• she/they

38, irish-american
גִיוֹרֶת

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shel
@shel

Human society in the late anthroposcene is one of the most mysterious times in human history. Despite being at the height of resource consumption and evidence of rapid technological advancement, we have very few records of the time. In fact, it is the practice of record-keeping itself which is the most hotly debated issue among scholars.

The leading hypothesis suggests that, for a reason scholars still do not understand, humans started keeping fewer and fewer records. All kinds of records. Historical records, financial records, political records. Human beings just stopped keeping track of their own dealings, with two very notable exceptions.

The first form of record we have from the era is records which were kept deeply underground in remote bunkers completely inaccessible to living humans at the time. The purpose of these records is likewise a mystery. Some scholars suggest that there arose a new religious practice of record-keeping, which was perhaps perceived as being as antiquated as animal sacrifice. However, perhaps this religion was persecuted, so they had to protect their records where nobody could access them. The Cave of Ten Thousand Bhuddas is a famous cache of records from better documented times in human history, which was also believed to exist due to religious persecution. However, what makes the late anthrocenic archives most mysterious is that unlike the Cave of Ten Thousand Bhuddas, that which is preserved in anthropocenic archives is often physical or sensory matters: seeds, spores, dyes, even perfumes. Perhaps these monks believed these things had mystical qualities which would aid them in the afterlife. Being completely inaccessible and often kept in remote locations, it is hard to believe that these records were ever intended to be accessed by living human beings. There is an edge hypothesis that these records were left intentionally for us to find, but there is little evidence to support it. If we were meant to find them, why make them so hard to find?

Much more well-known and even more mysterious is the matter of which records continued to be kept by late anthropocenic society at large. For reasons that are mysterious and hotly debated, the only records that continued to be kept and made accessible is music engraved on thin discs. When a fine needle is run through the engravings on these discs at a constant speed, music is produced. The purpose of these discs bewildered scholars for centuries before the discovery of how to access their contents. Older discs contain both music and speech, but over time humans began to only engrave the discs with music.

Nearly everything we know about late anthropocenic society comes from music. Most music details courting rituals or lost relationships. There are many discs about the need to remember "the towers." There is music deriding particular politicians or political factions. There is even music declaring, pre-emptively, that it is "the end of the world as we know it." Deciphering the poetry of these songs encompasses much of the work of historians of the late anthropocene. Why humans began to only keep records in the form of music may forever be unknown to us.

There is a competing hypothesis. When archaeologists uncovered ruins of the late anthropocene under many layers of submerged soil, much of what has been found was large quantities of complex machinery with very few moving parts. In all of these machines, trace amounts of lithium has been found. Lithium is an incredibly rare mineral. Geologists have found evidence to suggest that many of the underwater trenches, lakes, caverns, and valleys across earth have trace amounts of lithium as well. The constant spiraling patterns found in these lakes and valleys seems to suggest that they are human-made. Given that lithium is extrodinarily rare, yet can be found in both the machines of the late anthropocene and in these spiraling lakes and valleys, there is reason to believe that these lakes and valleys were once great deposits of lithium which were mined out completely by human beings and used to power their complex machinery.

If it were possible to gather enough lithium in one place, perhaps we could turn on one of those machines and access their records, so goes the theory, but such a theory is unprovable as there is not enough lithium in the world and we do not know what we would need to do with it once we had gathered it. We also have no proof that whatever machine we turned on would actually contain accessible historical records of value, or if the machines could still be functional at all after so much time in hostile conditions.

There is a legend, or perhaps a conspiracy theory, that the Church of Ten Thousand Mannequins contains within it an archive of all human knowledge up until the end of the anthropocene, but that it is only accessible with machines powered by lithium. There are those that believe we must melt down all other late anthropocene artifacts in order to gather enough lithium to power the machines in the Church of Ten Thousand Mannequins. However, even if we knew what to do with the lithium, such a gamble would cost us thousands of irreplaceable historic artifacts for no guarantee that we would truly find the historical records missing from the late athropocene. Even if we could power on the machines in the Church of Ten Mannequins, surely we would run out of power before we could ever recover all of the ancient knowledge it contains, if it truly does contain all of human knowledge through the end of the anthropocene.

There have been proposals to attempt to hard-wire cables from modern power generators to these machines in an attempt to power them, but such a move is incalculably risky as it could damage what is truly one of the largest and most precious ancient artifacts to have survived the era. We do not even know what voltage or amplitude is safe to use for these machines or if they would work once powered.

So as it stands, the late anthropocene remains a truly mysterious time in human history. Perhaps someday we will discover a way to learn more about our ancient ancestors. For now, we have a wonderful gift that they left behind for us: millions of hours of ancient music.

Now, for next class, I want you all to select three late anthropocene musical records from our library of replicas and listen to them, taking careful note of the time and place listed on the translated imprints on the back of the sleeve. There are record players in the library if you don't have your own. I want you to start by writing just your own first impressions of what these songs can tell us about the late anthropocene. What did these humans value, what were they experiencing, how did they feel, what were the important events that they may have been referencing. Later in the semester you will research the opinions of scholars in the field who have discussed the same three records and write about their hypotheses on the meaning of these songs.

