When I was a young person, I was endlessly fascinated with science-fiction, technology of every kind, and ‘the future’. I had high hopes for a kind of utopian ‘quantum leap’ in human and planetary development. These hopes were founded on the visions of authors and technologists, and they were egregiously optimistic. Now that I live in the future I imagined, I find that it is more like the terrifying visions of the writers who were my mentors, and nothing like the fulfillment of human opportunity and potential I dreamed of.

For this reason, I have become fascinated with Nature, rather than technology, and with the deep and ancient past, rather than the future. The former, because organism so vastly exceeds the sum of our technology as to render it a tedious and parasitic afterthought. The latter, because it is in the past that I discover both the causes for our failures, and the aspects of our humanity which were lost, obscured, or co-opted in our ceaseless insistence on achieving forms of excellence which are irreal and abstracted, instead of those which are organic, intimate and embodied.

The future is a place where living beings are competing with abstracted representations of organismal function, and losing. The past is an endless library of what is and has been sacrificed in these processes. I live in the present, but the past is my sacred library.