The Fly matrix

Long-time friend and creative industry collaborator Danny Allison and I have started recording a new series of radio shows. Details will follow, but it was during the second episode on the mental battery and taking care of our mental health in the information age, that he ambushed me with a horror story.

They’ve put a fly’s brain on a computer chip, and it’s doing fly things in the fly matrix.

Go on, read it twice. It’s true as well. The poor thing is puking on stuff, twitching, hopping around and everything, and it has no idea it is a part of the human ego parade.

I don’t think I can even get angry about it. Maybe dismay is a bit closer, but truth be told, I just blank out and withdraw even deeper into my analog hideaway.

My existential angst ridden brain doesn’t need this, or the fact that the same ‘they’ also have a petri dish full of human cells successfully playing 1990s video game classic, Doom.

But hang on a minute… if we’re up to Zoom already… how close are we to Final Fantasy VII? It was my escape from my GCSE revision, my creative universe for a good couple of years. Does this mean I can escape the big tech race to the bottom by actually being Cloud or Aeris or Sephiroth or Barrett or Red XIII? Would seeing out the rest of humanity in Midgar or Nibbelheim be so bad?

My mental battery has just bleeped to tell me it needs charging.

More on the radio show soon.