The Dark Prince

Long ago, in the dark times when lightbulbs weren’t around, progress was made by the individual. As you can imagine, these times were both good and bad. Bad because you had to go and buy candles to screw into the light fittings, and believe me, it’s very hard to screw a candle into a light fitting. Bad because candles and their wick don’t conduct electricity, so they didn’t work very well as lighting devices.

But these times were also very good as well. Because of the lack of heirachy on technology and progress in general (apart from a rather nasty class distinction), anyone who tried something new and found positive things was recognized. So, great leaps were made when some smarty pants did in fact invent the lightbulb and everyone breathed a sigh of relief, because when you burn the filament out of a candle, it’s really bloody hard to get it out of the light fitting.

Those times are now at an end. In this dank, lightbulb filled world, even the 100 Watt Globe (named after a bloke called James Globe) cannot spread light over the difficulties in bringing progress to the fore. Gone are the recognitions of the individual, in are the faceless masses of corporation. Instead of individual inventions being recognised and celebrated on their merit, this material, bulbish world relies on marketing and fashion to decide where technology will take us next.

At this time, there are some amazing increases in technology, and education is so widespread that many of the more intelligent in society now have a chance to do something with their abilities. This should be a golden age of expansion of the human knowledge base, instead it is one of almost complete stagnation. Everything that can be creatively designed is done so in teams, removing any touch of an individual. Without this individual touch, we live in a society filled with cars and buildings that are almost entirely identical in design. We watch TV shows and movies so formulaic and repetitive that if anything is even slightly different is is labelled as alternative, or weird. We listen to music that everyone else listens to, and sounds like every other popular piece of music, with little or no appreciation for the creative possibilities.

These things are bad. Terribly bad. But what shocks, what saddens me to the core is that even the sacred world of computer games has fallen to this plague of uniformity. A world where no physical or mental rules apply and true freedom of creation has been brought under a reign of standards, marketing and bile. Even the lightbulbs look the same.

How long will this last? Who knows, until a major revolution in society, whether through war or glabal climate change, but at least we have the lightbulb.