Boards of Canada’s Message to Humanity
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” -Wendel Berry
What is being harvested?
Boards of Canada's album Tomorrow's Harvest came out in 2013 with a cover showing Silicon Valley from across the bay—fogged, spectral, full and empty at once. It posed a question it never answered: what tomorrow, and what exactly is being harvested?
The easy answer is attention. But attention is a scapegoat, and what Paul Kingsnorth calls the Machine doesn't like to be scapegoated, because it doesn't like to be identified. That's the fog. We didn't build 1984, a society that fights its subjugation. We built Brave New World, a society that enjoys it.
Thirteen years later, the answer arrives, and it is called Inferno.
In this talk—given as part of a Maximal Listening session—I work through what happened in between. The real damage was never the hijacking of attention; it was the loss of the present. A flow state is not the same thing as a pure experience. One fills the gap between who we think we are and who we actually are; the other closes it. Scrolling is a flow state. So is love, so is deep work, so is real presence with another person. Only one of them is true, and when we are honest with ourselves, we know the difference.
We have waged war on the sacred in service of the Machine—and nothing can be sacred if what we experience isn't true. But the silver lining of Evil is that it's true. Hell is a difficult place, but it is also a true place. If the world is on fire, the least we can do is see it clearly enough to put it out.