Digital Fire: A Manifesto
Welcome to the Age of Reinvention, we’ve been expecting you
When in the course of human events—a new planetary movement springs up and connects all societies—it becomes self-evident that the time has come to fully embrace reinvention for the purpose of survival. It’s time to engage in true passionate creativity, and all that follows from asking more of ourselves, our lives, our minds and hearts, our cultures, governments, organizations and institutions—every single day.
Mark it on your Google calendar and ink it on your wall calendar. Draw it in the dirt and write it on the sky with an airplane or a magic marker. Scribble it in a notebook or YouTube it to the masses. Text it, email it, blog it, whisper it, and yell it in the streets. Write it on a cave wall or graffiti it on a brick wall in the heart of the city. The Age of Reinvention has arrived.
Wonderful, tragic, and cataclysmic events have unfolded in recent days, months, and years. Every person on Earth has been impacted. Societies, countries, and cultures have all begun spiraling in a new direction—a direction with no less an end result than altering the history of the human race.
Interconnected through technology, we’ve grown new minds and new spines, and we can no longer afford to live stagnant unsurprising lives.
People everywhere now know that open minds and engaged humans are the minds and people of the future. Now is the time for Free Thought and Freethinkers. If the current version of our future isn’t teaching us lessons of urgency and ingenuity, and we aren’t at our core already reinventing ourselves, we’re on the wrong screen and need to quickly swipe away, and find the screen showing this crucial idea and vital way forward.
Reinvent or crawl back under your covers for a decades-long nap. Set your alarm for a century into the future. Rethink where you are, what you can accomplish, and how you present yourself to every person you come in contact with. Reinsert yourself into the digital flow and join your life already in progress. Renew how your perception, beliefs, and essence of being shapes your interactions with the people of this world. Reshape thoughts into organic devices able to pinpoint and communicate with a human being on the opposite side of the planet, blasting through language barriers and cultural walls, and getting directly to the point of being alive in our historical moment.
Instantaneously connecting via text, email, Zoom—has brought citizens of Earth closer together, and a perfectly imperfect organic change movement was made possible through our devices. Worldwide connections are made. The fuse is lit. Live, immediate transmissions from zones of pain, power, protest, disaster have been broadcast and assimilated. Either by evolving into the New Now, or pushed by dire circumstances, more people on the planet know they want a fundamental shift to happen in their lives. Stories were sent from far flung locations, old and new media intermingled and keep intermingling. The Digital Everywhere was created by necessity. Our planet required it. If you are engaged, alert, and feel a growing spark inside—you’re open to the idea of reinvention happening on a global scale. Welcome to this precise moment. We’ve been expecting you.
Digital communication devices are accessible to people in the most remote corners of the planet. Reinvention is within their grasp, touchpad, keypad, mobile device. Connect and aspire—inspire, and feel the digital fire. The reinvention of getting the word out is complete, languages have been decoded, and everyone’s ideas about everything are being transmitted and are freely encircling the globe.
Imagine if the Declaration of Independence were written on a laptop and emailed to world leaders, kings, and tyrants as soon as the virtual ink dried. What if smartphones had been in use during the Salem Witch trials? Candid powdered wig photos showing twisted grimaces of those who murdered out of fear and ignorance. Strange goings on would have abounded; voices, images, and mapped locations sent by an unknown being from another place and time, crossing through the time barrier. With your magical device recording the deaths hanging in the air, they’d suspect you were truly in league with dark forces, and being hanged or burned at the stake would be in your immediate future. Now, these devices are uncovering and upending murderous regimes in our current times. Look around. Revolutions are not televised as Gil Scott-Heron predicted in song, but uploaded to the instantaneous Internet in real time.
Freethinkers and open-minded dreamers are giving the world a new spin. Just as in past centuries, freethinkers are permanently altering the future. As if they’ve been beamed in from our own future, they’ve arrived. Not a moment too soon. Ready to travel the globe or wander through a neighborhood, altering history as they go. Sending out warnings and visions of change. Look around. They’re sitting next to you in your local coffee shop or bar. Feel free to interact with them. Two people can now start a movement. It’s not just allowed, it’s encouraged. Creating life-altering change through exchanging ideas is a fundamental wonderful expectation. It’s now expected you’re here to change the world for the better.
We are living in an expansive moment in world history. Societies are being turned inside-out. Rethink the way you perceive and operate in the natural and digital world. Hearts and minds are being rewired in our digital world—from continent to continent and pole to pole. Take a breath; feel it to be the real truth. The internal architecture of our brains is being rebuilt. Reinvention has been established as a primary goal for billions of people.
Reinvention isn’t a commodity. It’s a quantum idea, a miraculous meme, a fluid structure, a new set of eyes, a path forward. People have hit a wall, and they realize it’s time to either knock through it, crawl over it, levitate higher than the tallest building, or just open their eyes to a world where walls only serve to unite, not divide. A wall with holes in it allows vines and curving stems holding flowers to reach over to the other side.
Reinvention asks everything of you, and it asks nothing of you. You can join the reinvention movement from anywhere on the globe. It’s up to each person to rethink thinking and renew their being. The dumbing down of cultures and citizens is a tragedy that must be reversed. Words, language, ideas, and reading many books is a superpower. Dive into the deep end of the ocean of knowledge. Every book, and every type of book is a miracle. The intellectual erosion of humanity has already gone too far. There are countless books, and millions and millions of them are good books. And there are new words and thoughts commingling and changing minds, younger and older. Minds with accumulated celebratory creative wisdom in them are needed to get us through the near future and into the new future. Smart must be the new strong, the new belief system, the way of living life in the New Now. Think. Think of new ways to be, do, act, live.
The future has arrived. We are living in the Age of Reinvention.
The New Now
Manifestos, Reinventions & Declarations
Revised & Updated
by
Russell C. Smith
Michael Foster
Marvelous thinking and writing, Russell.