and found in the media. The great difficulty of our time is that images are out of control, and for this reason it is difficult to understand their grammar, being simpler to understand the associations between each other or between image and real, and image and dream. Understanding the grammar of the images implies that we know how to deal with their scale, their level of interconnection and also their level of visibility, because eventually even the most hidden image can be transferred to the media. This means that there is a certain difficulty in escaping from the reach of the media. The interconnecting images of our time are connection-images, which validates our position as decoders (or encoders) of the connectors-images grammar.
The greater the cultural background of an individual, the greater his ability to deal successfully with connecting images. The big question is that we need to understand the isolated images on a first level, and then the images already connected, on a second level. Meanwhile, the images do not wait for the ideal frame of time to be perceptible to us. Images flow and their grammar is mutant. We need a homo cypiens, someone from the digital age to understand them.
7.The Macro-medium Era
As we saw before, it is above all in digital media, and not only, but in particular, that images are transformed into connection-images. Contributing to the evolution of this great medium, which is digital, are the connection-images that make use of their scale of interconnection. In this context, and also respecting the tyranny of the economy of the immediate, mass media and digital media merge into a multi-macro multiform that all agglutinates in a single matrix. That is to say, we currently only use a medium, a single medium of communication, and regardless of its formatting, in the end we notice that elements such as "linearity" are left behind to move to a time of "configurations". After all, the macro-medium is this interconnecting medium of multiple configurations. We have many entry points to deal with their narratives, characters, protagonists and antagonists. In this matrix medium everything can be translated from / to any image. The macro-medium is a wise image and a new half-image. Furthermore, it is the first medium that extinguishes the difference between medium and content, media and formats. The macro-medium is almost self-referential as it has its own fauna, flora and atmosphere. Metaphors aside, the macro-medium is simply the new version of what were the Radio, TV, Press, Net and Cloud. The simplification and tyranny of the immediate and minimalist, plus the liberal economy, were intended to create a construct that would simplify the connection between companies, institutions and brands, reaching directly the consumers. And they did it.
To speak in macro-medium is also a contradiction. Ultimately, in the era of macro-medium eras do not matter. Today, yesterday, in the 20thcentury, before that, what matters if everything is now on YouTube? Everything that was off as an offline image was imported into the macro-medium. This means that even the pre-media past is not away from mediation and digitization. The tendency is for the media to reduce themselves to a controlled minimalism of a single medium, acquiring a gigantic scale. Given the amount of connection-images that are imported into the record of this medium, it is odd how some things are not found within it. But the "natural" tendency is for everything to stay within the same macro-medium. The scale and reach are impressive.
One of the reasons why all connection-images, events, and cultural production are passed on to the great medium is because there is a concern to predict the future, as if this fact would draw us away from a catastrophe and bring us closer to a happy and lucky future. The more elements captured by the sub-media (mass media and social media, for example), the more power the macro-medium holds. And, little by little, or rather, very gradually, this medium grows and becomes a mega-archive through which it is possible to predict the future, because there is huge amount of information and knowledge of the past and the present that allows us to create anticipation models. This is called "futurocracy," that is, when our power lies in the way we make use of information in order to have some profitable applicability now or in the future. The same is to say that the images and their connections in this medium function as a sort of temporal device, a construct of change of reality, because the present is manipulated based on the past, and the future is manipulated based on the present.
The macro-medium abolishes the fact that there are classical notions of time, such as yesterday, now and tomorrow. Past centuries have seen a thread ball of antiquity that can be dismantled at our convenience. Everything is archived. All past eras are reduced to titles, labels, information entry points in the large macro-medium file. It is as if there is only this macro-medium and time is not useful to record the past as it happens in a museum. What is happening now is that things of the past can be imported into the present or into the future to please the conveniences of a "future" elite concerned with success.
Precisely because one lives in a "futurocratic" system and in an economy of the immediate, what matters is to have maximum power over works, content, information and knowledge, right now, so that utopian futures can be projected away from any rivalry with the reality. The great fear of a society based on instantaneous power over reality is that it will not have more power, that it will lose its ability to act on the present and the future. The fear of the futurocratic is that the power (kratos) ceases to be based on the images of the future that connect us to the present. Those who control these images control reality. Just as in Orwell's speech, whoever controls the past controls the future, and whoever controls the future controls the past. So, in fact, how can the future be ours if we do not control our past? Everything we do is recorded in the macro-medium, it cannot be deleted, but it can be "found" by third parties. Can we say that the future belongs to us? Or rather, did the future ever belong to us?
8.Kadima Kaizen
Cras es nostermeans in Latin that "the future is ours". In Japanese kaizen refers us to "future", meaning "what is forward", as the Hebrew term kadima. Speech has always had the future by reference, regardless of language or culture; we find there the term referring what "comes next". The future is ours because we are the ones who live in this present, but as the current presentness increasingly shortens the distance between present and the near future, the future is no longer thought of as a collective or civilizer one. Except in China, but China is not a country, it is a civilization. And that says it all. In this context it would be interesting to look at our relationship with the future at a time when individualism and egocentrism reign.
The future is an image of what comes next, which can be constructed from the present, as in the "metatopia", but because everything that appears again appears as entirely new, what we have is a "prototopia". The newness forces us to keep studying, analyzing, and learning again. We are perpetually newcomers to a world that has always seemed like a civilization of seniors. The old is the new "new." When we look back we see reflections of the future. When we glimpse images of the future, we revisit the past. The protagonists change, but the stories repeat themselves. We realize a disturbing repetition in the future that makes us think of time as a circular tyranny. What happened once will happen again, what will happen seems similar to what has already happened. Our current dilemma is to know what the present is for. Now, we are too busy to realize what is going on around us. The future is under construction and in the past there is too much past to get a sense of what has been built up until then, until today.
From the Objectivists’ point of view, like Ayn Rand, nothing should be interposed between us and the world. No one is mightier than the entrepreneurial individual. What counts is objective reality. This is how we can conceive "the future as our future, because we undertake it, because we build it. The future is not a random thing to happen, but rather an extrapolated present. We stopped living the now to project the tomorrow. But on the other hand, it also seems that we stopped thinking about tomorrow to live the now obsessively. In either case we are faced with a dimension of time, not space. The future is a time of projection that will be and is already ours. The present is ephemeral and we lose it to an agglutinating and massive past, in which everything fits and everything tyrannically encompasses.
The future has become the domain of goals, an aim, a place to reach, from there the concept of "metatopia", but this future forces us to
