be careful what you wish for, it might already be coming true

With all the recent talk on futurestance, I thought it would probably be appropriate for someone to suggest that it if you bring change into the world without the clearest of intentions and idea what the effects could be, startling and sometimes rather unpleasant things might happen. But they also might have happened in some way regardless if you had done nothing.

Time’s a slippery beast, I don’t claim to know what’s up with it. Half the time it doesn’t even seem to exist. Is what I’m doing now just the forward ripple from something that is happening later, or is it the cause of that event? Or is the water just a little too choppy from all the waves to really see what’s going on? As a writer this concerns me, for there is an interesting history of storytelling either causing or predicting real events in the world.

Perhaps the most obvious example is the Bible, but I can’t do justice to that, so I’ll stick to a more recent example, George Orwell’s "1984", that well-loved tale of the well-feared horrors of the totalitarian state. Double-think, constant surveillance and warfare the rewriting of all history. As both policeman and anarchist soldier, Orwell probably had a good understanding of what government could do wrong and a reason for wanting to warn people against that with his chilling tale. Perhaps he even caught a glance of where the future could be heading and just had to say it. Either that or many, many powerful people have decided his book was a manual for world-domination and have proceeded to implement his control-driven concepts one after one. Just what did Orwell intend by writing this in the first place? Or if it’s just ripples in the sea of possibility did it really make a difference?

This is suspiciously beginning to sound like the age-old debate of free will. Do we create change, or does change create us? Even in an acausal reality it certainly feels like my actions have some sort of effect on the world, at least on the small scale of my daily actions. I am nice to people and they are nice in return, I take out the trash and it doesn’t pile up. But what about larger trends? Most people seem to think they are rather helpless in face of say, the government, or global warming. But these states too seem to have come about by people making small decisions that have swelled over time, or the singular acts of those insightful enough to catch the wave at the right moment and steer the next events in a particular way. Perhaps state control was inevitable, but Orwell was still pivotal in defining just how it would come about. As was Vernor Vinge’s "True Names" in defining the internet, neither cause or prediction but just a clearer picture of what was already happening.

Just what is magic anyway? It certainly seems to presuppose some amount of control and direction in the outcome of events. But it often feels more like pushing the world just so as a particular peak of opportunity rolls by. The right kind and amount of force at the right time, and then change happens as we intended it. At least as long as we had enough knowledge of the force and foresight of the times to speak or act true, and not send the world spinning off into some twisted nightmare version of what we wanted. If you’ve ever tried spinning a staff you’ll understand what I mean the first time you whack yourself in the head. But with some idea of how it works and what to expect things seem to work out. A good interpretation of reality goes a long way.

This was also posted as my first article over at Key23 where there has also been some incredible disscusions about the nature of reality and transendence that all seem to be leading up to something...