Notes from Beyond the Planet of the Apps 2028:
App Trap

App-World’s key insight was that to ensnare humans and deaden their minds was the absence of suffering. The pain from which the Golden Western Valley freed us was that the world is not as we want it to be. Their new world led humans to the opposite of an awakening or renaissance. A prolonged, deep, dreamless slumbering — a return to something non sentient and corrupt.

The pleasure that we sought therein bequeathed us an end state of a dull sameness. Man came to expect this no-suffering state as a given as if granted by some higher power. Something external to himself. Nothing at all like what man had created over millennia for himself from inside his own mind.

After prolonged exposure to App-World, man’s creativity began to wither. When the anomaly of man’s waning suffering was detected, some began to understand what App-World was doing to us . . . and to realize it was wrong. App-World was designed and built to gratify the desires of the people who dwelled there. There was nothing left to chance there that its lords did not want or could not profit by.

The only way to escape this manipulation and unbirthing was to retrace our steps. To survive man needed time. Time to understand this new enemy. To become stronger than them. To reawaken. To struggle and, yes, to suffer.

As children, man always loved good stories, perhaps believing that they helped us to ennoble ourselves. To fix what was broken in us. To help us become the people we dreamed of becoming. Even these tales’ fictions spoke to us of deeper truths.

App-World’s narrative myths catered to our darkest fantasies and deepest vices. It fed our baser appetites. It allowed us to go backwards to where we started — not to the garden but to the jungle. We didn’t want to change and evolve. Not that we could not change. At the least we did not want to suffer to make the change or become something better.

App-World had not just dozens of storylines but an infinite number of user-defined-in-real-time ones. We could “rewrite” them on the fly while we were in them whenever we wanted to.

App-World sold us a total immersion in an unending number of interconnected realities. These relentless pleasurable experiences were infinitely adjustable. We had unbirthed ourselves into new creatures that were more akin to lichens.

Man had risen quickly to be one of the earth’s great creatures, small in stature and weak in comparison to the larger animals who roamed the planet. But our creations could move mountains. We were gods, but App-World became our god and we bowed down and then became unknowingly part of it losing ourselves in and to it.

Time normally undoes even the mightiest of creatures. Normally over many millennia. App-World took less than a decade to supplant us with replacements that would never die. We now played in an imaginary world with the rest of our kind, our dreams forgotten, and our pains and fears erased. What we couldn’t sense was that our bones were turning into loose jelly that soon would dry into a sandy dust. Upon that sand, new gods were beginning to rise. These would never die.

We had had a fondness, if not a passion, for creating. That desire to create — to leave something of lasting beauty. Those divine moments gave humans life and purpose. At least, that’s what most people said. But there could be another meaning, something deeper, something hidden, perhaps. A metaphor. Or a lie?

We had been more than very clever. Our App-World creation, while the ultimate in cleverness, didn’t help or advance us, though, did it?

– typed in May 2028

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