DISENGAGIST LISTSERV
SEPTEMBER 4, 2098
The world’s richest man, founder and CEO of the company that still employs 10 percent of the entire world and only as long as they submit to long hours and low wages, who desired in his speech as high school valedictorian “to colonize another planet so Earth can be turned into a huge national park,” has died. Eric Brandt was 134.
Brandt did not and will not see his ambitions of a global national park fulfilled. Many of us were “employed” on Mars, and we do not intend to leave our planet again.
We are the Disengagists, and we have killed Eric Brandt.
Do not believe the obituaries that insist he died like anyone else—by accident, heart attack, old age, Lewy body dementia, or cancer of some kind. Do not forget us when the news of his death slips past in the jet stream of online noise. Stop and look. Slow down and look at Eric Brandt. Who believed the physical was rehearsal for the digital. Who robbed us of context. Who situated books next to fish oil next to flip-flops next to hip-hop and called it progress.
Who gave us stream of consciousness without consciousness.
Who went to space for no reason at all.
We make a mistake to call him a fool if we don’t say the same of ourselves. Legacy is just ego on a longer timeline. Humans have hated this planet for so long, does anyone even remember why? We will disengage. We will retrieve what was taken from us, we will return what we do not need. We will free ourselves from need, and we will step into a new world of quiet attention.
A human future is still possible. With our “finger bones and tendons and muscle and skin that can do marvelous things.” We honor the memory of our ancestors, like the hero Lyon Lumière who foretold this fight long ago, who did marvelous things like destroying the lights so we might see the stars.