Green

Okay, so this was a ten minute exercise. And all it has to do with green is the first sentence.  ^_^ I don't know how I managed to get from "green" to what I ended up doing.  But then again, the topic for that day was "wool", and a few members ended up in this huge contraversial conversation that came off from it. So I don't know, I guess it was just a weird day. ^_~

He glanced out his window at the greenery of his garden. It was a look of longing. How much more he’d prefer to be out there, rather than cooped up in here, trying to write an essay on humanity in inhuman conditions.

He sighed, and turned to his computer.

“June 1st 2007” He typed, “Stuffed if I can write essay.”

He shook himself, and deleted the rebellious sentence. Come on, he thought, just a sentence, a word, anything to jump off from.

“What is humanity?” He typed. At least it was a start.

“The simple answer is this: We, as the human race, are.

But are we?”

And error popped up on screen. 

Microsoft Word has encountered an error and has to close. Would you like to send a bug report?

He clicked the “No” button, and watched as the application closed. 

“Stupid thing. Why’d you have to stuff up on me?” he muttered under his breath, and paused, a strange expression on his face.

Picking up pen and paper, he proceeded to rewrite what he had typed, and begin again.

“As our technology has progressed, we have integrated it into our lives. Society in the first world demands that everyone has access to the Internet, everyone has a mobile phone, everyone has a car. It is virtually inconceivable that anyone should go without.”

“We are the only race on the planet that has behaved so strangely. Apes will use sticks as tools, but they do not rely solely upon those sticks. Nor is it necessary to have a stick with them at any given time, as with mobile phones.”

“Technology has everything to do with how we perceive ourselves today. The progression of the human race is not really based on the progression of humans individually or as a whole, but on the progression of technology. In fact, in these times, humanity without technology really isn’t considered to be humanity at all.”

“Given this observation, can you strip a someone of all their technology and beliefs, and still call them human? Or has that technology, and those beliefs, become the humanity?”

“This is not such a ridiculous idea as it may seem. Not our habits of projecting our thoughts and feelings onto things that could not possibly consider them, and humanizing machines. A car is tired, a computer stubborn, our boats, and now, to a lesser extent perhaps, our cars, are referred to as “she”.”

“Perhaps this all seems harmless and irrelevant, but language is as much, perhaps even more, a part of humanity as technology, and thus it affects the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us. Think of how many feminists have change the spelling of the word ‘woman’, substituting the ‘a’ for a ‘y’.”

He paused, and chewed the end on his pen. Where was he going with this? What was he trying to say?

In order to avert the temporary writer’s block, he kept writing without bothering to think about it.

“So perhaps, for all our talk of artificial intelligence and robots that can think for themselves, we have already created artificial life- albeit on a different level- by projecting life onto our current technology?”

He smiled to himself, remembering how, only recently, a friend of his had told her ancient washing to “stop whining and get on with it”, and then shake her head and say “I swear that thing has a mind of it’s own.”

“It has been said,” He continued, “that when a loved one dies they live on in our hearts. Maybe our technology lives in our minds?"

He put down his pen and shivered. Not a nice prospect.