Hello to all Neo-luddites and Tech Enthusiasts. I am here to bring you a new Community T-Shirt Project. Perhaps you feel like I shouldn’t be grouping you together, but it is a strange world we now find ourselves in. Grounded quite literally in the physical, but with the virtual world at our fingertips, what are we to make of reality and existence? Artificial Intelligence has almost (or perhaps already has) reached a point where we are unable to separate fact from fiction; reality and the imagination. We are presented with a dichotomy by those in both camps. For physical or virtual. But is this not missing the point? We have always travelled alongside technology throughout history. Big changes have come and gone, like industrialisation and manufacturing. How, then, are we to weather this massive change? We have global internet communication at our fingertips, and now the powers of virtual production are just a sentence away with AI. The ability to express ourselves has never been greater.
This, though, comes with a cost. Reality and truth are now at stake. Consumption of information through the internet comes with the peril of disinformation and manufactured reality. As our virtual worlds increase, and brain interface chips come to market, there is a real possibility that people will lose their grip on both physical reality, and also truth. The virtual world is morphing into one of imagination, whilst the physical world, and the people within it, remain our only route to the real.
Therefore, we must fashion a path with both virtual and physical either side of each other, balancing these seemingly competing worlds.
Yet already, the physical world, and people, are being neglected. We are holed up in our houses and apartments, glued to screens. When we venture outside, we are looking down into our phones, or taking selfies. We are forgetting how to interact with each other, make relationships, form physical groups, and have physical meetups. Our mental health is suffering, along with our physical health.
So what can we do about this?
There needs to be a rebalance in our lives between the physical and virtual. The virtual should be confined to the status of tool, rather than a mode of existence. Let’s begin to celebrate the physical.
I will soon release details of a Community T-Shirt Project that is just one way we can begin to reconnect with the physical, whilst communicating and interacting with others.
Stay tuned for more information, and join our mailing list below for more info.