Humanity's direction
"Let me tell you about humanity's direction."
"Humanity took many twists and turns, but mostly, it didn't have a direction or a compass. A few power hungry individuals was steering it for their own benefits, while compromising everyone and everything else."
"This direction change started with tools, machinery that could do what dozens of humans could. Machine were more efficient, and reliable."
"But the real shift happened with the change is values, perhaps accelerated by these machines that we revered."
"We became disconnected from nature. We started living in cities, far from the forests, the rivers and the grasslands. The land became a factory, where we could extract minerals and trees from. Nature had been a provider until then, but it became our slave."
"We then became disconnected from our inner self. We were told that the purpose of life was happiness, and sold on the idea that happiness came with more - always more money. You consume, you throw out. We became machines ourselves - taking from the Earth, and burying our trash back into it."
"We became disconnected from communities too. Many rejected the religions and their teachings, being left alone to figure out what the purpose of life was. People became lost, not knowing their directions. Some people continued, but instead of embracing the diversity of opinion, they became persuaded that only them had the answers - creating conflicts. "
"We didn't stop to start asking ourselves questions. We relied on science too much. Science became our religion, and science is a very powerful tool, but it is how we framed and used it that was the problem. We relied on science to prove things that was obvious. We lost common sense."
"We treated complex systems like nature and society as isolated parts, not looking at the whole picture. With this approach, we missed the whole thing. We pretended that science was apolitical, while in fact, where the research was going was driven by profit and political interests."
"We assumed that every problem we faced could be solved with a new technology. But we forgot that the problem had been caused by existing technologies, and so they could be solved with existing technologies too."
"Humanity became a marketing experiment. Advertisements everywhere, and companies that would harvest our attention to target those advertisements. Sapping our lives away, we started to have shorter attention spans, with addiction-like behaviors."
"The algorithms of these attention grabbing companies polarized the people, creating echo chambers. Human attention was their product, and if you didn't control it, they were."
"Although progress was the emblem used, the gap between the poor and the rich had been excavated. It had become much bigger than the mountain between the peasant and the king. It was now an engineered mountain that kept on growing, and growing - toward infinity."
"So was humanity heading in the right direction? No. There was not thought beyond the self. There was no thought of where it was going."
"That's why we had to create this project."