Big Trouble in Little Punctuation

The broad-minded premise of Neil Burger's Teen Choice Award nominated-Film adaptation of Alan Glynn's techno thriller novel, Limitless (2011), is that we're only using a fraction of our available brain capacity. That we're not making use of our combined innate power to move through the world, because our capabilities are hidden from us. Bradley Cooper's titular character comes across a nootropic drug by the name of NZT-48, to game the stock market, become the President of the United States, and have sex with his wife or whatever. Get this - what if we're only using a fraction of the emotional range of punctuation, ad in-turn not utilizing it to it's true cosmic potential? What if we were able to unlock stigmeological capacities of punctuation, the likes of which we have never seen before? What if we were able to reinvent new modes of punctuation. The possibilities, if I may dare to say, could be Limitless (2011).

Punctuation: The Final frontier

I say we reformulate the very way we express punctuation: we capitalize it, we intensify it, we color it with every feeling known to the human soul. Allow me to explain: have you ever tried laughing a full stop? How about singing a semicolon? Dear reader, I invite you to take a moment and simply fathom the endless possibilities of this experiment. Okay now listen up kid - because this is where our grammatical revolution really hits the ground running. I want you to literally take a moment: sit down, take a deep breath, make some hibiscus tea, and literally cry a question mark. Did you do it? Did you read my previous question as if I tearfully whined it at you? Well done. You have now entered the ranks of an elite underground counter-culture. You have been re-birthed and through your reawakening you will see the world as it really is - or how it could be. This isn't your mama's punctuation. Are these the raving fever-dream ramblings of a sidewalk vagrant, or the thesis of a Stone Cold Steve-Genius? I am but a humble internet fool. I beg of you dear reader, to consider the future of our civilization. How can we bring this reformulation about? Government mandate? NGO's and charities directing 100% of their funding to this prime cause? A street art movement?

It's so simple - yet no one has dared to do it. Why? If the powers at be or, they, are pulling the strings of a global conspiracy limiting the expression of contemporary exclamation, surely a slovenly subset of the populace would be publishing 40-minute iMovie YouTube documentaries? I'm afraid the truth is unfortunately more sobering - as a civilization we have collectively slept on one of the greatest misuses of artistic revelation. Ask yourself this - who stands to gain from this? Would you allow a reality TV-show star alumnus, or any world leader for that matter, to dictate how much fear you can intonate into a hyphen? Looks like the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights may need a 21st-Century software update.

Satan's greatest trick: the hubris of our species

For millennia, humankind molded fecal matter into defensive barricades against the unforgivably biting weather, and unrelenting ancient predators (such as the Great Bears and the infamous non-house cats). Did we suffer this, only to invent a structure of functional punctuation that doesn't, I repeat doesn't, communicate the fully-encompassing scope of human emotion? Where has our spirit gone? Did humankind navigate the depths of the cosmos with the Hubble telescope, just for us not to scream a full stop? Did Michelangelo labor away for 4 excruciating years to gift society his Sistine Chapel works, just for us not to literally shout our apostrophes from the rooftops? Did Sisyphus roll that pebble up that hill for eternity, just for us to spit on his sweet little pumpkin-pie face?

A question as old as time itself: What separates us from the animals?

I invite you to envision a near future - the year is 2069 and we've democratically elected our first openly-Clone Pope, the moon is used for 92% of global agricultural production, Mars is undergoing its greatest housing-bubble collapse to date, and West Korea has the highest global per-capita GDP resulting from a bitcoin-tourism boom. This is the kind of world where all our brothers and sisters punctuate at their free discretion.

Ask yourself what kind of world you want to live in - the liberating ecstasy of being able to scream a comma? Or a coward's blood-curdling hellscape of a world, where totalitarian cyber-punk governments brutally punish those who dare practice their unalienable right to practice nuanced punctuation, by means of Twitch-streamed public execution at your local Starbucks? Could you, my tender-heart reader imagine, such a derelict, degenerate, and deranged society?

If we continue to treat our punctuation like a handcuffed centenarian, we are doomed to repeat history. My sweet, gentle reader, have you ever considered the Fermi Paradox? Named after Enrico Fermi, this notion explores the theory that there should already be advanced extraterrestrial life, touring our universe and presenting themselves, according to all we know about the math of our universe or something. Have aliens not visited us because their civilizations developed past a sustainable point and they wiped themselves out of heat-existence? Or might it be because we are too viscerally unattractive, filtered through their unattainable alien beauty standards? I place neither of these to be the cause of our astrological loneliness; I wager it is because they see a society that doesn't explore their punctuation to it's metaphysical limits, as a society undeserving of advanced alien technology (like sinks the sizes of bathtubs, and Valentine's days but only for pets). We are but ants disrupting the celestial picnic of our bravely-punctuating alien gods. We are a civilization of clowns and ants, and could not be taken seriously by them in this form.

How could our enlightened society take itself to the next stage? Could we even perceive what this paradigm shift could do for global trade, poverty, income inequality, and human rights?

These days we're all fearing the Coronavirus, self-isolating and washing our hands free from the filth of a rampant viral sickness. I say the true virus is fear of the unknown (ignoring the third eye of punctuation-capitalization), and the only self-isolation and hand-washing we should be doing is against the rampant sickness of unexplored grammar.