THE GREAT AWARENESS

Andres Colmenares // Barcelona

A 21st century, post-pandemic Europe

Amal woke up earlier than usual that morning. The recent news of a pandemic was affecting her sleep and the low-pitched sounds of a storm were not helping. Since her recent 100th birthday celebration, her mind was busy rendering a constant conversation between thoughts and feelings about her chronological age. She was now part of “the high-risk population”—designated as such during this new pandemic by the government of Neurope, one of the ten interregional citizen councils that emerged after the collapse of the nation state in the mid-twenty-first century. 

Amal, a daughter of Syrian migrants who took part in the great recovery of Europe after the networked crises of 2020, was getting mentally ready for a new hibernation. During her adolescence, her parents often told her stories about how, back in those days, people referred to hibernations as lockdowns or confinements. There was a negative perception around them, but everything changed when billions of humans realised the transformative healing power of hibernations and multiple megacities started using them as an effective tool to address the environmental emergency declared just a few years earlier. 

Like many children of the first global hibernation, Amal participated in one of the several time capsule projects and other prospective collective memory experiments that different communities around the world launched back then to fight against social amnesia, sharing deep learnings and feelings across cultures and generations. Right after Amal was born in the spring of 2021, her parents received a necklace and a wooden vessel—both shaped like apollonian cones—that they should give her when she had lived one billion seconds. In the base of the vessel, there was a metal plaque with a mysterious code and a set of coordinates identifying the location where a time capsule was installed. It was part of a distributed and networked transnational memorial built for the thousands who died in the 2020 pandemic. Inside the conic capsule, there was a letter written for Amal by a stranger who lost a dear one the same day she was born.

Many decades after those events, she still wore the necklace as a memento of hope and kept the handwritten letter she first read in 2053 in a drawer of her night table. While the stormy winds battered the window, she took the old letter and read it while holding the amulet in her hand.

“Dear Amal,

I wonder how your generation will remember this historical period of time. I wonder how this chapter of humankind will be registered in the history books you will read and learn from. I even wonder if you will learn about these times from history books or Wikipedias. Today everyone is obsessed with the internet but you know, everything changes and keeps changing so fast that it sometimes can feel overwhelming and disorientating. Just a hundred years ago there was a “Great Depression” and last year people were describing this time as a “Great Pause” but dear Amal, I would like you and your generation to remember this period as The Great Awareness.

Last year during the pandemic, and everything else that followed, humanity was so confused and overwhelmed that we had no option but to learn how to live with high levels of uncertainty. It took a while for many of us to realise the unprecedented implications of billions of people around the world in hibernation, isolated from their toxic routines for a few months, while staying hyperconnected in real-time. Those in power are really worried about their carbonated economies and keeping an unsustainable status quo, while many of us are questioning everything. We not only woke up, but became aware of a superpower: inter-collective action.

Like most humans living on Earth during this decade, I was raised in a toxic celebrity culture that shaped our desires, celebrated individualism, and reinforced unfair power structures. Since we were kids, we idolised the idea of superheroes saving us from evil forces, while adults idolised the idea of billionaires “saving the world.” It was only after a famous money launderer became president of what used to be the most powerful nation in the world that many of us realised the real power of our collective attention. No superhero came to save us from him and the pestilential narcissism he represented, but in 2020 we started learning how to use our superpower to save us from ourselves.

The toughest battles we have faced since last year are about protecting our collective imaginations from the fear of polarising wars and invisible enemies. The feeds, controlled by big data extraction corporations that used to be described as “social media,” are our battle and healing grounds. The current conflict is not between the traditional false dichotomies of users (left vs. right, old vs. young, black vs. white) but against the algorithmic timelines that distorted our shared sense of time, our perception of truth or reality, and the invisible extractive powers behind them.

After the oil markets crashed, everyone was asking and trying to predict what the “new normal” would be. In fact, many of us understood that one of the strongest driving forces behind the complex network of crises affecting humanity was wealth concentration. This is why many of us decided to de-normalise the idea of billionaires and many governments are following by declaring tax havens illegal. Old institutions that fortified inequality as charity, philanthropy, or monarchies are becoming quite unstable and fragile since we managed to include “No Wealth Concentration” and “No Corruption” in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. Meanwhile, many of us are finally understanding the true meaning and value of solidarity as the convergence of responsibility and empathy. The transition from GDP or profit to societal wellbeing as the ultimate growth metric is now becoming an important part of the political and economic agendas. 

The Great Awareness is now being shaped by multiple declarations of interdependencies, especially with ideas coming from indigenous communities who are playing a key role in helping us change our complicated interrelationships with non-human living beings and our sense of belonging with the Planet Earth. Many of us are subverting the power of language, using words like internet or cities as action verbs, using the term “environmental emergency” instead of “climate change” to bring the sense of urgency and humbleness it demands. We are finding new plural meanings to citizenships and learning how, by changing many of our everyday life choices, we can flatten curves related to carbon emissions or migrant deaths.

Dear Amal, I really hope that when you read this letter, one billion seconds from now, this time is still remembered as a time of great awareness.”

After reading the letter Amal noticed how her fears were melting down, leaving space for deeper reflection. She noticed that the storm was gone. She could hear the last raindrops hitting the grass while a group of birds were singing in the forest. She felt like time, and life itself, had expanded. That very brief period of time with herself, that moment of deep connection with her memories, fed her soul with the purest of hopes and serenity. It gave her the peace of mind she needed to remain aware of herself and the others during the upcoming hibernation, when everyone can learn once again what can happen when we are together apart.

Author Bio:

Andres Colmenares is the co-founder of IAM, an alternative think-tank developing strategic foresight and curatorial design projects using the internet to address the environmental emergency by changing how the digital economy is changing everything.