A wooden shelf sags from the weight of a hundred useless books, manuals, and binders, all full with saturated, pointless paper work. The dark ink once inscribing the complicated instructions to that piece-of-shit, worthless, Brother laser-jet printer, now bleeds illegibly, permeating through the discarded print, leaving behind black trace marks, like mascara stains running down the rosy cheeks of high school date, dumped days before the big homecoming dance. The shelf, barely balancing upon its quivering wooden feet, stands, although drunk, hunched over, serving as a sort of testament to a bygone era.
A wasteful age of physical media and print, killed by the technological revolution, born from machines oozing a lifeblood of zeros and ones. Moore's Law, as the symptom of exponential technological growth has become to be defined, has gifted us biological creatures the ability to thrive in a world dominated by computer intelligence, artificial intelligence, and lack of natural intelligence. Even as I type this silly narrative, poking away at a plastic keyboard with my fleshy fingers, every word is analyzed, checked, and corrected for error by an algorithm smarter, quicker, and more efficient than I could ever dream to become.
I wouldn't dare fathom to pick up a book of defined words, thick as a brick. The thought of consulting a thesaurus is as extinct an idea as the stegosaurus itself. Yet as I stand pondering the shelf of rotten books beholden of me, I am reminded of an era that produced so very much, but ultimately could not sustain itself. All-in-all, no different that the ruinous skeleton of the very building that encapsulates the cupboard of decaying literature. A twisted shell of sheet metal, crashing in the wind, and oozing cancerous chemicals from purposely abandoned barrels and drums, which slowly leech their contents into the natural aquifer buried deep below my feet. Hollow warehouses once lined with monstrous steel furnaces designed to melt the Earth's raw metals into dollar bills now remain as metal canvases, covered over with colorful graffiti and wanna-be gang symbols.
This era of production was no match for the technological witch that has ravaged the Earth's established societies, stunting its civilians with a spell of simplicity and efficiency. As society continues to progress ahead for the better, the shadows of our past industrial damage exist like inflamed, crooked scars, telling the story of unregulated industry, pollution, and greed encompassing the likes of nothing this planet has ever endured the burden of before. Our only hope now is that our evolving technology will advance quick enough to save us from ourselves.
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