As We Will Transmit

As our culture feels the full repercussions of algorithmic thought, a crisis of identity must intercede. The next fifty years will see a turn away from the joyous celebration of the network, the tipping point, and the crowdsource. Instead, the ubiquity of data and thought will call for an inertial twin of solitude and forgetfulness. The symphony of the networked self will demand a recognition of pauses that give distinction to melodies and individuality to notes. Rather than the walnut-sized cameras that graced the headbands of Vannevar Bush's future information worker, the thinker of tomorrow will discipline her or himself with the blankness of solitude. The places and moments that go unrecorded, untagged, and unlinked will define and outline the layeredness of the flickering histories that defined the early 21st century.

Concepts like nation, people, and being will gain distinctness through a recognition of embodied experience. Cogito ergo sum will be replaced by the unshared dance of experience. The abstraction (pulling apart) of the eye will be replaced by the concreteness of skin. As we pull away from authorized interfaces, the perverseness of primary contact will regain a currency that transcends the teletouch. The prophylactic and analgesic purpose of networks will find its dialectic in the revelation of the embodied.