Do you ever wonder about the trajectory your life would’ve taken if not for the internet?
I was removed from reality when I was eleven years old; I was given my first private, internet-connected device. From that moment, human interactions became secondary.
I’ve always been an early adopter. For that reason, I’ve also been a doomsayer. I’ve walked the darkly alluring corridors of technological depravity and recognized their danger from an early age. How all of this will become an experience machine. Maybe it already has.
It’s been a slow doom. The banging drum falls on deaf ears and downward-oriented neck postures. Your parents tell you “quit spending so much time on that thing” only to huddle themselves in a corner with their own dark squares.
We’ve developed complex coping mechanisms with a crippling, society-wide addiction. A collective Id feeds talking points to the masses like a hive mind. “This is just the world now,” or “let people enjoy things,” or an post-meta-ironic acceptance/fetishization. All human impulse joins together to form a rationalization of the reliance. We build the machines that destroy us and teach them how to do it.
I criticize because I am a born nihilist. I live largely in the simulacrum myself, and its comfortable.
We were not built by neither God nor chance for the purpose of comfort. It is the nature of man to achieve as individuals for the good of the whole. To achieve is to overcome. To overcome is to reject comfort.
Little by little we enter the machine. We’re frogs boiling, accepting of surveillance, biometrics, data harvesting. The blanket wraps the skies. To breathe air is to be known and documented. The overlords do it not for the riches or glory, but the third currency: knowledge. Omnipotence. Tentacled eunuchs abandon humanity for a fantasy of ascension.
But we’re just men. They know it too. A promise as grand as machined godhood is bound to have its harbingers, though. So afraid of an inevitable apocalypse that they themselves will it to existence through sheer ego.
Why do we build technologies where there is even a question of total extinction? Because others might do it before us? Then let them, if it ends the same regardless. Maybe it doesn’t matter. We are all already dying slowly, if not dead already. I think therefore I am—the less I think the less I am.
A machine thinks in my place sometimes, therefore we are. Until I am left not thinking, and I am not.
So by all means, take your time online. We’ve burned it all so that you can.