"Can I copy your answers?" Manifesto
has never been uttered by any of us because, in a way, it is a given. Sharing, merging, manifesting each others ideas. In a world so saturated with information and moving at godspeed, ideas form themselves and people only realise them, we are only liminal channels of an emerging reality that would take form elsewhere without us. Are we just doing what someone else has done before? Or are we getting in there just before someone else has the same idea?
There is no originality anymore and we know that. What we make could be nothing new and it is surely being done somewhere other than here as well. But we can understand this and subvert it, be wise and nuanced.
The things we make are personal, and the places we are or come from influence our ideas unique to each of us, making the investigating and experimenting as important as the answers we find. Outcomes take process, and we are the processors.
We understand the surf, and how the the world is too complex to be examined all at once. Problems and issues need extracting, and we are the extractors.
An individual can struggle to make change and does not know what will work until it happens. Change and impact comes from action, and we are the actors.
No one asks "can I copy your answers?" because we know there are no real answers, and solutions are often narrow and short lived. We participate in understanding our world and finding the best things to be done in it.
"Would you rather be a bird in a cage or a fish in a tank?" - A manifesto of hope and fortitude.
A fish tank, I observe, is a microcosm of what we humans consider to be a tranquil, simple way of living, projected onto aquatic gill-bearing animals in water-filled glass boxes. They have food, they have little plants, and sometimes they have miniature houses placed at the bottom, among the pebbles. The rectangular box becomes a perfect landscape, a moving picture, a model existence, containing an idyllic, modest life rather than just picturing one.
To have such a life. To eat, sleep, swim about, free from the burdens of human responsibility - blissful ignorance of the beyond.
But I cannot ignore the bias that comes with knowing what I know and being what I am. I can see the tank, circle it, I know that it's an enclosure even if the fish does not. I know of the sea. I know of the beyond. I know what I see in the existence of the fish but I don't know the life and the mind of it.
The bird in a cage; beautiful, intelligent, responsive, constricted, flightless, sad. It is certainly true that comparing the measurable intelligence of "fish" and "birds", the wing-ed would come out on top. The bird will comprehend it's imprisonment even if it feels loved from beyond the bars of its cage. It is sadness that comes from the unfulfillment of true potential, stretching wings and gliding through air.
I'm sure the fish is "happier" than the bird. But that happiness comes from a cost of it's inability to comprehend it's restricted reality, and no hope of unrestiction. As a bird I would be able to think, and in some way I will understand my own existence and my relation to the rest of the world. I think the knowledge of freedom beyond the cage would make me sad, but at least I can think about it, and plan for escape. I would have hope.
It could come down to whether you want to know you are a prisoner or not. The fish does have it's full ability. It can swim and somewhat exist just as it would in the open sea, but it does not have access to knowledge of the sea. The bird knows, but it does not have it's full ability.
Perhaps this means I want to be the closest form, between the two options, to a human. In our current society, humans are taught that they can do anything they set their minds to. Everyone has the potential to be what they want, and have what they want, if they work hard enough. This neo-liberal perception is integral to the ethic of now, justifying the powerful as having met their true potential. Maybe the bird is a good analogy.
Perhaps the tranquil life of the fish is what all we humans crave. Perhaps dependable routine is worth the cost of true freedom. But in our world, humans don't have tanks. There is no spoon feeding, no filtered, temperature-controlled water. There is an ocean, and we are all floating about in it.
I think I want to have knowledge of my own potential, even without being able to manifest it, It's what I'm used to. I'll be able to think, be sad. I would be beautiful with bright coloured feathers and a long proud beak. I'd speak, swearing loudly at my captors whenever the walk by my cage, and I'll observe the beyond, knowing and not flying, not yet, not until my escape.
I want to speak of hope, of optimism, in a world in which we grew up with doomsday predictions slated to hit before our expected retirement ages, with the slow but inexorable militarization of metropolitan police departments, with the failure of the existing political order to deal with the existential-but-not-yet-urgent threat of climate change. We have grown up under a shadow, swimming in the ocean, drenched in oil. Will we escape?
We are birds because the only other options are denial or despair.
The promises already offered are individualist and unsustainable: How many of them are scoped for a world where energy is not cheap and plentiful, to say nothing of rare earth elements? We do not depend on the earth, the earth depends on us and we can't maintain the fish tank existence because it is not real. There is only the ocean, the plastic-filled, rising ocean.
We must be birds and we must escape.
We shall find ways to make life more wonderful for us right now. Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have (instead of 20th century “destroy it all and build something completely different” modernism). Our futurism is not nihilistic, it is about switching roles, it avoids potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.
