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This is late.

I have a valid reason for this however.

2009 and the decade that was leave me sort of exhausted. It’s not a matter of just life changes (there were a ton), direction changes (again) or personal growth and development. It’s that as the decade progressed, living – the very act of getting up in the morning – started to become a process almost algorithmic in scope.

A decade in which we became post-human. We live outside of ourselves as much as we live within. The filters and the boundaries that used to be recognized as the “private life” permeated with every new innovation in connectivity, portability, transparency, “social” and Social to the point that we’re very, very close to eliminating the physical and haptics from the interface, going straight to the cybernetic organism.

As of now we’re textual cyborgs, or more appropriately given the cross-modality of expression: digital representational cyborgs: entities existing by and through the representation of digital data.

At any rate: the maintenance of self as such is tiring.

Tiring and without end. The downtimes we used to be accustom to are making way to in-flight wifi, smart dashboards in the car, push notifications, twitter and SMS. Post-humanism, the transference of self into more forms than the pure physical, is not science fiction. It’s fact. And to some its a predicate toward living.

That includes for me.

Moments not online are moments I’m free from myself more than with myself. That is disturbing. That means that when I’m running for 10 miles or so, and completely off grid, I’m without identity. There is something poetic about that, or disturbing. Choose.

This brings me to the decade.

I started the decade searching for a way to bring myself into two planes of existence simultaneously. 2000 was the year of Ricochet, promising universal wireless broadband via a bulky adapter and lamp-post based transmitters. Those transmitters are still all around, Ricochet is not.

Ricochet was part of my plan to allow myself to bifurcate into two parallel identities. one a person, one an IP address.

I did not get that through wireless transvergence, but I did end up maintaining that bifurcation through a site and identity I’ve maintained for almost twenty years now. The last decade was one in which the concept of “me” as an online identity almost, and nearly superseded the identity of me as me.

I spent ten years working away from that.

In the last ten years I did a lot. I graduated college. Lost my long held high school job. Lost my mind a bit in the middle there. Got into grad school, met Amy, got married, got my job at WBR, befriended my favorite band, had a kid and now I’m again on the cusp of some major changes.

The ten years that have passed have realized things I previously dreamed about in the world. We saw the best of what human innovation can offer to connect us to concepts of ourselves far exceeding physical limitations, and at the same time realized that so much growth out of ourselves doesn’t necessarily mean the best of humanity will always be represented.

For me, I’ve had the privilege of working with great tools, technology and people to explore the aspects of our post-human condition to various extents, both artistic and practical.

The current state we’re at has what I took for granted as a normal reality. We are pervasively connected with ubiquitous computers, something that was relegated to clunky devices in academia when I graduated college. But what is that doing to us? What is the fact that I’m writing this at 38000 feet over the midwest doing to me?

We are at the fulcrum of a decade poised upon either an ascension to something amazing or a descending into something slightly mortifying. I hope the power of the tools we wield are used in a way to construct a better reality for ourselves. I hope that we don’t take the elevation of dimensions of existence beyond mere physical as a way to remove accountability and personal motivation from our every day living.

More than anything, I hope that the world I am raising my son in retains the sense of aesthetic beauty which ultimately shapes memory and history more than pixel laden design and curvy aluminum.

I hope that in ten years, when my son is 11, he can still wake up and go outside to a sun rise, and leave the phone behind. Even if only once in a while.