technology & decay

3D printing organs is just one of the technologies fuelling the drive towards immortality.

We invest all this money in shiny new technologies in the hope that they might make us fitter, faster, smarter, more productive, luckier in love, healthier…all pushing towards a goal of machinery to make the superhuman. And yet, at the end of the day, we are not immortal. Technology narratives lack a discussion around death and decay — even though everything is subject to entropy. 

So much of literature is about death, dealing with the death of ourselves and others, the effect on those around us. I chose to study literature at a time when I did not want to really be thinking of death. I could not speak about my own death but I could connect deeply with the sentiments of poets around me - like we were secretly communicating with one another even where I could not do so with those around me and they most certainly could not do that with me.

But nowadays things are a little different - most social media content revolves around forms of escapism, perfection or immortality. Our daily digital lives no longer equip us to deal with mortality.

Our insistence on narratives of perfection is damaging; we forget that we are poisoning the earth, that governments and corporations are exploiting us, that our economic systems of capital and austerity are making us seriously unhappy. The future of storytelling for me needs to be something that resists pushing us further into isolation and brings us back in connection with one another and with our material bodies etc.