Our current cultural heritage seeks to rationalize absurd juxtapositions framed through preprogrammed filters and playlists, sovereign devices with their own aesthetic impulses, and algorithms that serve as the final destination instead of the carrier. These sums, a kind of visual ecstasy greater than their parts, minimize to extinction the tantalization of the non-altered and unmanufactured. 

The death of imagination will be a season like a plague. A distinct thud, its sustain will murmur for centuries, though we will come out on the other side, long after the curse of anything anywhere anytime, reclaim our fleshy primacy over machines, reverting to older gods of function over fetish. One day the every day stops competing against itself. The screams across the airwaves and cables quiet, the cluttered menagerie crumbles, the grotesque carnival splashed across the landscape of grocery store aisles washes out to sea.

Our social infrastructures are being reshaped by rapid changes in population and its subsequent redistribution. The impending reality is no mystery to demographers and economists who have mapped out as actuaries moving numbers in columns and lines on charts. Our politicians prey on the emotions of the early manifestation of these realities, with boogeymen at the border, boosting national pride in production, rallying the worker to hedge off the fragile supply chain folding in on itself. These actions stem from reactionary positions and fail to provide proactive applied strategies.

Almost visionable, long past the whispering god of AI, borne out fully and then finally reined, still there humming along in limited bandwidth of power, is a conclusion of these chromed-out dongles and multiple binaries, giving over to pragmatism and no longer bolstered in fallacy of revolutionary purpose. This tangle of wires and interfaces will be repurposed for more essential functions like growing food in inhospitable climates. Brilliant and bold solutions will erupt from the necessities of permafrost, glacial ice, and rising oceans. Hacking and co-opting of otherwise benign materials and mechanisms will improvise solutions to ferry us across these troubled waters. 

What of our storytellers, our songslingers, our craftspeople? They might allude to far-off utopias or dystopias, but they fail to offer scenarios that provide a cultural solution to keep apace with this … We will need a new art a new song a new story to help our collective psychology process the burden of change at a rate faster than our evolutionary capabilities. In all of this newness, nostalgia will inevitably be hoisted as a votive. Must we look back to move forward? An undeveloped art that molds itself within the chaos of the moment is required to survive. The joy of more will be swapped for the joy of less. This will be reflected in our dance and our songs and our wordforms and on our stages. This provides a cultural infrastructure to dance with the wind, swim the flood, forge in fire, crystal in cold.