Self portrait in xenotopia

Recently, on a remote Alaskan island, I learned that plastic can be found in Alaskan shellfish. A group of school kids in Sitka, AK had collected a bunch of clams and mussels, found plastic in a great many of them, and presented their findings to their community at the local library. Having seen this presentation, and learned that clams on a remote Alaskan beach now sometimes contained plastic fibers, I got to thinking.

Did the person operating the machine that produced a fiber of plastic that ended up in an Alaskan clam know that their work product would end up polluting distant shellfish? What about the people who brokered deals and otherwise acted to get such a fiber from the moment of creation to its point of entry into a water system -- did they know this fiber's destiny? From my perspective, what each of these people consciously knew was irrelevant, because their functional operations as components in social machinery combined to determine the plastic fiber's fate.

I knew that the insects were disappearing. So were the fish. There was glyphosate saturating our croplands and now plastic in the clams. Considering these matters, a change came over me. It came slowly, over the course of weeks, as a primal tilting of perspective, such that I began to see the endless games played by people upon each other's thinking for one ostensible purpose or another stripped to a basic, singular function: the maintenance of a global societal order that was transforming the world into some kind of xenotopia for reasons unknown. All of which moved me to wonder: Why had our species chosen to make the world into an alien place? And why had we chosen to create this alien place in particular?

I knew there were plenty who would say that we made the world this way by accident, and plenty more who might see in our collective choice the grand designs of a willful deity. But such notions did not satisfy my wonder, for I saw neither byproducts of chaos nor evidence of a grand designer in our particular xenotopia. Instead, I saw people, acting individually and in groups, wielding copies of natural systems called technologies, transforming the world in a great many very specific and calculated ways. In other words, I saw a social computer, made of people and technology, issuing and simultaneously following instructions to create this alien world.

So I wondered: Why was the total social computer making a xenotopia?

This question was, of course, unanswerable. But it got me thinking about the future; about the world I'd like to see come into being by the year 2040. So, knowing that humankind's relationship with technology was, in fundamental ways, transforming the world into an alien place, I began painting my annual self-portrait, and wondering what our species could reasonably aspire to over the next couple of decades. Here's what I came up with:

Could we reasonably aspire to create a world with clean oceans by 2040? Probably not. But we could perhaps aspire to not completely kill the oceans by then.

Could we reasonably aspire to create a world without war by 2040? Again, probably not. But as the tools of conflict become increasingly automated, there will likely be some regions where the risk of being killed by a robot is high. So we could perhaps aspire to keep the number of such regions low.

Could we reasonably aspire to create a world with sane governments by 2040? Nope. But we could perhaps aspire to make governments somewhat less hazardous by then.

Could we reasonably aspire to create a world without poverty by 2040? Almost. Technological development made it technically feasible to end poverty in the 20th Century, yet aspiring to bring an end to poverty by 2040 may be overly-ambitious. Existing power structures seem unlikely to move towards eliminating poverty, and actually appear inclined to further cause and entrench it wherever possible. However, I do think we could reasonably aspire to eliminate artificial scarcity of national currencies as a cause of poverty, and to eliminate poverty itself in all but the most extreme circumstances. As for how -- crypto seems an important piece of the puzzle.

Once I began to understand the world as a burgeoning xenotopia, I couldn't not see it that way. And once I started paying attention to all the ways people are working together to make the world into an increasingly alien place, I found myself in awe of the degree of cooperation evidenced by the endeavor's clear, ongoing success. However strange the future may turn out to be, we are at least creating it together.