Approximate translations of all these songs should be available through the library, but please do not allow the translations to bias your interpretations. Whether or not you have studied these ancient languages, try to imagine other possibilities for what they could have meant. Official translations tend to be very literal, but this is music, poetry, it is never truly literal and we may never know what metaphors and allusions may have been intuitive to humans of the era. Read the footnotes! And try to think about how the musical elements might color the meaning of the lyrics as well.

I will see you all next week, have a good long weekend for Mountain Day.

— Recorded lecture of Leyrnator Prilbis Dafni, a treasured conveyor of anthropocenic history and ancient literature. Given to their students at High Cliff University on 4.54±0.05b±160–60k±300.546k—Seventh Lunar Phase—Thirteenth Rotation.


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in reply to @shel's post:

That means a lot to me since I really love your writing. Also yeah that's a special little treat reference for people in libraries and archives. I like to think that the Internet Archive just kept going for a long time and came to have sooooo many mannequins and future descendants of humans were just like "wtf is this place???"

this is wonderful and it's something i think about all the time

what with the constant dread of seeming impending apocalypse, it feels silly as such a small thing, but i often think about how much longer vinyl records, playable with pretty simple machinery, will be playable than all my cd's (my preferred physical media) which require delicate and complicated electronics to decode

how useless a cd might be to a future archivist who doesn't have all of the computers and lasers required to play it. depending on how bad things get, how useless it might be to future me

This reminds me of I read something once, which I can't seem to re-locate. The question was "if all of the advanced technology we currently have now magically disappeared, how long would it take to re-create it with our available knowledge?"

And as it turns out, the answer is "nope."

Not ten years, not a hundred years, not a thousand years. Getting back to where we are today is literally impossible. (I mean, don't discount human ingenuity, but we couldn't retrace our steps.)

The big problem is that we've already dug it up all the easy iron. Time was, iron ore is close to the surface and you could dig it up with hand tools. So we did dig it up with hand tools, and now it's all gone. The iron ore that's left, cannot be mined except with machinery... and building those machines takes iron. Future generations cannot take the same pathway to our current technology because our society has already burnt a bridge behind us in terms of technology and resources.

It's possible I'm mis-remembering and the actual bottleneck was coal rather than iron.

So yeah... Lithium. 😬 Extremely, excessively plausible.

I've had a half long-post of this rolling around in my head for years, I've thought about this way too much, sorry.

there's plenty of iron, and lithium, in the land fills (well, and groundwater, when it comes to lithium)

You can take the same pathway, wash away the garbage and scavenge the rest. bootstrapping to a 1850s level of technology is possible with what you learned in elementary school, even half remembered.

if you happen to remember the story the village elders read to you Before the Event, of that Michael Mulligan and his damnable Steam Shovel, you can probably do 1920s heavy industry with a few thousand people who already graduated fifth grade, frantically writing down everything that comes to mind as they remember it.

at that point you don't really need a steel industry until later, because of two things: you now can break down the cars all over most countries, and recycled aluminium doesn't require nearly as much raw electricity as cracking bauxite into aluminum.

if you follow nerds, you probably have heard once in your life that a transistor is made of semiconducting materials, and CPUs are made from silicon. if you can find a nerd, they'll be able to fill in the rest, though it may take a lot of prompting, and then once they have the general knack, you can task more nerds to miniaturizing.

it's not the materials that measure progress, it's the fact that by sixth grade, if you watched all the videos from your teachers being absent, you probably know more of how the world works than the smartest people in the Manhattan Project, outside of their specific domains, thanks to the invention of writing and the public school system. Every discovery builds off the rest, and you can trace that line if you get enough people from different fields together. the ADHD Wikipedia binge that they half remember years later, is a species survival mechanism.

if you find someone who's the kind of person who has multiple offline copies of Wikipedia just in case, well.

And if it was the other way around, they Thanos snapped all the books, every single academic in the world would most likely pivot to braindumping because of the magnitude of what happened would leave them no other choice (not to mention, researchers' skill is largely finding information, not remembering it. you'd need to find a math teacher to re teach you the equations you commonly use)

basically I think we'd be set back maybe fifty, one hundred years either way. just knowing the simple machines as discrete concepts puts you ahead of the average ancient Greek.

it's not so much that we lost the ability to get to the moon, as much as we lost the political will. it costs a lot to spin up those industries when you aren't also using them to build bigger ICBMs than the ruskies

Had fun reading this. Absolutely would not have understood the mannequins reference if I hadn't visited the Internet Archive for the first time just last week. I think the Buddhas reference is lost on me however.

Probably wasn't the intention, but the "Leyrnator" at the end made me think for a sec that this future society was speaking a language descended from Yiddish ("leynen" is "to read" in Yiddish) which recontextualized it with a really cool vibe for me :)

oh, shoulda just checked your profile lol. cause rereading, of course this feels very Jewish, they're interpreting 1000s year old texts in a nigh-dead language and ascribing their own meaning to it. anyway, all that to say that I really liked this piece of writing :)