I finished up writing something, feeling rather content – sat out on the back porch for a bit, listen for cars – and then I departed. Biked around.
Before I left I read through this article – at first skimmed, but then a double trace.
The internet is made of demons… isn’t something I haven’t thought of before. There’s a biting self-awareness with engaging online at all.
One sometimes stores a small hope that this is enough, just as I wrote earlier. Maybe it is. Retreat to our little corners after the minimal is achieved.
For the first time in history, we can simply do without each other entirely. The machine supplies an approximation of everything you need for a bare biological existence: strangers come to deliver your food; AI chatbots deliver cognitive-behavioral therapy; social media simulates people to love and people to hate; and hidden inside the microcircuitry, the demons swarm.
But when I really think about it… I don’t know if I want it this way.
Half of the time I’m browsing around looking for some sort of thrill, some sort of gag – and yet while I biked around today, there were bundles of opportunity to do the same. I could’ve yelled hello to all passer-bys, I could’ve danced a little more, I don’t know, I could’ve been living. I was basically living, but was it enough living to phase out the supplementary internet entertainment? It does not seem to be the case.
There is that fear of liability of getting involved with others that you just don’t have to deal with on the Internet. But by the same edge you are settling for lukewarm living, lukewarm reality, not-there reality, catatonic reality.
I am reminded of all the bus stops I passed and the uncanny silence. Highschool was getting out and most of them were sitting on the ground staring. Adults waiting to pick up their kids were also ensconsed inside the pixel. It honestly looked like robots on stand-by.
Usually I think “well how could it be any other way?” but then it finally dawned on me how wrong in certainty I am. Through a simple (and potentially wrong) projection: every single one of those chained probably wished for the some sort of engagement, thrill in real life which they supplement with their phone.
“How could it be any other way” is the beginning of Discovery’s end. It is the cauldron where one is plugged in to be a duplicate of all others.
I’ve written many thoughts and essays about the Internet in the typical caged-bird-song schematic, to the point where now it’s just a benign indifference.
But I suppose today I finally realize: I don’t think the Internet can be anything more than a book. Or that it certainly can be, but are we there yet, or do you want to be there? Why settle for the monitor when there’s a basement with pizza and games and snow waiting to make fights out of with sleds in store and a rush of low-temp air that kills your lung?
Not much interesting could happen on here that could ever match the (now seemingly taboo) “how are you” to the one left of you, waiting. Not as though that’s the smartest idea! I don’t even want to go into all the details as to what makes the Internet so… when I reflect…
Amnesia!
I don’t want to make this a dichotomy. I think I’m writing this out to ask for a third way. Or redefine what is thrilling. What moves you.
Not to denounce the Internet, not to praise it, just a third way.
Maybe one ought to rewrite what thrill is, or why be plugged in, or what are relationships really, and etc.
There’s been a good bunch of analysis of the above from me in scattered entries, but all I’m doing here is throwing Internet on top of the pile.
You’re done with it; now what?