So the internet died today. Magical hackers from the planet Russia shot so many packets up the ass of the net's backbone that it can't walk straight for days. You try in vain to quickly find a nice rack on Google image search but that little circle keeps spinning like it has nothing better to do. Visiting youtube is like being transported to the year two-thousand. Everything is so goddamn slow. How the hell is one supposed to receive their daily dose of dopamine? At this rate, we'll be tossing sticks at one another outside like they used to do in the old days when we weren't a race of Candycrush-playing cyborgs. Hello Reality, it's me. Nice to see you again. I guess.
What were the old days really like? Phones were stuck on walls and people actually bought music and video games from stores. Libraries were used by regular people and not just hobos looking at pornography. People talked to one another and looked each other in the eyes. When you wanted to go somewhere, you had to pay attention and get directions. Twitter was something birds did. Facebook was a long-lost Lovecraft story. Google sounded like a mix between a fart and a burp.
We knew things back then. We didn't have machines do our processing for us, as well as our socialization. This sounds like revisionism, doesn't it? A wise old sage fondly remembering days of the past while taking advantage of the technology of the present, irony be damned. I might as well wax poetic about the days before irony, back when people believe in ideas instead of eviscerating them. The ironic man has nothing to say, he just wants to laugh at you for believing. Don't ask me where I was going with this. I've lost the internet. I have no direction home.
Is there a binary choice between Netflix and the cinema? Between Ma Bell and the IPhone? Between Twitter and a real human being? It's either all or nothing; that's the American way of seeing things. Good and evil, shades of gray be damned. I've tried to have it all like the rest of you. I have no philosophy of things.
My son stares up at me with gray-blue eyes, his face describable only by a self-coined word: tunky. It comes out of the mouth in baby-talk. What sort of future will he live in? An augmented one with personalize advertisements beamed in directly to his brain through the infolink he had installed there as soon as he could scrape together the cash? What wondrous technology we are capable of, only to use it for our basest pleasures. Hedonism is in, you know. It never goes out of style.
Before the internet died, I had fever dreams. Let's not pretend it won't come back, fortified and worse than ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment