Posthuman Blues

Last night I had a dream of a future inspired, in part, by the stills I've seen from the forthcoming "A Scanner Darkly." In the dream, every inch of space was enlivened with entertainment technology. All walls doubled as screens or projectors. One of the people I "met" had an ongoing love-affair with a person who materialized only as a photo-realistic animated persona in the decor of his apartment.

I watched surreal holographic cartoon characters entertain children. And in a strange twist, it seemed that flesh-and-blood humans could commingle with the neon-lit virtual world so seemingly out-of-reach by becoming virtual themselves, their humanness somehow uploaded into the very architecture.

Blogger/friend Sauceruney made a guest appearance. He was sitting at a bar of some sort, making passive remarks about the ubiquitous tech I was exploring. I remember wondering if it would actually be cheaper to simulate the gaudy yet sophisticated environment as a direct neural uplink rather than construct it in "meatspace." Sauceruney, or someone, seemed certain awesomely endowed broadband computation (taking place in real space, as opposed to cyberspace) was responsible.

I experienced not a little relief knowing that what I was seeing wasn't an illusion. I estimated the world I found myself in was roughly one-hundred years in advance of our own, in which case the human race (or at least the small portion of it that I saw) was doing essentially OK. No ecological collapse. No thermonuclear spasm -- or at least none that I could infer.

Maybe that was the point of this fantastic display of future media prowess: to banish transgressive thoughts, to cauterize pessimism in the womb.