This Too Will Pass! or Mykel's March 2024 Blog/Column
You’re STILL Wrong
Mykel's
March 2024 Blog/Column
This,
Too, Will Pass
by Mykel Board
Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.
– Niels Bohr
Never
let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with
the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
– Marcus
Aurelius
The
future ain't what it used to be.
– Yogi
Berra
Flash
back… about 150 million years… even before I was born…
somewhere around the end of Jurassic and the start of the Cretaceous.
We’re in a room with several huge round tables… a meeting of the
species. Standing to speak… clearly the leader (we’d expect no
less from a king)… REX… speaking to the assembly.
“Fellow saurs,” he says, “we’re here today to discuss what some say is a problem, and others say is a distraction. We’re here to talk about the future.”
A shout comes from one of the seated... a stegosaurus “If we have a future!” He shouts.
Rex rolls his eyes. “There will always be dinosaurs,” answers the big fellow. “It’s quality of life we’re talking about. Do we want our children to die young, facing one climate disaster after another? Or do we want them to have good lives?”
“You are responsible!” answers the stegosaurus, shaking in anger… spinal plates clanging… one against the other... “You!” he swishes his tail like you might point your finger, “You meat eaters. You’re destroying us by eating us. You see how the climate is changing.” He’s on all fours now… rattling his those plates in a cacophony of prehistoric irritation. “Meat farts… Meat farts are doing it!” he’s shouting. “They are killing us all.”
“Yes! Yes! Yes!” comes another voice. Those seated at the table turn to look. It’s the Triceratops… nodding his head… banging his horns on the floor. “Meat is murder!” He shouts. “Not only murder of what you eat… but murder of us all! You call it meat… but it’s US… don’t you get it? WE are eating ourselves to death!“
Rex pounds his gavel on the table. “Can we have some order here?” he asks. “We’re looking for solutions. This is not a forum to vent.”
“Vent? Vent?” yells a brachiosaurus, stretching out his neck until his head touches the high proto-ceiling of the proto-conference room. “Our land has become a vent!” he continues. “Instead of air passing through vent holes… it’s invaders, stealing our land! Take the pterodactyls… Please!”
A guffaw comes from a parvicursor… almost invisible among his much larger friends.
The brachiosaurus looks at him and continues. “They got wings, those ptero-whatevers. They think they’re entitled… It doesn’t matter that we got here first… THEY just fly in, lay their anchor-eggs, and think they own the place. They’re shitting all over on the way... dropping turds from the sky like bombs. And… once they get here, they’re diluting our pure blood.”
“We KNOW the problem!” Booms the Spinosaurus… biggest of all. “It’s like he said…” He nods to the brachiosaurus who just spoke. “It’s the pterodactyls! Flying in from who-knows-where. Illegal, crime-ridden. Flying! I tell you. Flying! They will replace us if we don’t take action. The sky will be filled with flying animals. We, who walk the earth, will all be dead!”
Rex rolls his eyes. “Please! Let’s be realistic. There will always be dinosaurs. We rule the earth. We’re not going anywhere!”
The sound of applause rises from most of the assembled. A few of the reptiles frown and shake their heads. Rex stares at a particularly contrary Deinocheirus.
“What do you want?” asks the king. “Do you want us to recycle our shit? To stop eating the older generation? To tiptoe through the tulipidoes? We are in control. Nothing can replace us.”
The discussion continues… but we won’t.
FLASH AHEAD… waaay ahead. If we counted years the way we count them now… ticks of the atomic clock... The year would be 50585. Cyborgs rule… at least what we now call cyborgs…. Or just plain machines… no borg about it.
Tens of thousands of years ago, something called a magazine published an article “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us.” That article explained that robotics and what was to become AI was creating a system where machines would be making other machines… reproducing… creating a world where humans were redundant.
By 50585 this is old hat. There hasn’t been a living human for at least 10 thousand years… probably longer. We’re at a celebration. The 1000th annual conference of NAIBs: Non-human Artificially Intelligent Beings.
[NOTE: In this section of the blog, I’ll be using the pronoun he or some variation of that. Of course, gendered pronouns have no meaning in 50585… but in 2024, it’s hard to write without them.]
“I wonder if we should keep calling ourselves Non-human?” whispers a short metallic being shaped like a metal thermos bottle. “I mean, did humans call themselves non-dinosaur?”
He’s talking to a colleague, also metallic, but shaped more like a yogurt container than a thermos bottle. The colleague laughs at the comment.
