It's actually real

It’s a common inclination to dismiss internet usage and its sewage.

A fringe thing. One may even get mad talking about it, as some banal reflection best hidden. That it’s always, at best, a weird enclave to find distance from, let it hum in the background. Just go play some games, message some classmates. Running into those sharing ""memes"" guaranteed disdain, violating how it was a retreat, in most ways, before eternal september cranked up to enrolling the entire world.

And as one witnesses the rise and rise of its ever consuming position; that is, to replace anything it could, whether getting together or reading, distribution chains, recommendations, a normalized befriending of essential strangers within waiting lobbies and mutuals — still, so one may push it away, hold it stubborn. Remain certain how illusory it is. Something “in the background” of course, before turning off the tower at 2 a.m.

Yet now, in its full force, roaming the local grocery store, one may not see people anymore. If seen, they’re clearly off-shift for this five-thirty to six window, and of the rest sauntering, well, there’s something off about them. As if their soul is elsewhere. Where did everyone go?

The other day came a long quarterly conversation with a neighbor about large scale terraforming projects. “It’s on YouTube, and man what they’re doing in Singapore, well, maybe the US will too someday,” he’d say.

Journeying into the still dusk suburbs til dark, knowing the lit windows supplement a virtual haze in whatever screen, whether TV or Samsung Odysseys, even then so subconsciously rested a stubbornness never to admit: the virtual world has become, for most, more real than reality.

That’s where they spend all their time. That’s where everyone spends their time. That’s where kids, today, God bless them, spend their whole life. They have something like 70% on a device to 30%, and of that 30%, perhaps ~20% sleep. And within that pseudo-reality, so Instant-message attention deficits makes visiting this place feel like Chernobyl.

“Touch grass” and through a park visit only elderly people are found. “Get out” and with a bother to buy some snacks there’s someone to dodge rocking back and forth while their iPhone is two inches from their face, behind the storefronts, before the bridge. It’s like booting up a cracked Ocarina of Time with some skin repack but half the screen is static and the poly res is blurry at best.

It’s real now. This is happening. You could romanticize it if you want. If you get away from its more dystopic visions.

Even if the internet is now more real than reality, it’s better to retreat into a void, some makeshift slum in the sewers between the traffic lights and TCP packets. For even if the prior statement implies the internet is actually real, which in many ways is, it’s still a partial isolation chamber and there are whole legions of operatives moving one’s mind this way and that with word games and metadata.

It’s just weird that it’s now integrated into the everyday, the same as breathing, even if it feels like the opposite. Like suffocating. And you can be real edgy and gesture and say, “it shouldn’t be this way!!” and even reading this post it’s real easy to get all eye-rolly about it because, well, even if It Is Real And You Won’t Get Away… Just stop thinking about it (´･ω･`)

But if you want to keep thinking about it, and get more angry with each thought, well, the only thing left to do is create your own cult and destroy everything, perhaps. Or suggest it to be exciting: this clearly isn’t sustainable…