Nastic Gryzunova. Seine: issue 93

It is completely unclear why so many theories of the coming apocalypse have been coming from the UK lately. Why aren’t the ghosts of imminent complete failure visible to Australian scientists, American scientists aren’t, Chilean scientists aren’t, Japanese scientists aren’t, nothing is Russian at all, and the poor British invent and invent. It’s trite to somehow refer to the climate. It's no better in Ireland, but there is a distinct lack of gloomy forecasts there too.

For example. At the annual meeting of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, held as part of the Creating Sparks Science Festival of the British Association, Professor Susan Greenfield, in a report with the eerie title “The Brain of the Future,” said that humanity, becoming more and more dependent on the network information flow, risks facing the leveling of individuality and a penchant for creativity, as well as the problem of lack of imagination. This is how technology affects human brains, according to the professor.

In fact, she fears that as the way information is presented on the Internet becomes increasingly standardized, it may have a negative impact on a person's ability to think and their imagination (after all, standard logical connectives are created). Positivity comes down to acquiring new experience in huge quantities.

It is possible that I do not understand much in this complex life, however, I have to note that if we continue to remember only that the Internet is such a global library with a disgustingly organized catalogue, we are not threatened with a decrease in the ability to fantasize, but with a progressive madness, strongly reminiscent of the syndrome of manic consumption in conditions of total shortage of everything. Terminology dictates attitude. Accordingly, we change the terminology. The Internet is a living environment. The oversaturation of information and the standard way of presenting it are reproaches as strange as they would be against a three-dimensional environment. The ambiguity of the environment in which everyone is a ghost, even though they are living people, and the ineradicable human habit of adapting everything fundamentally new to the already formed (three-dimensional environment, by the way) methods of perception quite effectively stimulate the imagination. Texts turn into people. Banal business stories go into literature. And vice versa. We live within a system that combines the features of our internal chaos and the chaos of the environment. It’s somehow strange under these conditions to assume that we will forget how to think and fantasize. Because it is obvious that these are precisely those abilities without which one simply cannot survive in given circumstances. Of course, according to some individual optimists, humanity is soon facing extinction. But something tells me that it’s not from an inability to think. It is much more likely that we will die out from overindulgence in this activity.