Middle Marches in the Modern World

Even in our modern world, though we try to ignore the Middle Marches, we still carry a heavy load of superstition and irrational fear. Few are now afraid the faeries will come for our children in the middle of the night, or of the goblins steal what we hold most dear, but even now we have not escaped the grip of the Marches. As they were in the past, in the Middle Marches today our laws do not hold and we lose control. We still risk stepping across an invisible boundary into the Middle Marches to a place where we have little or no control.

The astounding, apparently unstoppable, collapse of the world financial systems is surely from the wilder regions of the Middle Marches and has reached into our world, taken control of the economy and somehow made it fall apart under the weight of more debt than there is money in the whole world! As if to prove we have stepped across the boundary, political and economic masterminds have singularly failed to explain the collapse, much less to correct it.

It may not be the faerie magic of ancient folk-tales or the devilish manipulation of our more recent religious descriptions of the Marches, but by our own hands we have made and let loose a monster we simply can't understand, never mind control or destroy. These are the lands of the modern Middle Marches; the creations of human ingenuity and artifice that by some apparently alchemical mystery take on a life of their own and grow beyond the skills of their poor makers.

Creations, structures, systems and developments that operate and make their own decisions and changes too fast for humans to understand, are visions of our future according to proponents such as Ray Kurzweil or Vernor Vinge. They are the first signs of a growing together of human skills and technologies to form what has become known as a Singularity - a hive-like collection of people like you or I living in a culture and society that moves and changes so fast and so far beyond the capability of any human to fully understand that it can be thought of as a living creature in its own right.

This, they say, is the Middle Marches of the modern world. A world in which we are effectively powerless to control our won lives but which we - as a species - built for ourselves. This modern view of the mysterious world beyond our own is perhaps no better a view than the old folk-tales of the medieval fears of our past, but it may be that we have at last begun to understand what makes them such places of fear and strangeness. If nothing else, people such as Kurzweil, Vinge and the members of the World Transhumanist Association, or "h+" as it has become better known, are beginning to map out some of the boundaries that lie between our world and the Singularity - the Middle Marches of the modern world.

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