Purple: A Way Forward

Purple is a positive, optimistic book in the Futurist. Technology Speculation. Where Are We Going? What Happens Next? Abundance, post Singularity, genre. Purple is about the future of the human project. It's about where humans have been, where we are now, and more importantly where we are going. We humans are the only known technological civilisation in the universe. We have built a world of information and knowledge, and we are getting better every hour. Technology is all we have, and we have built something that is simply too big to fail. Purple is a book of big ideas, exorcising the extremes of conservation groupies, climate change prophets and Green politics. Purple has always been the colour of excess, luxury and extravagance. Purple is the new Green. Nothing is running out. We are surrounded by infinite amounts of matter, energy and time. Our only visible deficit is information. Purple is an antidote to negativity, to a gathering hoard of doom scribblers, peddling an increasingly dark melancholic vision, constituting a denial of hope and a lack of kindness to billions of our fellow humans for an admixture of odd philosophical and quasi-religious reasons. An ever-expanding library of disaster porn, portrays humans as a disease, or a pestilent burden to the planet, a temporary natural aberration needing correction. Their gloomy fatalism is absent any celebration of human progress, or acknowledgment of future prospects. We are rarely told how almost everything is improving. Rainforests, oil, water, fresh air, fish, the ice caps, and a long list of assorted human necessities, all allegedly squandered out of existence. Technology is our enemy. The silly spectre of Malthus stalks the halls. All is negative up to and including the long overdue asteroid impact. The world after people now warrants serious academic concern. Purple presents carefully argued opinion that these unenthusiastic authors are just plain wrong. Human science and technology has brought us to where we are now. Technology and the western, capitalist, value system stand as our supreme achievements. Purple is about addressing the information deficit and welcomes the inevitable rollout of AI to automate the wealth creation process to make us all as rich, but with a note of caution. AI needs regulation and human control. Sustainability; staying as we are, is a dead end. The billions outside the wall want what we have. We want more. Purple is an optimistic thesis on the human future. We are all billionaires in waiting. We don't need to worry about conserving energy, dwindling oil supplies, food shortages, or the global collapse. On the contrary, the pleasing prospect of an infinite future is a licence to consume more. Purple is a new philosophical underpinning of the consumer society, urging a guilt free explosion of endless consumption. Borrowing now, whatever it takes, against our infinite future resources, will close the knowledge deficit, inspire confidence, and dispel fear. Purple is therefore the natural colour of the abundance movement. Purple explains why globalisation is necessary and why western technological civilisation dominates all other social models. Purple seeks a conscience easing inflation of science and technology as an antidote to Luddites and anti-technology rants. Does it mean we'll all be happy and love each other to bits? Not by a long way. Purple is not a perfect one-world hippy commune solution to anything; it is simply a statement of the inevitable outcome of human progress and technological development. The human project is too smart to fail, and too big to fail. Human supremacy is primary, we will never surrender to corporations or machines. We have the confidence that comes from owing everything, and we fear nothing. If the doom mongers are right, and Nature made an error, then it won't matter a damn, we can party on, and dance our merry dance towards the edge of the cliff, or wait patiently for the inevitable asteroid.