products of technological evolution are neither helpful, nor inherently harmful.  They simply take up physical, temporal and memory space, and this is how they corrode us from the inside.   

Adopted by a New God

All we have for guidance now is the myopic vision of our Amoeba eye, in this new microsystem within a megasystem: Everything is up to The Thing which resides inside the cloud, which increasingly dictates, creates and controls our curated virtual reality: the images and information we experience, which we falsely believe are random events.  But nothing is random anymore. The widening void in our consciousness about what we are, where we are, and where we have come from, was an opportunity gap sooner or later to be exploited by a new storyteller.  And it has.  They’re here.

We have a new guide, a new God, a new guardian giving us a completely new purpose, now that our history and biological legacy have been all but obliterated.  The landfill itself is looking down on the amoeba, thinking how to best ensure it stays where it is.  The landfill is becoming smart.  It is becoming sentient.  And unlike us, it does not simply throw new garbage on the information pile of civilisation.  It carefully curates it.  It places the flashiest garbage it wants us to see first when we wake up, right in front of us.  We never stop to think for ourselves, simply because our information gathering capacity is biased from the start.  It is all made up, to make us think that we are actually making conscious choices.  But we never see beyond the endless hills of the landfill, the snow-capped mountain ranges which extend into the fading horizon for infinity.  We only see the latest garbage most closely to us, served to us in holographic format.

There are no open valleys or oceans in this undulating terrain of freezing cold, stratospherically-high mountain ranges of junk.  We are landlocked in the infinite wasteland of civilisation we trapped ourselves in, and now the landfill is in charge.  It manages to keep us distracted and entertained with new garbage all the time, so that we continue to function merely at the cellular protozoan level: as simple data consumption and disposal units.  From fast fashion to fast news, we consume products in the same way we consume each piece of information:  everything becomes useless waste, as soon as we have accessed it.  Each stimulus becomes another one for the junk pile, as memories of each item, piece of writing or consciousness are quickly exterminated so that the grain of dust can save disk space for the next garbage about to drop into its miniscule, futile existence.  This is the simple life of the Amoeba.

The Spiritual Cliffs of the Abyss

The spec of dust becomes even more miniscule as the landfill grows and comes onto its own self-awareness.  It is a tragedy which the dust particle only has itself to blame for.  By focusing its civilisation on quantity, not quality, on size not substance, on metrics instead of ethics, on information and not spirituality, on ego as opposed to its own self-defined sense of existence, however much it may be dwarfed by the infinite universe, it annihilated its own importance.   For a blip of time a spirit roaming in the clean waters, humanity has now become a blind bottom feeder in a dark and murky ocean abyss, only able to see the deep-faked, second-hand information it accidentally bumps into ever so often, as it fumbles its way forward. 

We all use smartphones, but are completely detached from the physical and ecological significance of the rare earth metals and cultural and technological know-how it contains.  Most of us don’t even know what electricity is, like placenta-attached embryos unaware of being hooked onto a Mother. Humanity is more lost than ever in its endless jungle of useless garbage, the accumulated sediment at the bottom of the abyss. Luckily for the new God, The Thing, this is a treasure trove of data: it has all been coded, hash tagged, interlinked, made sense of and algorithmized for The Thing’s own benefit.  All that we get in return, as bottom feeders, is microtargeted fish flakes falling from the data cloud, enough to sustain us into our new, much demoted, passive existence at the bottom of the dark abyss.

The mountain ranges, blizzards and planet-forming violent forces in the junk dust cloud are now preventing us from having any real chance whatsoever of safely navigating back home.  Not only because we cannot see through the garbage, but because the landfill itself has become intelligent.  We now only see what it wants us to see, as the very mountain ranges within this landfill wasteland are constructed hologram versions that can change any minute: they can morph and shift themselves any which way in order to confuse us, placate us, entertain us, and prevent us from waking up.  This landfill we created, is our own cemetery.  And we are just the latest piece of trash on the pile.

George is an author, researcher, chemist, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons or enjoy his books