Suddenly it’s all too much. Everything is immediate. We can share thoughts at the rate of thought. Images. Music. Everything is available. Suddenly we had it all in our pocket. Suddenly we could see people as we spoke to them, on our phones, on our computers. Suddenly we were all connected. Wars persisted, genocides, famines, gang rapes, financial blunders, crashes, all that had dominated when headlines were headlines. Gross atrocities shared common space with blogs on shoes, trends in plastic surgery, reports on how long the wait was outside the movie theater, rants on pet peeves, and baby photos. It was as if every thought, every idea decided to be heard at once. And when the words and images were reflected back from virtual worlds with countless viewers and comments, a narcissistic pride took hold. Look what I wrote. How many hits, how many likes, how many follows. And I decidedly joined the party. The uninformed didn’t suddenly inform themselves. The world, it turned out, was not entirely studious. Though many studied trends, exchanged recipes, ideas, political analysis, searched for turn-ons and laughs, it was evident that the sources chosen for information retrieval were still boundaried by personal tastes, interests, and prejudices, and one could easily continue to exist within the idea that their way of seeing the world was the way of seeing the world. Arguments about privilege, the advantages of the rich and connected, were becoming troublingly obsolete. People with more at their fingertips than any previous generation. Many hopelessly seduced by comfort, escape, celebrity, and the vanity of being seen. Browsing had more to do with wandering than exploring. Wanderers left invisible trails, like phantoms. Explorers took great pride in their discoveries, planted flags. Bookmarks. Issues of humanity, crisis of society, took the form of passing phantoms. They lived next to us, right under our noses, but it took tragedy to hold our collective attention, which spanned for a predictable fifteen minutes as long as we were somewhere else living at a safe distance. We loved to watch people of power fall. We liked watching them rise. Loved picking them apart. Outfits. Hairstyles. This, soon, took its effect. Exchanged philosophies less. Gossip and the latest news more. Stared at tragedy from safer regions. Cried into the camera when it was our turn. Documented everything. And this worked in our favor. Police brutality was captured on film, illicit conversations between politicians were captured on tape, undercover lovers were found out, secrets took on new forms. There were secret accounts, new forms of privatizing messages, ways of (at least on the surface) wiping history, spinning stories. Mostly, we were escapists . . .
Andy Warhol was right. George Orwell was right. James Baldwin was right. Steve Jobs was right. What entertainment had become was wrong. But we all watched and followed along, looking at each other like, “I don’t know how this happened but it is funny.” Reshaped our personalities. How we related to others. Demands to not be ignored. Gestures and Pokes. Brought out new sensitivities. New forms of bullying. Mostly, we were thinking of ourselves. We yearned to share our experiences, what we thought was awesome, what we thought sucked. We were searching for similitude.
Have felt the same before. Have concerned myself with the thoughts of others. Have thought of nothing, no one but myself for days on end. Weighed myself against differences. Have attempted to think different. Differently. Correctly . . . Logic and reason. Spiritual discipline. Myth and magic. Music, and other languages. Have experimented with drugs of all kinds and really, it’s simple: fuck it.