Project Vision 21

On November 18, 1883, the railroad companies in the United States and Canada self-adopted a new standardized “time” system that consisted of four time zones (East, Central, Mountain, and Pacific) so that all clocks within each one of those zones were synchronized.

In other words, the railway killed multidimensional and kairological time and reduced it to a one-dimensional, mechanical, and chronological time. We are all still trapped inside that time, a time that controls everything (think computers) regardless of nature’s time or our psychological time.

Now, digital technology (which become commercially available in 1991) has had a similarly deadly effect on another element that was once an integral part of being human: truth.

Digital technology in general and more specifically social networks and programs and applications that allow creating "deepfakes" (something like “very realistic fakes”) have caused that everything is now just an “opinion” so nothing (not even the truth, whatever it may be) causes anybody to change his/her mind.

We must be clear: we are no longer facing a relativistic approach to truth where everyone has or believes they have their own truth. Now we are facing a situation where truth has become irrelevant and unnecessary.

As Shelly Palmer (a recognized technology expert) said in a recent interview, the arrival of deepfakes marks "the end of the truth” because technological advances have reached the point where “you really won’t be able to tell what is real and what is fake.”

At the same time, according to Palmer, this lack of distinction between what is real and what is fake or false, although solidified and promoted by digital technology, is not based on any technology, but on something totally human, that is, the uncritical adoption of some dogma or ideology.

As the aforementioned expert suggests, it is useless to propose laws to regulate new technologies if the source of disconnection from reality (and, therefore, from time and from truth) is deep within each one of us.  

We have killed so much time that, after objectifying and quantifying it, we have reduced what used to be time for study and meditation (scholé, in Greek) to the “free time” that work leaves us, that is, to a time of rest and recovery of energy to return to work. And now that initially railway time has been computerized, globalized, and digitized.

And we have killed the truth so much (aletheia, in Greek) that nothing remains of the unveiling and lack of forgetfulness inherent to the truth of existence and it all comes down to "I believe that ..." and the unpleasant expression "We agree to disagree ", where "I believe that ..." should be understood as" I am not going to think" and "disagreeing" as "I am not going to think either".

But can we live without time and without truth? Rather, what have we become by killing time and truth? Murderers of God, as Nietzsche said in Also Spoke Zarathustra? “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”