Look at it. How YouTube ads play. How targeted-- demographically-correct ads spice along your Facebook pages, the age targeted spam messages within an email inbox, the square pixel filling advertisements spaced between New York Times articles. We've all been pegged along a thousand-some passively collected data points. Every countablulated number, location, finger click and webpage in our monthly storied web histories has been calculated into profiles. Profiles worth advertisement budget points. It really does not matter how this digital profile differs from ourselves in action. What analogue action can rival the digital equivalent of our web-denizen shadow? It is a digital sun that casts the public self that remains.
There's little comfort in denial. What local micro-transaction act has the resonance of trans-continental-corporate data waves? At what point does a self-righteous divorce from modernity leave oneself a spinner's loom amidst laser processors? I hope not to be misunderstood. There is an attractive fantasy in simplicity. Some sort of projected nostalgia, tied to our own self-important delusion, which guides us. Even embracing our options, we are tempted to paint a large and unknown world in the light of our familiar local lives. Simplify to comprehension. Information corners us into innumerable passive decisions.
This is something contrary to how I personally lived. Technology and the algorithmic rhythms we leave in wake are a thing we can ignore to our own peril. The relationship to data, input from the world and output from ourselves, dictates our space and agency with it. In the analogue space our greatest remaining resource is time.
I sat, organically speaking, in a bar tonight. Nursing a gin and ice, I looked to the women and men surrounding, and then to the walls of screens. Their screen's programming. I became entranced thinking. It was what I saw that led me typing tonight.
I think we may be living commercials. As late capitalism resonates with the rise of digital living, we've never been so saturated and so ill-equipped. Consider a message, and it's form. Consider the messages we emanate. At all moments. Passively. Look to the form of every Facebook announcement, it is the individual statement to our audience of acquaintances. We assert our lifestyle's viability and allure in words, pictures, locations, events and culmination of all these elements in concert. Commercials for others and ourselves. Proving to the world we are satisfied, interesting, energetic-- hoping to convince ourselves of that same image.
Along the lines of technology, I am not sure that the self-sales department we must maintain is wisely opposed. It is the terms of existence we accept in persisting. But in similar manner, to ignore these forces is to confuse for ourselves what space we occupy. To cut clean and abandon the modern world, I think, is no more meaningful than embracing technology-- In and of themselves. Either choice is perhaps worthwhile if chosen and navigated according. Agency is the greatest remaining aspiration I can conceive. Agency before circumstance is an active assertion.
Look. We are astride in time, and its demands are inconsistent. It is two worlds spanned and thoroughly mixed. Traces of the future lie parallel to our oldest habits. Old tribe-bigots communicate with socially prejudiced populations around the globe-- perhaps using technology conceived, programmed and constructed by the very people they despise. Tech professionals withdraw to ranches and farms to work traditional tools into traditional crops in traditional arrangements, logically eschewing modern advancements as immoral. No one sees anything inconsistent within their actions.
Last night I sat in a local Irish bar. A sad small man, mid-30, lamented life and was desperate for connection. He leered at two girls who looked like a young cousin of mine. When they left, and we alone in the bar, he turned his attention to the bartender-- direct and insatiable was his eye, he wanted everything. She was married. At first tolerant and recognizing his plight, she grew tired. He was a proper sociopath in manipulation. I am embarrassed to admit how easily I may have been herded by his flattery if I hadn't overheard his early sickness in words. "He would be happy to corner the bartender in a dark alley and have his way by force". And so, he said this to me. There is a sincerity to desperation. I resented him accordingly. But in my own indirect manipulative nature, I acted his friend. Waved off his words and directed the conversation elsewhere than sex and the bartender. I convinced him to step out for a cigarette. The door was, wisely, immediately locked behind us. He stumbled. And I left him and walked home without another word.
Maybe he deserved a fist in his teeth. Maybe he only mouthed words that didn't mean a thing, except a cry for help of sorts. He had been a drummer, once had long hair, but had to pawn his set for money.
Analogue life, I believe, is nuanced and can only be herded indirectly by the boarder collies in our heads. I think the world dawning will be only more nuanced. I feel our ideals and desires may be incomplete, and perhaps will prove little use for what follows.
