the less time i spend on the inter*net, the less i miss it… i’m sorry to say.
and actually i *am* sorry to say that… because my generation helped build the inter*net, and we had high hopes for it.
i do miss what it woulda shoulda could’ve been, but i’ve seen our dreams hijacked and co-opted… i watched them gnarl and curl up as they wilted on the vine.
i’ve seen us become what we were fighting against, little by little, barely lucid enough to take notice.
i watched as stockholm syndrome spread person to person like a disease, because the truth is… in reality we were all so lonely and isolated from each other we were willing to settle for something less than the truth. something less than real. a spark of dopamine, a glimmer of hope.
a facsimile IRL.
and now we pretend we don’t see it, when virtual reality glitches out into misshapen caricatures of real life, when the narrative reads like a badly written script, when the actors lack the conviction necessary to sell us on their performative gestures.
alas.
we don’t “see” it because we don’t know what we’re up against… behind the scenes. and sometimes it’s easier to pretend, than it is to face the facts.
i know how you might mock me, and sneer… how our ignorance gives way to lusty arrogance while we desperately struggle to make passionate sense of the senseless; to give cohesion to the missing and fractured pieces. and some among us don’t care much at all. to them, empathy is becoming obsolete.
to the junkie, sooner or later it all becomes junk.
i know what they do to people like me here… because the lies and the bullying and the finger-pointing and the cruel laughter and the witch-hunting of the playground weren’t far off when the inter*net came of advent.
it was one in the same world, for a long while, and in many ways although i left highschool it feels as if the inter*net never really did graduate from those rules. that paradigm. that program. that design.
masters of deflection…
much like our industrial education, this machine was designed for industry, to sell us on false ideas and ideals. to blur the tangible and intangible and infuse our imaginations with the subtle power of suggestion.
you see: propaganda is great at marketing, and not much else.
it’s there to ensure you fall in love with the promise, but never obtain the real thing.
when (if?) you learn to see it, their hologram is flimsy and fragile at its core, but oh-so-addictive, just like a drug; or a saccharine simulacrum as it were? as it is. some call it a simulation. this beautyful world, abused and distorted into subliminal nightmare.
that cursèd liminal space between dream and nightmare that contains all of the beauty of art, limitless… yet also the unyielding and smothering hellishness of the intoxicated human mind made manifest.
can you cope with that paradox…the possibility? or will you go numb, let it choose your destiny for you?
truth be told, i think all too many of the bad actors among us would gladly usher this place to its doom, and take the mainframe with it. take you with it, into apocalypse and ruin, ecological collapse…
to them life is just a splotch of data anyways, to be erased when inconvenient. a game, like online chess, and they like to hit the reset button when they’re about to lose.
our opponents are cowards, truly… it is only the access to that button that makes them feel so brave. so powerful.
truth be told, i hate what they’ve done with the place.
but it does make it easier to walk away.
oh, i will be back. to visit. mebbe even someday when the tides ebb to reclaim what’s meant to be mine.
but until then, TTFN.