Mad World: A Dispatch from the Edge of Reality

September 29th, 2008

In my hand is this whis­tle with a wheel at the end that spins when you blow air through it — and I am absolutely amazed. It’s not the whis­tle. It’s how it was made. A friend of mine just loaded a file on a com­puter, pressed PRINT, and forty-five min­utes later, there it was.

The rest of the day, I imag­ine how much this tech­nol­ogy will improve and how much it will shake up the man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­try when we can sim­ply print off the goods we need from designs that can be spread at the speed of thought. We are liv­ing right now with the power to do things that were not so long ago the domain of sci­ence fic­tion — and it’s an amaz­ing time to be alive.

After hav­ing exhausted all the great pos­si­bil­i­ties of the con­ver­gence of 3D print­ing, nan­otech­nol­ogy, and indus­try, I come back to my senses and real­ize we’ll most likely use it to build bet­ter bombs.

Because, make no mis­take, they are out to get us. And the only way to really make sure that doesn’t hap­pen is to get them first. For as it has been known in every sketched out moment of West­ern life: When you can’t trust any­one, you need to be able to con­trol it all — and to do that for any rea­son­able length of time, you’ve got to have good bombs.

The fris­bee seems to almost stand still as I jump. I pluck it out of the air, spin around, and throw it back. The next throw is a long one, and I’m so focused on it that I almost back into a group of baby boomers who all give me dirty looks.

At some point it occurs to me that the piece of plas­tic we’re throw­ing back and forth is really just an excuse for grown men and women to dance in a field — because once you get the basics of catch­ing it down, the real plea­sure is in the flow of your move­ment, in how grace­fully you can grab onto it and then let go.

Some­how the need for a pur­pose to dance around like a fool (if that is what one feels like doing at any par­tic­u­lar moment) seems silly. Then again, there are many harm­less things which we nev­er­the­less learn are wrong, and the more we learn of these things, the closer we come to being all grown up.

But in this moment, I’m back to look­ing at the world through the eyes of a child, where every­thing is an adven­ture and your only duty is to make sure you and your friends are hav­ing fun. I won­der if we all should have per­haps taken the art of play more seri­ously. After all, when we’re not busy play­ing, we tend to be busy wor­ry­ing about our sal­va­tion and wag­ing wars.

We’ve been taught to stop believ­ing in the Bogey­man, but that doesn’t keep him from exist­ing. He’s that rogue nation, that sleeper agent, that quiet guy sit­ting next to you on the bus, mind boil­ing, wait­ing for a chance to strike. When we were younger, we could stay safe by mak­ing sure to check under our beds and by keep­ing a close watch on our clos­ets. Now, we real­ize that the price of that feel­ing of safety has become our eter­nal, neu­rotic vigilance.