The fraying Web
The fraying Web
How do you know what’s real or a dream when you can’t tell when you’re awake or asleep?
Sometimes I feel like we’re all dying, in a sense that we seem to be stretching our connections far beyond their limits to the point that everything seems to fray. They say that the neuropathology of schizophrenia looks like abnormally long cortical columns, and I believe it, because I think the same pathology afflicts all of us socially. We just won’t set a limit on things.
I see this from several perspectives: from the responsible, prosocial societal steward or “good citizen” moral standpoint, from the material and matter-of-fact standpoint in careers, and crossed again to differentiate those from whether I am personally seeing it or trying to analyse it as some kind of function of humanity. In all quadrants, everything seems to be fraying, and I think the Worldwide Web is the reason why.
In the future, there will be no mental illness or upset serving as an impetus to “log off”. You won’t get mad one day, check yourself, or get pressed by a concerned family member to reconsider your life choices. All the people who were going to do that already did and logged off. After a point, the only people remaining are those who are truly committed to their insanity. They will never log off, and this illness will not die with them because new people continuously log on, starting their great personal journeys on the Web where it somehow has any relationship to real life. It doesn’t, but this is not obvious, and worse, we have no scripture or millennia of human history to provide us lessons about this kind of threat to our existence. It really is novel.
The problem is that there is just too much information. You cannot handle it, but the user experience of your device leads you to believe that you can. It lies to you, presenting a feed to be infinitely scrolled with the unwritten premise that this is anyone-and-everyone on Earth. Not that it is literally everyone, but rather that it is universal, and puts your eyes at the centre of it. It’s a more advanced kind of narcissistic disease that hatched with the advent of the idiot box.
But still, it’s confusing. What does it mean that only some of these sites are bad for you in this way? How is this different from checking emails or blogging? It’s easy to be dismissive that I am simply hating on such sites in condemning them, or easy to be dismissive that I am simply lecturing people to have better habits. It’s easy to be dismissive. It’s so easy. You know, that is the entire purpose. Sit down and engage with nothing unwanted. Always be stimulated, and always be controlled, by believing that you are in total control, and are perfectly informed. So clearly, part of this is a matter of moral habit, yet another part must be something objective.
It’s impossible to explain to those who are logged in, as even the very concept of logging off is co-opted into their Extended Universe of Everything and slung about like an insult. Worse, you cannot even tell that I am not still logged in when I explain this kind of meta. But how could you know? Well, the tried-and-true is this: actions speak louder than words. Maybe a self-evident approach is best, meaning that for all intents and purposes I am logged in for this, but I am not for other things, and perhaps the latter is where you and I will find life together. Everything otherwise is just death. I hope this writing could at least cauterise the loose ends for someone.
One more thing I couldn’t work into the original that bears mentioning: this problem also presents with text messaging, emails and other such mediums in a reduced form. Perhaps even phone calls also exhibit some elements of the pathology at hand here. It seems the mere fact of global interconnectedness itself is central to everyone being ripped apart.