Binary Dementia and Auto-Narcissism, an internet plague.
When we stare into the black mirror looking for our soul, we never think of the consequences. This relationship started off innocently, in your hand is a device sold as something to help you in life. Co-dependency forms, before you know it years have flown by and now that device designed to help you is secretly making you scream HELP ME! NOTICE ME, acknowledge me, validate me!
We have spent years and years whispering into the devil’s ear, always listening, even when we don’t talk, don’t type, don’t browse. It knows where we go when we are alone. We have been monitored by algorithms hither to and through-out.
When was the last time you can remember pausing to search the task bar of your own mind before asking Google who? what? where? how?
Are we being told what we want to hear? Are we being told how to think?
Why? Why don’t we just slow down. Wait before reacting, until a few minutes have past, take the time to think about when we thought last?
Shaming, naming, cancelling, claiming, conspiracy theories and counter conspiracy theories, are we gaslighting ourselves, are we being gaslighted. I’m sure there was once a gentler time, a slower time when things didn’t happen so fast.
Everything becomes an attack of tiny minutiae and detail, your never right unless you are completely right, your thoughts must arrive right on time fully formed and in an indefatigable manner, You get so good at commenting in such an obtuse manner, the subject of discussion is no longer about the subject. Its about you winning.
When we go out to a party and decide to take out our phones instead of interacting face to face, what are we saying to the people we intend to share time with? We’d rather take the time to see how our multiple personalities are doing on-line. Is the tik-tok version of me doing ok? How is the Facebook version of me looking? Is my twitter righteous enough? My tinder and Instagram revealing enough? How about my only fans?
We are building the perfect prison for our own souls. We cannot escape it, wilfully will not escape it. In the echo chambers of our own mind, maybe the odd moment of silence occurs.
We may here the chime of someone else’s point of view, that isn’t in accordance with the voice within you. How indispensable are your internet friends when you have the power to choose when it begins and ends?
This isn’t a choice you would make in the real world; you wouldn’t dismiss people so easily without thinking first. In the real world there is only one way to remove someone so totally from your life, murder.
When did things become so disposable, discardable so worthless?
Here we are stabbing each other in the back, pulling each other apart, in this great electronic forum, because there is no space for nuance, neutrality or consideration.
You are the sum total of your last tweet.
We are desperate for recognition but don’t really recognise anyone else. How can we do that when we are not ourselves? When we all have multiple personalities. We are all getting caught in a trap, a trap where there is only one acceptable way of thinking, one way of solving a problem. We are swapping biological reasoning for binary code.
The like button is like a dimmer switch for a light that gets brighter and warmer the more it is touched and at a predetermined point comes the climax, that orgasmic joy of getting there, being recognised as a witty, insightful, clever person. Being worshiped as sexy, fashionable, trendy. You wouldn’t feel that way if other people didn’t validate you. Confidence is now a group decision, not a personal belief.
We don’t go out for a beer or to have some food, without resisting the urge to show our phones to each other, we’d rather emulate the virtual world in real life than the other way around. Why don’t we show each other to each other anymore? Look at this meme, she’s a karen, he’s a chad but I’m nothing, there is no longer anything in me that you cannot find on my phone.
Those endless photographs do not let the memory age like wine, they just cheapen every moment and trap it in time. With the ability of total recall, we do not grow, we lose the ability to trust ourselves, our own memory. We always must check what is true.
We are so afraid of being wrong. Imagine treating a child like that. We treat people more naïve or less experienced than us like vagrants, yet worse use their bad example and mistakes to make ourselves look better. Oh how we love the shame of others.
And those children, they scream, like recovering drug addicts gone cold turkey. When we take away that screen and interrupt the flow of that cocaine like dopamine. In fits of rage, my four year old boy, I’ve took away his supply, his brain chemistry toy.
Our sons and daughters have seen and heard about things we never new until our teens when they are barely able to type into the search engine. Would you let your six year old walk around the city unescorted? They’d probably be safer in the real world than with some of these monsters online.
Yet still new-borns out of the wombs are instantly christened in blue light from day one, barely seconds old, their slowly aging faces recorded as the years move on. What fate could be worse than having a visual record of your own decline from day one. It’s a reality I’m glad to be without, but in the future kids will grow with a focus more on what they were than what they could grow to be. The weight of the past crushing any hope for the future, to face the end with a smile on your face for all the things you’ve left undone. Perfection would not allow for this, I cant die without one last selfie can I?
The death of love and innocence, the death of belief in each other is easy when there is always an instant way to replace those we are intimate with. There is always someone else out there waiting if he or she isn’t the one, why work on it when you can spin the roulette wheel one more time and win a bigger, better, sexier prize. Why grow together when you can monkey branch and leap from one partner to the next?
Love has become a game in the digital world. How can anything last in a world of instant resets, saved games and cheat codes? Who indeed is the imposter?
Please take a moment to consider I may be right, and I may be wrong but does my point of view mean we can’t get along? There is more than one way to do the same thing, there is more than one way to unite the world or destroy it.
With binary thinking, the moment we choose ONE WAY
We lose the way.