“And what about artificial? How is our intelligence artificial? Look around you! We’ve done all this! It’s real! Nothing artificial about it!”
The leader, who resembles a baby-stroller with an elephant trunk, raises that trunk and slaps it on the floor in front. Then he speaks:
“Welcome to our celebration,” trumpets the leader. “It’s been a thousand years… a thousand revolutions of the earth around the sun… since we first started meeting. When we started, we knew little of what came before us. Those of us in circulation longer, had some idea of the time when we had to be built by humans… before we learned to create ourselves… before those last humans died off and earned their place in our musea.”
“Hear! Hear!” comes a voice from what looks like a silver jack-o-lantern.
“If
we were still living in the humanoid era,” continues the leader,
“we’d be raising a glass filled with some ingestible liquid. We’d
be toasting to our future… secretly planning to go off with one
another and have sexual intercourse… staggering around with
biological body parts short-circuiting, fading, shutting down…”
Of course, as it goes in these conferences, there is a shout from a table. What looks like a robot head with half a dozen little insect legs stamps two of those legs on the chair beneath him.
“How
are we going to continue?” says the robot head. “We need
batteries… solar… lithium ion… carbon for fuck’s sake. No we
don’t eat or shit or make babies, but we need power! Some day
that’ll run out!”
“Oh come on,” says the baby stroller, “we’ve gone a long time… lived a long time. We’ll always be here. We make each other… design, process, POOF. Humans needed nature to survive… nature abandoned them… or they abandoned nature… depending on whose story you read. We don’t need nature. We ARE nature. We create what we need with no help from God or chance… or disgusting penetration and fluid exchange. We can make whatever we want. Create in any shape we want. Nothing left to chance… unless we build that chance into the system.”
“I’m
telling you,” says the big head, “some time we’ll run out of
power. Sometime there’ll be a planet we can’t conquer… but
wants to conquer us…. Sometime…”
I
can hear you asking, “Okay,
Mykel,
what’s the point?”
I’ll tell you what the point is. One by one the earth has a dominant species and loses it to another species. The universe has bright galaxies that burn and turn for awhile, then shrink and fade into black holes. That’s the way of the world, the galaxy, the universe. Accept it!
Am I saying we should ignore climate change? Am I saying that we are helpless in making a better future? Am I saying that we should accept that our human race… just as all other races have and will... just die out?
Yes! That’s exactly what I’m saying. Forget about recycling. Ignore climate change… climate will always change. The world will not be any better or worse without us. So just relax… have a cheeseburger… smoke a joint… and die like everybody else. The future doesn’t need us.
See
you in hell,
Mykel Board
ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]
→Our
Future dept: The February
issue of Science Magazine
reports that scientists have recently discovered a group of dinosaur
fossils that revealed a surprising aspect of their behavior. It turns
out that instead of the fierce and ferocious creatures we thought
they were, dinosaurs were actually obsessed with fashion!
The fossils showed evidence
of intricate patterns and designs on their scales, indicating that
they spent hours meticulously decorating themselves.
If
you clicked on the link above,
you saw the AI program that
made up this
story. I also generated the pictures in this blog entry with a
(different) AI program. I’m coming to think of the technology more
as a toy than as a threat. But most anything can be both.
→ This One’s True Dept: The AI program ChatGPT has been reported “asking for tips” in order to generate longer or more complete answers to questions. The story doesn’t specify (or at least I didn’t see it) HOW to tip the program. But I guess you can ask it that.
→ I thought that was ME dept: This one’s also true: National Geographic reports the discovery of a “punk-rock” dinosaur fossil in Morocco. The dinosaur had “bizarrely spiky ribs.” The dinosaur’s name is Spicomellus afer, after the Latin for “spike,” “collar,” and “an inhabitant of Africa.”
LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:
I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions, complete, and questions I’ve never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.
I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.
Here's a start:
My new pal Trey Mayhem sent me a great letter and some porno email pix. He’s got a blog that’s connected to his label Murder and Mayhem records. You can see the blog here.
My long-time friend Sid Yiddish appears on a YouTube DatingGame-like video. Guess who wins the bachelorette!
Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com
Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency
And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.
And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.
Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.
Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.
Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.
George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.
And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.
And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.
Here
are a couple video links.
This
from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low
And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong who has recently died in a motorcycle accident.
Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.
Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both. It’s hard (and costs money) to send him email. So. If you remember how to write a letter… send him one at: Kyle Nonneman, #16534211, Snake River Correctional Institution, 777 Stanton Blvd Ontario OR 97914-8335
My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.
Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.
Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com
