Archive for June 2013

This french fry is this Go Train car’s Red Wheelbarrow.

These two images from National Geographic‘s Found Tumblr are currently my Desktop backgrounds:

“Did you ever hear of the 5.9 Kiloyear event?

“I thought not. It was an aridification episode, a great drying. Maybe it began in the oceans. It desiccated the Sahara; ended the Neolithic Subpluvial. Worldwide migration followed, forcing everyone to cram around river valleys from Central North Africa to the Nile Valley and start doing this thing we hadn’t done before, called civilization.

That’s when it really began: the emergence of state-led society, in the 4th millennium BC. Cities. Agriculture. Bureaucracy. And on the geologic timescale, that’s yesterday. Everything that’s followed, every moment of it from Hannibal to Apollo, it’s all just a consequence of that single forcing event. We got pushed to the riverbanks. We made cities. Invented paper and roads and the wheel. Built casinos on the Moon. […]

But this global climate shift, the Anthropocene warming – it’s just another forcing event, I think. Another trigger. We’re just so close to the start of it, we can’t really see the outcome yet. […]

“The warming was global, but Africa was one of the first places to really feel the impact of the changing weather patterns. The depopulation programmes, the forced migrations … we were in the absolute vanguard of all that. In some respects, it was the moment the Surveilled World drew its first hesitant breath. We saw the best and the worst of what we were capable of, Geoffrey. The devils in us, and our better angels. The devils, mostly. Out of that time of crisis grew the global surveillance network, the invisible, omniscient god that never tires of watching over us, never tires of keeping us from doing harm to one another. Oh, it had been there in pieces before that, but this was the first time we devolved absolute authority to the Mechanism. And you know what? It wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to us. We’re all living in a totalitarian state, but for the most part it’s a benign, kindly dictatorship. It allows us to do most things except suffer accidents and commit crimes. And now the Surveilled World doesn’t even end at the edge of space. It’s a notion, a mode of existence, spreading out into the solar system, at the same rate as the human expansion front.”

From Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds (p.150-151). The character Eunice, speaking in 2162, is explaining the development of the global Mechanism that watches over and protects the population. This is what I’ve been thinking about this week in light of the NSA revelations.