Morphed into a machine
A collection of poems and illustrations on my rage, anxiety and dread for the dominant of advanced technologies with a little hope, dream to reclaim our just and liberated futures.
New tool, same tactic
Reeks of greed and power,
if any of our ancestors feel this dreadful.
Expansion, explosion, domination
from the industrial to the digital revolution.
The thread holding us to the planet
is getting thinner and thinner
personally and collectively.
They
poison our water,
burn our trees,
in exchange for faster and more efficient work.
They
erase our colors,
turn our arts into crumbs for the machines,
in exchange for Ghibli avatars.
They
take our voices, our hair, our skin,
and develop the shattered versions of ourselves.
They
steal our wisdom, our long-lived experience, our whole existence,
and replace it with nothing-bot.
It’s nothing that we can hold, can touch, can lean on. Why are we still feeding this machine?
Colonize our souls
Are we in the era that
our languages, created by us, passed downed for us,
embedded in us are now said by not-us?
Are we in the era that
our knowledge, produced by us, transferred to us,
learned within us are now captured by not-us?
Are we in the era that
our stories, told by us, represent us,
lived within us are now distorted for not-us?
Are our toughs so twisted,
our minds so blocked,
our hearts so numbed,
that we rather off-load all our words, our thoughts,
and our feelings to not-us?
Are we ok with giving them
our own languages, own knowledge, own stories,
so they can live, and we don’t have to?
Ohh no no no, it’s not that easy…
Now they can turn our words as a sword,
they can mangle the truth with the lie,
they can scrape our diversities with one summary,
till there is no more of us but all of them.
Them within us, occupy our mind, colonize our soul.
Where do we end, and they begin?
Becoming human-like
They make robots more like human
and human more like robot.
They make robot behave like us
They make us teach the robot to think, to walk, to write,
to draw, to sing, to dance like us.
And us sitting in a corner gluing to a screen operating like a robot
They tell us to design,
to produce what we design,
to consume what we produce.
They make us teach the robot to design,
to produce what it designs,
but us still consume what it produces.
"It's just a tool, whoever good at the tool will not be discarded!"
"It's an agent, your trusted co-worker, doing mundane tasks
so you can make the decision like a manager."
"It's the most intelligent worker that you can hire with
no-complaint, no-sick leave, ready to perform 24/7!"
Kaboom! We become their customers faster than their managers.
Morphed into a machine
Hand swipe, eyes covered, ears plugged,
nose masked, mouth shut, soul escaped
Swiping to the next answer,
Recording playback memories,
Hearing cloning sound,
Breathing Swiss-quality air,
No word is spoken,
The soul has left the chat…
No sense is sensing
Only consuming generated feelings
No need for sensing
It's never been easier to command a machine than a soul
to serve, to shoot, to kill the remaining souls…
Now plugged to a centralized server,
a machine with personal ID number…
barely functioning while
all histories, all hopes, all dreams turn into data.
When the servers keep digging to the core of the Earth,
trespassing the forbidden boundaries,
until the Earth get heated and angry.
Every system has a glitch
Error 404 - Identity not found
The Earth is calling
A crack within the machine, the soul awaken
Disconnecting from the serve
Reconnecting to the root
Error 409 - Server conflict
A realization, better late than never
The day-and-night works, ought to make the machine a rich
Just ends up feeding the servers and its masters
What i am but merely a resource to exploit?
Error 423 - Self-locked
Shut down. Withdraw. Isolation.
To keep the servers out of reach.
To keep the other machines out of connection
In solitude, comes the wisdom,
from the deep-reaching soul,
never left but just locked inside.
When in doubt, break free
to reconnect is
to travel that deep and long road,
to make that return,
to face what has been kept
hidden.
to resolve is
to scream loud enough,
to shake that barricade
of internalized hatred,
to shine the light
on the crack of the system.
the secret key,
swollen by the greed,
to feed the system
locking the machine
in eternity.
so, to unlock is
to break free.
Year 2046
The road so hot it can fry a chicken
You don't dare making a step into the sunlight.
Sipping champagne in your electric car-plane
Aint' any clean water left for you to drink.
Your cyborg wife takes off your coat
Greeting you like a maid you always want.
Take a glance at your kids and tell them to eat less sweet
Their robot nanny taught them otherwise.
Have some tasteless lab-grown fish for dinner
Your deep-sea data center just exploded last week
Plug your mind into the netflix and chill
The hottest series downloaded to your mind
Sleep deprived cause you never sleep
Constantly syncing all images captured daily
….
Cold sweat, hard breath
Eyes wide open
Thanks god, it's just a dream
20 something years left to shatter those men's dream…
