Prologue. Dreaming of an era where I belong
The great thing about humans is that they’ll never stop being miserable. Even in our dreams we still manage to have nightmares.
That’s how some stranger “keppy” ended our argument in an online chatroom yesterday, spouting the idea that being miserable is somehow an inherent part of human condition. It’s honestly defeatist nonsense. Even if every society is bound to have sacrifices, I will not sit contently and watch as that sacrifice chooses me.
It’s often said that people look to the future for hope in times of hardship. I suppose it makes sense then for me to look into the past in this age of unprecedented comfort. It’s not like I’m one of those crazies who miss the days of Eurasian warlords or Bi-Oceanic military-industrial conglomerates. My sentimentality is reserved for the wild west of human culture in the early 21st century, in the beginning days of the Internet, where imagination was free and small communities thrive without a care for the larger world. How much I wish I lived in those times! There’s an obscure Internet forum or bulletin board for everyone and everything. Any thought that can be conjured can be shared. People can publicly be their true selves without some subroutine of the Directorate labeling you a potential RSS - Risk of Social Stability, another one of those signature dry neologisms of the Directorate. Not a lot of reliable sources survived 50 years of social collapse in the latter half of the 21st century, but it’s clear from surviving Internet relics that cultural diversity never recovered because of the Directorate’s stability-first policy.
In fairness, ever since the last human shifted out of the Directorate, humanity has been going great. Productivity measures grow at an absurd rate every year, new technologies pop up left and right, and the rate of violent crimes has decreased to a negligible level in most places around the globe. We’ve abolished aging, conquered deep space, optimized production, and gotten into previously unimaginable territories in science. The Utopian Dream humanity set out for 300 years ago has finally come to fruition.
But that dream is not mine.
Perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy, every year that passes I feel more acutely like a foreigner in my own land. Thoughts, inclinations, values, interests - the Monoculture pushed by the Directorate is uninteresting at best and distasteful at worst. According to developmental psychology children are “socialized” (brainwashed, really) by those around them into social norms and values as they grow up. Once it establishes itself, the Monoculture is self-sustaining - precisely the stability that the Directorate wants. Perhaps thanks to my typically unhelpful stubbornness, I’ve resisted any attempts to moral education for as far back as I remember. Thus I can only pretend as I live in this perfect utopia, every day being a frustrating standoff between my unwillingness to welcome the Popular Canon into my heart and society’s unwillingness to give me a place in its dream.
If I was born in the 21st century, I think I’d choose to become an Internet artist. Drawing actually creative things, talking with friends on our newest works, and living on commission from Internet strangers. It’d be a difficult life, probably with little material security, but I know I will have my place, no matter how small. In some deep unexplored corner of the World Wide Web, I’ll be getting happy about getting a few dozen likes and having 1 or 2 dedicated fans who will comment under every work.
My place. A phrase that stirs ripples in my heart like no other. My place. To never again have to feel like an outsider looking in. To never have to pretend to be something I am not, to never have to constantly guess what other people are feeling. A world that comes to me naturally, like how this world is naturally acceptable to everyone else.
Nobody is in the wrong here. The Directorate created a perfect society at the End of History and the average person is enjoying the best world to have ever existed. Yet my soul endlessly rebels at the purity of this very heaven. Then, what could I do to pursue my place in this world?