Homo Lingua
- Bora Jung
- Mar 5, 2020
- 3 min read
Future Scenario: Living without chewing energy
My scenario narrates the perspective of looking at the body as a tool and technology. Energy is the capacity to survive, move, think, and work; it is the lifeblood of activity. What if we could consume the minimum kinetic energy and intake the same amount of at the same time?
Meals are getting more straightforward in modern society, such as eating an energy bar or drinking protein powder. Eating food is no longer happy. In contemporary society, people are too busy; the happiness of eating is gone.
It doesn’t make sense to consume body energy by moving the jaw muscle for food. This is a waste of my energy. Instead, people would save kinetic energy and preserve it, and the body energy should be used to survive.
Every chemical source of energy for nutrition turns into liquid. Every food is liquified to maintain life.
However, the jaw muscle has slowly degenerated and has turned into a vestigial organ which is not needed to survive as life evolves, increasingly shrink, or degenerates.
The jaw muscle not only plays a role in chewing food to swallow and digest, but also moving shapes of the mouth to speak. So, people will have trouble communicating with others with spoken language.
Luckily, they are living in a super developed digital world, so people could communicate and interact online.
20 years later…. Also, the most significant development of digitalization, they keep their body to maintain people’s life, people’s EGOs exist on the Internet. Of course, they can go back to their physical body from cyberspace when they need.
No one uses spoken language, and in terms of a theory of evolution, a human being will have changed their mouth structure for sucking as their energy source, not for chewing and for communicating.
Human nature is Homo Lingua; a human is adjustable and curious who will eventually take over and explore the linguistic. They invent a new system of language which never knows whether it is another evolution or degeneration of language. For example, ‘T’ means ‘I want to pee’. ‘Triple L’ is ‘I love you’, and ‘STS’ is ‘I am hungry’.
Design fiction, allowing my imagination to be expressed as a story, creates a mock-up of tangible futures. This ‘living without’ experiment could suggest directions on how to build and solidify the idea. Following the story, I could regulate the rules of the trial, predict the detailed future, and suggest other possibilities which had not been proved. Likewise, William Gibson says, “the future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed. In other words”. I could create new scenarios regarding how to investigate future perspectives could lead to various
consequences.
What if everyone cannot live in cyberspace?
Everyone is talking loudly in the video. Then, the conversation becomes ambiguous and people make strange noises. When the screen switches, one person is floating alone in cyberspace. They communicate with each other by texting in cyberspace. In the end, what happens to the other people who are left in the real world, those who cannot go to cyberspace?
The video can explain how systems change. A variety of changes, interventions, and disruptions accumulate across time and space until the system reaches a tipping point. Then, at a moment that cannot be predicted, a small release of energy triggers a much larger release and the system as a whole transforms.
In summary, my initial idea was to explore a food(energy) crisis in the future. I have not considered the danger of running out of food in the world; in the short or even medium-term, if so, I would like to think I could survive even with energy drinks, which is an alternative solution. Also, if the solution is to live in the cyberworld, then I would accept it. I, as a middle class average person, have relative access to a solution that others may not have. Consequently, I only think of the changes for myself, not for all.
Chew the cud for the further mission to occur in
I suggested cyberspace as a means to alter the error of spoken communication via technological development. On the other hand, like the last scene of the video, there is the possibility that some people could be excluded from using the suggested solution due to a disparity in technology. If the gap in technology development persists, developing countries in 2045 will have no answer to the food crisis and are less likely to own the technology to sustain life in cyberspace. According to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals 7(SDG7), development related to technical processes must ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for ‘all’. This is a mission statement that I could reflect on further, for future scenarios.
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