Isolating one’s self, at base form, means making oneself more alone. A person may do this themselves, with no-one else around or in a small group. Historically, large groups do it too: religious ones. Conservative, racial, and prejudicial ones. Even whole countries can become isolated through politics, geography, or economics. Through-out human history, the delineations of most of these groups were more or less the result of fear, necessity.
People walled themselves behind castles first as protection.
Long before fiefdoms played much part in society however– and conquest proved itself so fruitful, did the idea of nation-states as border-lands come to be. Now, countries and groups expand most often with economics: reserved military might, threats, intimidation, the like. All bullshit tactics to feed the bigger-stick persona of fuck-you-got-mine.
But ultimately, Human society lives now in a postdigital world. One where, by its very nature, virtuosity or purity matters not. Humans have learned to see existence as 0s and 1s: the pure manifestation of every universal truth summed up therein. There is no gray, because we are the gray. There is only input/output, systems of it fractalized and scaled to every possible level of reality, infinity, and not. Information– datum, is infinite and finite. All and nothing. Both black and white, but also neither.
We are everything else. The color spectrum between. And because of that, our existence dictates that black and white are, in fact, different from color: from gray. From us. Yet somehow, Humans still allow ourselves– force even, to believe we’ve utterly no say over these facts, no effect on them. We believe they they’re otherwise divine instruments, not structures formed of tools by the very logical and dominating forces that comprise us.
Nature made us. Nature is us. We are animals. Primates. Human. That is our taxonomy. Moreover, we are comprised of all the same recycled matter and energy as the cows, their grass, its sunlight, the particles and waves that form it.
And we are fucking that system up for everyone, ourselves included.
The essence of a system is through-put. A system takes an object, applies its purpose-built methods, and refines it. In theory. In reality, the refinements may not always be such. Such is true for all systems. From evolution’s vestigial Appendix to the codec corruptions of modern conversion software.
Once extended to the enormity of the universe, its mechanics, its methods of action, the truth of that merely becomes greater, larger. More tangible. Especially in the face of a special history such as ours.
In a reality where people can stand on one side of the world and effectively see, hear, and touch someone on the other side, how is isolationism good?
S. M. Nolan's Sci-Fi Logbook 