citizen.of.the.hyperreal

We make up maps and stories of complex behavior and presumed consequences, using old systems evolved for responding to threats and opportunities, reproduction, and brilliantly, the capacity for cooperation.

We live in these maps and stories; if you are making sense of things, you are using these to do it.

As our needs and ideals became more complex, our inventions, these maps and stories, became more complex as well; new ways to control threats, create opportunities, manage family life, and cooperate on astonishing scales, all evolved.

Some of these stories and maps are even about improving story and map-making; science is astonishing. 

Some are old and powerful reflections of needs and feelings, like the need to belong or be guided. 

But all of them matter, because tigers, because oranges.  They all pull on the old triggers.

And even having a story or map is so important that when one fails, the mind recoils.  In the original world of survival, if something became confusing, shying away from it was doubtless a great instinct.  But now, it can leave us with a fear of change, and a violent addiction to the stories and maps we have, as we have them.

But they are all just made-up best guesses, just stories, just maps; all a product of imagination and reason working from fragments and shadows of clues. 

And they are built using the old systems of approach, avoid, challenge, bond. 

And they are all based on the previous sets of maps and stories, building on or revising the old ideas.

So it’s kinda like this--

There were some pretty basic stories, rooted in the core conflicts of the narrative.  Long time ago; before written language, before much in the way of what we call civilization.  But for a damn long time, and this set the main cannon everything is based on.

But then OMG the fanfic!  A chaos of competing continuities from a conflagration of uncoordinated authorial voices and visions.

So then, civilization.  And it did OK.  Popular.  Moves a lot of product.  Keeps people busy.

But it’s always been troubled; new stories can bring up new distortions, new tragedies, new atrocities not possible without the added material.

And in key ways, it’s failing; because we can’t get our stories straight enough to save our world from our own impact on climate; because the existing political solutions are all resistant to the very power of reinvention that technology and new connectivity are accelerating.  The old stories are failing, and it’s costing us more and more by the moment.

So we need new stories because we are in danger and upheaval, and a lot has to change now.  And when things are confusing, we tend to shy away, and hold onto our old maps and stories all the tighter.

Meanwhile...

The imagination itself is one thing that new tech and connectivity is transforming.

Fantasies and speculations in bright, primary colors, reaching right down into the old trigger systems, finding new ways to pull the old switches, and oh so very hard.

Computer games create an art of manipulation of threat and reward, to a level that has many worried, but I think they don’t really understand why yet. 

Genre fiction, geek culture, anime, genre-tinted pop culture, all of it is accelerating as well, refining to fantasies of pure personal power, visions of shockingly new worlds of possibility and threat, heightened pantomimes of overcoming challenge, and erotic material that pushes raw arousal to surreal heights, while at once calling up deep enduring sentiments with a whisper.  And much of it is infused with tones of transcendence; of becoming, of beyond, of seeing from a great and previously unimaginable height.

Transcendence can rewrite stories.  It’s can be an antidote to the fear of not having a story or map.

It’s all too intense to be simply fantasy; it’s a new kind of hyperrealism.

It’s not just escapism anymore, and that worries folks, but they don’t know why exactly.

I think it’s because it threatens everything, well, every story and map, that is.

The audacity of this all is the underlying carrier-wave; Things Can Be Different.

And the people who love this stuff do not just recoil from things as they are. 

They often, at least in bits, live in new ways, love in new ways, talk in new ways, connect in new ways, see problems in new ways, and try to solve them in new ways. 

They are trying, in bits and starts, to bring the hyperreal into life.

And so...

We who are native of the hyperreal have the chance to carry this idea, this approach, into not just our lives, but the world.

There can be an ethic, a context, a sort of system or meta-institution of rewriting things so that they touch us deeper; and as a part of this and consequence of it, so that we are more and more profoundly not stuck where we were.

And maybe, that could lead us to solving the kinds of messes that the old accrued fanfic can’t and won’t.