my vision of the apocalypse

In times of stress new innovations appear. Our ancient ancestors, the Upper Paleolithic Homo sapiens had to adapt to an encroaching ice age, glaciers covered their hunting grounds. They moved south, worked it out, invented bows and arrows to hunt smaller game, started painting on their walls, started up civilization as we know it, societies and stuff. Institutions were born.

cave lion drawings from Chauvet Cave in Southern France, 35,000 to 30,000 years old

Nowadays we have lots of institutions. There are institutions for everything. There are institutions for studying the institutions. Institutions evolve faster and faster
due to technology. We can imagine ourselves in outer space or at the center of an atom, that’s not an institution, of course, but it’s a pretty cool thing.

And so here we are, the adults. We’ve pretty much flubbed it all up, we’ve fostered divisiveness and fought with each other over principles, who’s institutions were better than the other fellas institutions. Time for the kidz to innovate some stuff. Our job is to love them and wish them well. We have set out a great course for them, due to our ignorance and selfishness, now they can find their way back home to sustainability and wholeness, back home to compassion and respect. Like how we should have done it all along but just couldn’t manage somehow, until the shit hit the fan.

‘Oh! Hey! What’s going on?’ they said and no one answered and all the cars stopped and the buses and nobody could get to work and slowly they came out of their houses to ask for help from their neighbor. ‘Hey, do you have any food? I have some soap, want to trade?’ And in this way they got to know each other and worked together to get some food because the trucks aren’t running anymore and the internet’s down.

I think that’s what my vision of the apocalypse is and when we finally rebuild something - it’ll cooperative, shared, it’ll networked with nodes. But that’ll be the kidz part.

They could come up with anything without us standing in their way - and with their computer skills? Oh my gosh.

It’ll be smart, adaptive, helpful, friendly and efficient. Like a refrigerator that says good morning to you.

Imagine living with a houseful of appliances that talked to you. That would be like Pee Wee’s playhouse.

What do you imagine?