What technology allows is consistent reinforcement and security of one’s general thoughts about self. You get whole timelines of your life, photos to say, “yes that was me” and all the people now missing.
Barring the ever-evolving eventual digital tombstone, so there are many posts and topics and online temples, concepts to latch yourself onto–especially with the death of local community and more “touch-base” realities. It’s even a focal point in politics as diversion from a stage-play that it all is anyway.
Identity has infested each unborn soul and expands as a tumor does until the mind starts hemorrhaging. And maybe to shut it all off we have these convenient gas-stations managed with candy collections, cigarettes, other things you know and I won’t bother to iterate more.
But they even have more advanced gas-stations that foregoes the gas and has a thing called the “pharmacy” in the back where you can trade more paper slips for harder hits. And the cycle rages on with each tumor driving the soul maddened with ideas and concepts that, at first glance, seem like the pathway toward something more suitable than the current situation–a situation of complete submission and surrender, an inability to assert anything or want of anything because of the beautifully designed control structures–and yet the destruction multiplies.
What makes our, I suppose, acceleration of identity-unto-death so amusing is how it raves in a carcass of a culture. Of any culture. Of any culture at all! Not to imply culture as something to aspire toward anyway–cultures are identity delivery mechanisms. I think I’m pointing out how it’s a culture in most things but names, most things but some good memories. Most cultures are now the way to flagellate yourself as one either bemoans the lost of “time” or the “good times” and the dissolution of everything in the “past” and these new ones are the vultures for sure. Because identity is the mind parasite.
And so while everything is leaking blood, a torrential sacrificial order, you got two paths ahead of you.
You can either imprison yourself with your digital footprints, ideals, and opinions, interests and loves, joys, moments, people until driven to a deflated twitching hissing neuroticism.
Or you dare to reject everything you thought reality to be, facts which you’ll no longer see, realities waiting where you become something terrifying. Maybe even relish in the new “identity” – to be.