How long did I wander that desolate wasteland?
Wait.
Let me better explain the situation. It wasn’t as bleak as all that, in fact it was filled with a cacophony of sound, light, and color. In the beginning there were only two: the black and the green or the black and the orange. Later, it allowed four, then sixteen, then two-hundred and fifty-six. Once we passed seventeen million it became academic. Today there is an allowance for the infinite hues available on both the visible and invisible spectrums of light.
Let me tell you about the forms. The desolation I referred to was far more insidious than just a blank landscape. Again, when we started out it was merely a collection of dots that could form lines and other two-dimensional shapes, and those dots were arranged on a tight grid. It remains a collection of dots on a grid, but now the grid is vast enough to paint three-dimensional forms and drape them in shadows so realistic you’d swear they were more than just artificial representations inside a digital computer.
Where does the desolation come in? It’s in the understanding of what we’ve done with what we’ve made. It comes from the knowledge that there won’t be anything meaningful produced in the future beyond providing an ever finer point of distraction.
Sometimes we invent tools that have no practical uses. We then continue to develop them into evermore pointless implements. It’s not until we stop and look back on the history of a thing—provided we’ve taken the time to properly document it, which we usually haven’t—that we can see it for what it is. While we’re deep in the act of creation all else seems to pale, and the thing we’re constructing becomes the whole of our business. This can go on for ages, passed down from generation to generation in an invisible and fruitless pursuit of some unknowable future goal.
We excel at going in circles. That’s what I meant when I talked about wandering through desolation. We’re cursed with eyes that can see just a tiny bit toward the horizon and realize that we’re coming back around to where we’ve been before, and we’ve come this way times uncountable.
First draft: 141207
Published: 230709