Excerpt

Archive: Personal Project PER59683758

Introduction, Footnotes and Conclusion by Rowena Savalas

7 January 2314

We have yet to reach perfection, but many think we are close. – Anon

I remember the first time I dreamed all the numbers had disappeared.

Instead of organisation there was an insurmountable heap of life, piled higher than the sky, vast enough to swamp what we have achieved. The Magnaman method was lost, buried. Nothing of our time and place, not even the Unity Spire, emerged from that squirming mountain.

I jerked awake, lay in bed, breathing.

A profound feeling swept through my limbs, my stomach, my soft living brain. Gratitude. And then sympathy. Sympathy for those who tried to make sense of their own short lives during the age of humanity that preceded our own: the Age of Riches.

It's difficult to come to terms with what humanity once was. The future is clear and calm, a long straight road ahead, and challenges that once plagued us are now overcome. There is only the past left to fear, and I've found it easy to picture the old ways as a monster, coming up fast behind me. How can I learn to accept this terrible legacy? Not only that, how can I be honest about what price we continue to pay to escape it? When we sacrificed difference and discord, we gave up on part of ourselves. It takes bravery to admit that maybe we miss it.

That's why I have started this personal project.

Firstly, a bit about me.

I am Rowena Savalas. If you are discovering this document for some future personal project of your own: hello. I'm waving at you. Both hands.

I live in the Age of Curation, which commenced with the global adoption of the Magnaman method in 2168. To quote Magnaman: "We already had the answers; we needed better questions." There was no problem facing humanity to which we had not already found a solution – one that invariably had been obscured under useless detritus masquerading as information, for the sake of profit, personal ease, or cruelty. Magnaman's techniques allowed us to interrogate and classify such motives, and to allow the true jewels of our time to shine forth. We apply them still, to every document created. They saved our present, and at the same time, created our future, for they revealed what had been hidden: stream existence was already with us, and trying to hide from human destructive capabilities, much like every other creature on the planet.

That realisation changed the world. That was not an easy process. But once we learned to nurture – more than that, to cooperate – we discovered a way of incorporating the vast wisdom of the streams into the delight and discovery of organic living.

From a different angle: What am I?

I am organic. I am part of the Atlantic settlements on the reclaimed Jurassic coast. I am seventeen years of age in body, and six hundred and sixty-three in streaming years. I feel I need to make sense of both sides of myself. You know how sometimes you want answers that don't come out of knowledge, but from the struggle of emotions inside you? Part of it is that I haven't decided on a life path yet. I think maybe I want to be a historian, so I hope this project will help me decide if that's right for me. I feel it is important to make a good job of this. I'm not sure who gets to be the judge of whether I achieve that.

Enough about me. If you opened this document because of the title, then you probably want to read about the Age of Riches. You've come to the right place! It's a personal obsession of mine.

Here is what we think we know:

Lasting from the end of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-second century, the Age of Riches is defined as an intense and consuming explosion of digital information that could be characterised as a sweeping mania (and has been called the first global movement, although it would bring no unity of purpose). The rise of instantaneous communication, coupled with a period of general deregulation in areas such as trade, travel, and – crucially – information: did these things lie at the heart of that wild time? It seems like an easy generalisation.

Let's start again:

The Age of Riches is a unique challenge. Previous eras have been studied in an entirely different way. What evidence remains? asked the historians of the past. They found what physical confirmation they could by digging up objects, reading the scant written record (inevitably littered with the bias of the victor or the privileged), cherishing whatever had survived down the centuries. They studied exhaustively, then extrapolated. Every crumb was a gem.

In the Age of Riches, there are simply too many crumbs to find value in them all. In fact, the sheer amount of data is its own worst enemy. Vast amounts of data were taken and stored about every person: thoughts noted, measurements taken, motives ascribed. At the same time, old methods of cataloguing and classification were simply not up to the task of keeping that data accessible.

I think I can explain it better like this:

In the Bronze Age, a dull rock would have been mined, its potential visible to those trained in such an art. The rock would be cut, then polished to a shine, and the shiny jewel would be set in a crown. The archaeologist skilled or lucky enough to find it would have seen its status to its contemporaries. In the Age of Riches, all rocks were deemed to be equally polishable, and therefore no rocks were worthy of polishing. They were people of a time that had everything and valued nothing. The task of the modern historian, then, begins with assigning worth by digging through the mountain of digital items that nobody rated to begin with.

Traditional measurements of metadata must be treated with absolute suspicion. Do we consider a source to be personal or public? Fictitious or real? Important or trivial? All lines are blurred.

It's a thrilling process. Am I capable of doing it justice? Would it be a good way to spend this short fleshy life?

And so to The Dance of the Horned Road.

On 23rd July, 2024, roughly five quintillion bytes of digital data were created. Documents came into being and were circulated instantly, with little metadata beyond the time and place of upload. Some were viewed by millions, some by only a handful. The Dance of the Horned Road was released on that day. The metadata that remains tells us it was labelled as an autobiographical document containing elements of fiction, but much of it makes no sense when viewed alongside other documents of that period. It's possible that the document was given a physical manifestation; printed materials do exist from that time, although that does not guarantee meaning or importance.

This document is not obviously special, or of interest. It holds no value beyond what we might, individually, assign to it. But it fascinates me. I came across it by accident, but there's a part of me that wants to think of it as fate. I know, I know, ridiculous. But it's hard to understand otherwise.

I've long had a game that I play at the end of long days, when I can't sleep for fear of dreaming. I link. I follow metadata from one document to the next, choosing a word at random, looking for documents that have been barely touched by the sifting process, which is (I believe) the great work of our age. I've uncovered the strangest things that way. Images you wouldn't believe with your own eyes. Stories that hardly make sense. The Dance of the Horned Road came to me that way – a truly random discovery. I read the first words with mild curiosity, and then I began to get sucked into the story, because it connected with me in a way that's difficult to explain in words. It's the tale of a young woman who doesn't know what to do with her life. She is given a quest that makes no sense. She is unshaped, undiscovered, unappreciated, in the way only a character from the Age of Riches can be.

I knew I'd found something special – not to the world, but to me. So here I am, at this moment, polishing her. She is, at least to me, a shining jewel.

This document – which I will annotate with my thoughts and perceptions – reads like a puzzle that begs to be solved but is determined to skip all the juicy clues. It makes little sense. It doesn't conform to any logic but its own. Things happen that could not possibly happen, and have meanings we could not possibly follow. The streaming side of me sees data: links and lines and numbers. Well, one number. But it can't make purpose from that. I think only my humanity can provide a reason for this dance. Romantic, I know. But aren't all quests on the romantic side?

I asked myself the same question over and over while reading: What does this all mean?

I'm beginning to think that's the wrong question to ask. What questions should I ask of it, and of that long-ago time that remains so well hidden under a wealth we cannot value? This is what lies at the heart of this personal project, and I hope, by the end, to have an answer.