Editor’s Note
Tedium is setting in as simple pleasures, like hanging with friends, start to feel like a thing of the past (they’re not). Kids don’t mind much. Seeing their friends only in the “ether” is “old normal”. For many kids, existing in a fantasy world half the time, making teams of friends online to strategise in real time inside “the game” about how to kill for fun or bludgeon other players over the head with a rainbow-coloured sledge hammer is so much better than school. So what’s all the fuss about, mom?
When we have load-shedding there’s scant concern for how we’re going to make dinner, or fire up the geyser for a hot shower, or see our way to bed without breaking our necks — it’s about losing a place in the Fortnite standings.
Play has changed. While, as adults our playthings have been indefinitely confiscated, afternoons for school kids — previously the preserve of running and passing and throwing and batting and kicking; of learning to win and lose; about teamwork and getting over a graze, or not making the A-team — have segued into hours in front of a screen ... after hours in front of a screen home schooling.
It’s good training for the Singularity, when we humans become nothing more than the slaves of AI and the next generations remember the world outside the game as a “splinter in the mind driving them mad”, as Morpheus says in The Matrix. If that ever becomes reality, don’t think you’ve seen the end of viruses.
And while we’re on the topic of The Matrix and viruses, virtual reality enforcer in that film, Agent Smith, has this to say on the subject: “[This] came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realised you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively creates a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way to survive is to spread to another area. There’s another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is?”
So perhaps a “reset” is in order.