This seventeen year old Jewish punk kid got into an argument with me as to whether or not, after suffering a "technological apocalypse", humanity would be able to survive. He said that if one day, suddenly, and completely improbably (which made me not want to argue with him at all because there is no reality to this argument at all), humanity lost all our technical innovations, we would be powerless to defend ourselves against nature because technology has caused our bodies to devolve.

I disagreed, in a somewhat "I am older and I know better" sort of way, by attempting to state that his "technological apocalypse" is completely impossible because our technology involves our evolution. There's nothing that is going to happen that is going to remove everyone's understanding of engineering, at this point the concepts that create easy land irrigation are instinctual (and you'd have to literally erase decades of knowledge from everyone's minds), and we've always been able to kill things without much trouble.

Disagreeing with me, he says: our bodies are no longer adapted to natural survival. Which I scoffed at, because we were just as weak and flimsy, if not weaker and flimsier, than we were 1,000 years ago, probably. Not that I was there.

I think what he was trying to explain was something that maybe he saw in himself, or in others, something that I worry about from time to time (in a "how would things be different?" sort of way), something that I think this song, Century Eyes, is discussing:

Is the internet killing us? Admittedly, if there was a World War 3 and the majority of government was utterly wiped out, where would the accountants go? How about the computer programmers? If there's no electricity, and no easy way to make it, where would all the technical employees go? Do you think the kind of person who hides in his cubical for 8 hours, then goes home and hides in front of World of Warcraft for another 8 hours is going to survive in the wild? Probably not. He probably doesn't even know how to fish without a mouse and keyboard.

This thinking, however, is rather flawed. Even amid a complete technological or real apocalypse, people can band together. We're not cats and dogs, we're all people, and when the shit goes down we can get along, but that isn't really my point. We're so surrounded with information at all times, it's hard for us not to pick up random survival skills:

I know how to catch fish out of a river. I know what the proper kind of trap looks like and if I was stuck somewhere where I needed to catch fish (or other food) to survive, I'd be able to do it. (I owe this to watching Limbo over and over, and other survival skills I know you can thank Discovery and Les Stroud for, etc.) I'm a music listening geek with a sick monitor tan, finger tips as smooth and uncalloused as polished ivory, but when shit goes down, I am eating some fucking animals and I am not screwing around. If I can kill it, I will eat it. I don't doubt my ability to survive without computers.

I think it's important to realize that a lot of the things that really keep our world going are jobs performed by people who don't use computers, who haven't been blinded by looking through century eyes (to reference the song again). Mechanics, carpenters, plumbers, engineers, architects, these are all jobs that existed before computers and the internet, and they are jobs that will exist long since.

Our lives may be distinctly different from just forty years ago, we're over-entertained and over-informed in comparison, but we're not useless and broken. Admittedly the weak and useless will bite the bullet pretty quick when shit goes down, but they'd be dead already if it weren't for all our enlightenment and triumphs over beasts. Yeah, we let the weak and feeble survive and flourish these days, but that doesn't mean humanity is without the strong and able.

~fin

Song Note: This song could be about eight times longer and I wouldn't mind.