" Ode to the legions of the anonymous"

The faceless trillions of individuals buried in the graveyard of time – nobody knows them. Nobody put a name to the story of their lives, so nobody misses them. Nobody knows what they look like. With no image left behind, their lives grow fainter in the memories of the loved ones that remain. They played such an important part in the course of evolution; together, they created civilisation. Human history seeks stability in emphatic events; individuals are the manifestation of eras. Spotlights in the realm of shadows. In the graveyard of the anonymous, weather-beaten tombstones pile up to form a soaring Tower of Babel with windows almost obscured, behind which even the once-famous slowly fade. So we cast the poignancy of a vanished age from our minds and look towards a future shining with optimism. Our media-driven, Internet-linked world brings all of us fleeting fame in a virtual reality. Time is rendered relative by warp-speed circuit boards and megabytes. Ultra-fast servers simulate a virtual cyberspace in 3D. The past and the future are eradicated or redefined in re-dimensioned leaps through time. In the cultish medium of a glassed-in multi-dimensional world, surrounded by countless parallel worlds of galactic manipulation, nobody ages; everyone is free to know, achieve and utilise everything. An elusive flow of information has become a randomly raging torrent. All conceivable streams of information converge formlessly to build a universal super-cosmos through which we gladly surf. No living thing can remain anonymous any longer; everything is recorded, monitored and harnessed. In the voyeuristic Internet age, high-performance photonic networks reduce every disaster to a display. The tyranny of total transparency has given rise to an Orwellian Brother of epoch-making proportions; the anonymous cast of human history, past and future, is disinterred and fed back into the network. We can all contact, connect and discard each other interactively. In the sensory realm of the arbitrary, contact is cheap. What remains is a faint aftertaste and a yearning for the great fallacies – or were they? – of a lost age: Feelings like love and tenderness, family ties, human bonds of affection, intellectual exchanges, individual processes within an awareness of collective existence. Perceiving happiness in touching the skin of sensitised being, conscious of the limitations of time and space … seems to congeal into fleeting cliché. The here and now will not tolerate nostalgia for the past; will the present afford us the space to reflect on a future worth having?