The 21st century Conquistadors are Virtual

 

The 21st century Conquistadors are Virtual

(Originally written January 24, 2013)

There’s no mystery anymore, not really. Everything’s out there somewhere, hidden in a motherboard, waiting to be cracked open, engineered, coded, set loose. The armies aren’t riding horses now — they’re wired into cyberspace. Ownership, capture, domain — the trophies of this new world aren’t land or gold but data and imagination.

History is full of it — wars, colonies, invasions, all the ways people claimed power. You can search it in seconds now: empires built on blood, slavery traded like currency, massacres as birthrights, faith battles turned political wars. It’s all there in the digital libraries. You don’t need me to stretch theories or polish footnotes. Fact-check is instant. Click and it’s there, no gatekeepers.

England had to fight Spain, France, the Dutch. America slaughtered the Indians and called it nationhood. Africa was ripped into slavery and sold off as trade. The Israelites were cut down 2,000 years ago, and still the Middle East rages with the echo of that wound. Our existence was carved into shape by violence. And we inherited that DNA whether we like it or not.

But maybe — just maybe — something’s shifting. The conquistador spirit, the old militia mindset, it’s mutating. Instead of guns and swords, we’ve got keyboards and screens. Instead of ships, we ride bandwidth. The militia of minds is swelling — armies of followers logged on, marching not across seas but through signals.

Look at how fast things travel: Lance Armstrong confesses and Oprah’s ratings shoot global. Barack Obama becomes both the contradiction and the rebirth of America in one body. Tobago votes and suddenly Trinidad’s political map redraws itself. My friend Prizgar Gonzales puts out a book and within hours, strangers in China are reading it. Prince Harry’s scandalous jewels leak online but he still commands his battalion overseas. And me — Grace Walker — I can throw my thoughts into this web, and they travel farther than my feet ever could.

So yeah — start your search engine. Type your way into new societies. Maybe even begin the healing of the old perils that blood and history left us. Because the new conquistadors aren’t marching on land. They’re inside the motherboards, inside our connections, rewriting the map of human power in real time.

Come with me. Let’s see where this virtual militia takes us — as global citizens, as voices carried farther than we ever dreamed.

While you’re here— this is where the thread keeps pulling. If the web gave us voice, AI hands us a new kind of echo. I talk about that here:

Same question, different decade: how do we use these tools without losing ourselves?

Comments

Post a Comment