Laughing at the Rain: The Burden of Transactional Interfaces

I have reached out, quite a number of times, to various people and institutions, simply to share ideas and insights developed over decades of independent thought. The rare responses I receive often seem to assume that I am attempting to leverage some relationship for commercial, reputational or institutional advantage. I am not. It is sad that people have become so accustomed to transactional relationships that an unsolicited thought is treated with suspicion, as though every exchange must conceal an ambition, an obligation or an attempt to acquire influence. People seem increasingly unwilling to engage unless there is something in it for them, or unless they can be certain that nobody else might gain some commercial, political or reputational leverage from the exchange.

This is how a culture dies, how a civilisation hollows itself out: not necessarily through catastrophe, but through the unspoken, progressive assumption that every human interaction is adversarial, competitive or commercially motivated. I have no such intentions, which, ironically, seems to make me appear more untrustworthy. That is what the world has come to. It arrived here some time ago, of course, but the machinery now runs largely of its own accord, reproducing the essential distrust, isolation and hostility it claims to overcome. We call it progress, efficiency, security, perhaps even continuity. Whatever we call it, it is killing us, and we seem incapable of recognising the absurdity of what we have constructed. A runaway train, accelerating towards nowhere, no one can see you crying when it rains.