There are cities under our feet. The land we stand on is one layer of the cake. Go underground and you’ll find tunnels atop of tunnels, ruins next to pipes, caskets next to wiring. Progress is just the bones of others pulverized into dust and the sinew of the new. Each age announces itself more convenient, more high tech, more more. Yet its all built on resources mined by people ignored in parts of the planet where the labor is backbreaking, where nations from east and west stripmine the spoils. Away from the world wide web, and the mania of social media, medieval working conditions fuel a joyless leisure lifestyle, while parts the earth resemble a sauna.
The future and the past are not two sides of a coin. They are both composed of fragments, a a thousand cracks in reality, that we force “order” but, in truth, are just a mountian of pennies in an unbroken piggy bank. Progress is a facade that the monied and entitled share cocktails behind as the dangerous work that supports it happend a galaxy of dirt roads away. Strung out like junkies on heroin, the attention economy sucks out our brains. In the other world, where no one cares about the ratings of CNN or Fox, life becomes more desperate, angry and increasingly mobile. The veneer of progress can protect no one from heat and ashes of endless consumption. The fire next time has come and its burning Texas this weekend.