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The Museum of Vestigial Desire

Tag Archives: devolution

Serve tags: desire thread devolution service

The human faculty of service, unlike other faculties, has been devolving through time. At this point, we perform services without any desire to really serve. Our economy survives and exists on this fact. Because services don't match with desire, there is an expectation to be paid. That sets the ball in motion.

But also, this devolution is preparing us for a future life as refugee spacemen, fiercely independent, compulsively mercenary, no allegiances to respect, responsibility or other social folklore.

To serve and to experience the emotion after serving is at the same time a privilege, an opportunity and a challenge. Reducing it to a mechanics and a dry function is much more desirable. Service is linked with the desire to evolve. It is a base emotion which we do not have the palette of experience, the capacity to feel anymore. We would rather not need to feel it anymore, become digitized and like a server in a server-farm happy to serve, redundantly networked and happy on electricity.

Evolve tags: devolution evolution aspiration

We are ahead of ourselves. Whereas common concern requires us to focus and deliver on promises, there is a neurotic urge to escape. Of course we never want to be who we are, where we are. 'The grass is greener on the other side,' doesn't capture the anxiety of the moment, the emotion of the moment, it just speaks of aspiration. It is a question of recursive multiplication, a virus, steam. Here the we is not the same as earlier (not just me in multiple projections), here the we is the idea of the human. The idea of the human was a prescription, social and cultural that at best we have been able to rise up to occasionally over the years. It is not a description. We are not human by default. Or all the time either.

The tangential momentum of humanity's common motivation is to get organised and efficient to conserve effort and resources. And to be more elegant. The clean lines of the design I see in magazines tell me that that soon we are not going to be happy with out bodies. Bodies that sweat, need to shit and take a piss, bodies that complain though pain. We will need ones that behave like good computers, don't get heated on overuse, have no disease, are upgradable, don't smell, have accessories and are a mix of born in a cradle and bought from a shop. I am personally attached to the illusion of personality and personal identification. What will I do about it? When it is time to accept the evolution underway, resign to it, surrender, agree. I will think of the person as an instinct, as electricity, the systemic stimulus that lets gadgets breathe.

Into the fluctuation of the voltage of this electricity, I will see gradations and pencil in a full person. Do a naming ceremony afresh, call different ranges of fluctuations by different names of organs and erstwhile-body parts.

Our impatience with evolution to catch up with aspiration is a clash of two scales of time. One is granular, instinctive, throbbing, residing in the pulsating rhythms of our organic body. And the other is an urge to chase tangents.