AlieNation: The Map of Despair

In the modern world, control is automatically exercised over us through the spaces in which we live and move. We go through certain rituals in our lives: work, “leisure”, consumption, submission. Because the world we live in was designed solely for this purpose. We all know that malls are for shopping, offices for working, living rooms for watching TV and schools for obeying our teachers. All the spaces we move in have predetermined meanings. And all that is needed to propel us forward in these spaces is that we are kept on the usual paths. It's hard to find any activity at Walmart other than looking at items and purchasing. And because we're so used to it, it's difficult for us to imagine doing anything else there. Not to mention, if we think about it, anything other than shopping there is illegal.

There are fewer and fewer free and undeveloped spaces in the world in which we can give free rein to our bodies and our minds. Almost every space that people enter belongs to a person or a group and is already occupied with an existing meaning and a defined use: private properties, shopping arcades, city highways, classrooms, nature reserves,... And our defined paths through the world rarely take us close to the few free spaces that remain.

These spaces in which thoughts and desires can be completely free are being replaced by controlled spaces like Disneyland. Places where our desires are prefabricated for us and sold back to us at the expense of our wallets and our feelings. Giving our own meaning to the world and creating our own ways of acting and playing in it are fundamental parts of human existence. Today, we shouldn't be surprised that so many of us feel desperate and unfulfilled when we never have the opportunity to move in spaces that demand exactly that of us. Precisely because the world has so few of these places left to offer and the routine of our everyday lives never takes us there, it is not surprising that we are forced to resort to places like Disneyland to get any semblance of play and adventure. So the true adventures our hearts long for are replaced by imitation adventures, and the excitement of creating is replaced by the excitement of viewing.

Our time, like our space, is completely occupied and regulated. The division of our space is actually just an expression of what has already happened to our time. The entire world runs and lives according to a standardized time calculation, designed to precisely coordinate our movements across the entire planet. Within this larger system, all of our lives are regulated: through our work routines and our timetables, through public transport schedules and shop opening times. This planning of our lives, which begins in childhood, exerts a subtle but powerful control over all of us. We forget more and more that the time in our lives actually belongs to us alone and that we can decide how we want to spend it. Instead, we think in terms of working days, lunch breaks and weekends. A truly spontaneous life is unthinkable for most of us. And so-called “free time” is usually just time scheduled to do something other than work. How often do you get to watch the sunrise? How many afternoon walks do you actually have time for on a warm spring day? If you had the opportunity to take a trip like no other this week, would you actually take it?

These restrictive spaces and schedules drastically limit the great potential of our lives. They also isolate us from each other. In our workplace, we spend most of our time doing a specific job with a specific group of people in a specific room (or at least in a specific environment). Such limiting, repetitive experiences offer us a very limited perspective on the world and prevent us from meeting other people with completely different backgrounds. Our home isolates us even further from each other. These days we lock each other out in our own homes, partly out of fear of those whom capitalism has treated worse than us, partly because we have fallen for the paranoia propaganda of the corporations that sell security systems. Today's suburbs are graveyards of a community that packs people separately into boxes... like supermarket produce, sealed airtight to stay "fresh." Because of the thick walls between us and our neighbors and because our families and friends are scattered across many different cities and countries, it is difficult to build any community at all, let alone live in a community in which people can benefit from each other's creativity. Both our home and our work chain us to a certain place, to a certain spot and prevent us from traveling around the world in any other way except on hasty vacation trips.

Our travel is also restricted and restrictive. Our modern transportation options - cars, buses, subways, trains, planes - keep us all on a predetermined path and we watch the outside world rush past us through a window as if it were a rather boring television show. Each of us lives in a personal world, which is largely made up of well-known destinations (workplace, supermarket, apartment, dance hall, etc.) with a few connections in between (sitting in the car, standing on the subway, walking up the escalator, etc.) and a tiny chance to have a completely new experience or discover new places. People could drive through the expressways of all EU countries without seeing anything other than asphalt and rest areas, as long as they stay in the car. Because we are trapped in our fixed paths, we cannot imagine truly free travel, expeditions that always bring us into direct contact with completely new people and things.

Instead, we are stuck in traffic jams, surrounded by hundreds of other people who are in the same predicament as ourselves, but from whom we are separated by our metal cars. As a result, they appear to us more as objects on our path than as fellow human beings. We think we reach more things and places in the world through our modern means of transportation, but in fact we see far less, if any, of all the things and places. As our transportation options increase, our cities proliferate further into the landscape. The more transport routes increase, the more cars are needed. More cars take up more space and therefore the distance keeps increasing. At this rate, highways and gas stations will one day replace everything that made travel worthwhile to begin with.

Some of us look to the Internet as the “final frontier,” a free, not yet fully developed space with much to discover. Cyberspace may offer a certain degree of freedom to those who can afford it, but whatever it offers us, it only offers it to us if we leave our bodies at the door: through voluntary amputation. Remember that you are made up of both a body and a mind. Is it actually freedom to stare intently at flashing lights for hours without using our senses of touch or taste? Have you forgotten the feeling of wet grass or warm sand on your bare feet? Or smelling eucalyptus trees or firewood? Can you remember the smell of tomatoes? The glow of candlelight, the excitement of running, swimming and touching?

Today we connect to the Internet when we want to experience something exciting without feeling like we're being taken for a ride, because modern life is so constrained and predictable that we've simply forgotten how pleasurable actions and movements in the real world can be. Why should we settle for the limited freedom that the internet can offer us when there are so many more experiences and feelings to experience out here in the real world? We should run, dance, canoe, live life to the fullest and discover new worlds. What new worlds? We need to rediscover our own bodies, our senses and the space around us. Then we can transform that space into a new world that we can design according to our needs.

Until then we have to introduce new games. Games that can take place in the occupied spaces of the world, in the malls, restaurants and classrooms, and overturn their given meanings so that we can give these spaces new meanings in accordance with our dreams and desires. We need games that bring us closer together, out of the confinement and isolation of our own homes and into public spaces where everyone can benefit from each other's help and creativity. We will recite poetry in factories, give concerts in the streets, have sex in fields and libraries, free picnics in supermarkets and flea markets on highways.

Of course, we also need to introduce new concepts of time and new ways of traveling. Try living without a clock, without adjusting your life to the hectic world. Try taking a long journey on foot or by bike so that you can experience everything from your starting point to your temporary destination without looking through a window. Explore your neighborhood, climb rooftops, look around the furthest corners of your surroundings that you've never noticed before. You'll be amazed at how much adventure awaits you out there!

Space/Time Control, Space Travel, and Space Exploration