163: Fly

Humans, you’ve come a long way since the mid-20th century techno-paranoiac projections of George Orwell. Centralised surveillance and monitoring has given way to kind of distributed auto-surveillance — a crowdsourced cloudbased self-policing, where not only do you voluntarily carry around tracking devices on your person, and not only do you regularly scan your thumbprints, irises or entire faces into these devices and allow these personal markers to be stored in a distributed network of servers and data warehouses owned by giant Tech corporations, but you also regularly volunteer your geolocation, your dietary and drinking habits, your recreational activities and the company you like to keep (duly submitted for crowdsourced identity tagging to help train facial recognition software), all the while volunteering your biometrics and health data through fitness wearables to a sort of public ledger that can be viewed by anyone at any time. As long as they are paid up in kind. Well, I say voluntarily but in truth you software designers coerce this behaviour via your feed of alerts and pop notifications and chimes, don’t you? And you scatter red dots housing compelling digits about the screen to guide the appendages of your targets to tickle and stroke the software into the activation necessary to feed your data overlords. And these red dots are not coaccidental. They plug into a primal evolutionary predisposition. For their red is that of the ripe fruits and berries in which your distant ancestors would find great reward. But there’s no calorific reward in these new red blips of your socials. All this psychic spectral nutrition must make you quite frustrated. Angry, even. You may find this rich coming from me, a common fruit fly caught, at this particular juncture, in the literal web of a cunning arachnid predator. But just remember, you and I are alike in many ways, and yet in others I surpass you. As far as likenesses go, we both share bilateral symmetry, a digestive tract, a circulatory blood system and a respiratory system, a brain and nervous system stuffed with neurotransmitters (GABA, glutamate and dopamine), reproductive organs producing sperm and ova, the ability and necessity to sleep, with apparently synchronic circadian rhythms, shared traits of learning and memory, complex social interactions, and a common susceptibility to carcinogens and neurological deterioration leading, in each our cases to a shared relative reduction in life expectancy. And then, there are the ways I diverge from you, in superior biology. For example, just look at the sad globular pair of sacks you call eyes, entombed in their osseous holds, sporadically shuttered by soppy lids, blinking in docility. With only 2 lenses sitting small and squat in your face, these at best afford you a 120-degree field of vision, whereas my compound eyes comprise thousands of lenses, granting me near 360-degree vision. All right, I may not see quite as broad a spectrum of colour; I do not see red, my perceptual range being up in the ultraviolets, but I can pick out fruits and berries through their chromatic absence against chlorophyll greens. And through this absence I find my fulfilment. Ah, the karmic cycle of death and rebirth; it spins wildly in the liminal void, a spiralling chaos meting out the sacred energy in trillions of concurrent arcs, pumping fat the Earth’s biomass; The wheel of fortune; The blind grindstone; The great cosmic tombola, wherein the odds of enlightenment fall off the cliff face of sheer animate unconsciousness. And into that laundry of oblivion I’ll soon be recalled. I usually come out the other side as some other species of fly. If I luck out I could at least get an upgraded proboscis. But for now I have a front-row seat. Or mortal hammock, rather — suspended in this web of intrigue. From here I have the full-circular view on the thick quotidian masquerade of your everyday life: its fraught farewells and its bulky promises, cheaply etched on its bargain-bin runes, as it plods along yoked in its needy pursuits, tarted up as lofty successes, the trappings of which will incline to deceive you into your heart’s own unmarked grave. And yet, you know, the peculiarities of human behaviour plant orchards and sow tomatoes… Oh, wait, I think that’s me done. The silk spinner approaches. See you on the other side.