Think about plankton – not Plankton, Mr. Krab’s Spongebob nemesis – the real stuff, adrift out there in the wide, wide, wide, wide sea. Plankton is a plant that converts sunlight and nutrients or other, creepier stuff, into energy that it converts to matter to become, well, plankton.
So, what IS plankton, in the grand scheme of things (the GSOT)? Why, the building block upon which most ocean life feeds. Big fish eat little fish that eat little fish that feed on plankton.
Now, consider the lowly aphid. I just put a post about aphids on my TangleWicket website, so I’ve been thinking about ’em.
Aphids eat plants, just like those things that feed on plankton, and everybody else feeds on them. Ants actually herd aphids because they produce a gel called honey dew that is a major treat over in the ant hill.
There are tons of bugs that eat aphids – beyond your ladybugs, you got your lacewing larvae and parasitic wasps just for starters. They’re pretty low on the food chain.
It’s okay, because aphids give live birth. To females. No need for male sperm. One aphid can lay up to 80 female aphids during its 25-day lifetime. And they can give birth to a dozen of ’em a day. A day, Louie, a day. Boo-boo-boo-boop look, it’s a whole population!
So, here we are talking about bugs and plankton, and somehow it comes back to you and me, doesn’t it?
In the GSOT, you and I are just consumers of stuff that gets produced, right? We have our preferences, but we don’t have control.
We’re like aphids on the leaf of life, consuming what we assume to be important until we’re one day gobbled up by some entity. We all kick off eventually, right? Go to the Big Whatever – what happens next is anyone’s guess.
While we wait for that eventuality, our minds and wallets are continuously picked and prodded by the world around us – by the world we’ve put around us.
I’ve been wrestling all day with AI – from the confusion of the AI engine I’ve been using to build my websites to the ludicrously cheerful female voice taking my order at Taco Bell to the digital assistant at the CVS to the automated AI job interviewer. I feel picked at, prodded, and reduced to answering human yes/no questions to a machine that, for all its clever words and smarmy voices, still only understands yes/no. Binary switches – maybe a billion of ’em in a row, but binary none the less.
Hmmm, I’m not sure I can help you with that. Please press 1 to try again.
We are gobbled up by the massive, monstrously voracious world around us. Maybe not physically, but our attention, our time, our thoughts.
Because, my friend, you and I? We are merely aphids.
John D Reinhart 