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And what if consumption has superseded itself with the advent of Internet advertisement?

Since commercials are now possible on global scale, while being contextually aimed at specific audiences, it becomes less and less interesting to mass-produce for crowds subjugated by manufactured desire for standardized objects. Manufacturing myth, like cars, TV’s or CD players, is no more necessary to reach a sufficient audience for your business. For you are no more limited to sell your stuff to the guy next door and you don’t need to sell at million-scale either. With little investment, you can propose your Aberdeen-made blueberry and minth liqueur to a car mechanic in the suburbs of Beijing, who, just by chance, happens to like that sort of thing. If he’s in a hurry, you can even ship it with FedEx. All you have to do is to have your ad placed on spetialized sites (say “weirdliqueurs.com”): something youknowwho contextual ads and co. can take care of for you in no time.

What you can do, anyone can. Any product can be distrubuted and sold on global scale. You no more need to find yourself an optimal client nest beyond hills, seas and roadway crossings. You don’t need to spend thousands on commercials in general magazines that’ll only bring something if you sell millions of products. Small things can survive – many of them, in fact. And with the small things, the small desires for them. Many small desires that haven’t been manufactured for you by dinosaur brandmakers but that just happened to you, on last-year’s Seoul trip, say, where, looking at the Han river, you began to like that blueberry liqueur.

What this possibly means for our World is the end of mass production, mass labour, mass consumption, mass braindeath. Some time soon, you’ll make money by being creative again.  And at this very moment, we’ll enter into the new age of diversified consumption.

As for the new pathologies of the eight billions of singularities to come, that is another story to be told by science-fiction.

Allopatric speciation of fruit-flies seems to take but weeks, much less then squirrels separated by drifting continents and floods. How about us? How long will it take until we are no more alone… again ? since the fun times of Universe sharing with the Neanderthalians as the only other tool-making, walking and talking beings.

We might soon get a chance to figure it out, as some of us seem on their way to make it to Mars, after all. And chances are that if some eventually settle there, you’ll probably not get to see them every weekend. They will live their separate ways, their separate survival strategies, their separate sicknesses. Within two or three hundred years, it will be dangerous to visit these remote humans, as our immune systems won’t be apt, anymore, to deal with the unique virus mutations that will occur in the Mars colonies. We will end up living separately, dying separately and will eventually evolve into… two separate species.

What will happen then? Will the martians communicate with us? Enslave us? Exterminate us? Or will it be moral, for them, to farm and eat us, as much as we find it morally acceptable to eat other species today? Will we drift so much apart that we will be to them what pigs, dogs and horses are to us? Will it then be perverse for them, to copulate with earthlings, will they call this “androphilia” and sneeze with despise? Will we drift from racism to specism? Will we found a universal community of sentient beings? Or will our misunderstanding be so great that we’ll eventually loose all interest in each other?

In any case, this confrontation with such a similar otherness will lead us to re-evaluate all our values, and some of these to our greatest good. Rather than waiting for aliens to come, this is our chance to make some of our own.

3D with glasses? Definitely not the next step as we’ve seen it all: color filters (bu-ah!), polarising glasses (neat but don’t tilt your head), alternate hiding of right and left eye with liquid crystal glass (kind off heavy for the brain, not that much used for left and right hemisphere alterning in 48/sec tact).

No, definitely, the next step is 3D without glasses.  Or is it? Isn’t the eye&object complex rather as old as the principle behind the creation of Chauvet or Lascaux? Isn’t the next step rather 3D… without eyes.

Connecting screening devices by micro-electrodes directly to the optical nerve is the next step. Ongoing research is already done on this technology in the prospect of healing the blind.

And beyond that: wireless chips implanted directly inside the brain: this is the next big step of real multimedia experience.  Call your lover and chat from within your mind in the middle of a business meeting! Or spare at least on your next myopia operation: buy – with WiFi and HD receptors and switch between the reality in front of you and the other, the world of 3D image-flow in information space.

Really, who needs glasses?