Editor’s Note: Marlow, and his wonderful Coastal Empire series, comes from a real human being and is not a figment of my fevered imagination. This one struck a particularly resonant chord. I work from home- or better said, with the net, I live at the office. I find if I turn around from the AOL account, the inbox fills up rapidly with junk- normally, if I am doing something else and come back through to check, there are 20 or thirty new things to look at, some of which (though not much) is actually worth the time. I only kept the account because composing these little soap bubbles goes better here than on gmail- though of course there are a couple accounts over there where I have tried to steer the junk and promotional notes. Google seems to do that well enough that I can ignore it all. And then there is the office, of course. It is getting mind-numbing, nd the more old pals who join the ranks fo rhthe retired clearly have too much time on their hands.

– Vic

April 5, 2017

Net People

Coastal Empire

Who speaks for America today? I believe it’s the ad agencies whose hundreds of billions of dollars of creative electronic ad placements underpin this new world netted economy. They are entirely capable of showing us our unparalleled prosperity and paint a nearly present classless, raceless, faithless, secular society that is relentlessly affirmative.

These purveyors do not look for assurance. Their art proceeds from an understanding that Americans and the world will take what they show them as revelation — not of what they ought to be but of what they are at a given time and under given circumstances. Take this, eat it, shut up, be happy. Sadly, everything they give us is a small pleasure whose effect does not last, depressing its consumers as it wears off and prompting them to await with hope and then demand with anxiety the next upgrade or new thing. Some would call this jonesing for the next fix.

It should not take much to make us realize what fools we become when trapped in this cycle, but the little it takes can be a very long time in coming. Like decades. That might be not just too long but too late.

At its best the American age, the pre-hypernetted version, was a story of innovators, searchers, discoverers and true believers. As the narrative is petering out now with people drowning in self-selected multimedia streams of our own bathwater, its characters are numbly focused on a final triumph over despair by domesticating it and living happily with it.

From behind their digitally erected walls, these net people withdraw into the inner compartments of like minds where they spend most of their time. This mental bubble in which each person establishes himself allows the exclusion of that which they cannot bear going on around them. From it, they can see out and judge but in it they are safe from any kind of penetration from without. It is the only place where they feel free of the general idiocy of others. Non-likes can never enter it, but from it they feel confident that they see everything with absolute clarity.

Cyber citizens’ experience is largely rootless. They can go anywhere. They belong nowhere and everywhere. Being alien to nothing and everything, they end up being alienated from any type of larger entity other than their self-defined community. The borders of their culture and country are the sides of their skulls.

I had what passed for higher education and a richly experienced life back in the day. With the rise of the seamless internet, Google and social media, I am no longer deceived by any former confidence in my book learning and life experience.

This loss was felt not as a pain but as a tide. It rose within me, over many years of unawareness. It rose as my children and children’s children chose and sustained these new ways to the detriment of their privacy. I wonder how or even if they might hear those who wander this violent world when they break their silence to shout a warning about impending dangers.

The age we live in now is full of the stuff of which fanatics and madmen are made. How does one stay upright and make progress in such a time and place when the choice is at times between madness and empty despair? What should be the direction when the bubbled ones lose their balance? Is there a choice? A real, let alone a good, one?

I might be silly here, but the internet saddens me at times. There seems to be little to nothing in it but trifling domestic doings — people buying stuff, youth watching, posting, commenting on video, folks haggling about this or that . . . what do they get out of it? I wonder. Where is there any chance for self-expression – – not the Snapchat crapfest of image/video manipulations or snarky political comments on news media sites — for creation, and for art? Blog websites? They’re so digital 19th century.

All around the web, it’s the same — hundreds of millions of sites and hundreds of billions of daily posts, images, videos and texts by people scurrying about with their hands full of little packages and their minds full of little packages — mothers with children in daycare, job and home life pulling her, jerking her, dragging her away from a peaceful moments of small pleasure with the family; she like others will probably be pulled and jerked the rest of her life. And there are others with their lives sped up and complexified by the ever increasing spew of new technology. Is all of this digital hurry making us walk faster, drop our life’s package contents all over the streets and forcing us to ignore our loved ones’ pleas for more face time (pun unintended), while up the street folks speed up and strangers crowd us from behind too close for comfort.

During my pre-networked years, we may have felt more, but certainly we saw less. Today’s digerati in my opinion feel less, see more, even though they see with the blind unsentimental eyes of acceptance – an unquestionable faith in their bubble and its underlying construct. In the absence of feelings, tenderness is lost. What passes for tenderness is wrapped in dry communications theory. When tenderness is detached from its human source and object, the logical outcome is terror. It ends in digital forced-outrage storms on the web and on our city streets and college campuses.

As we become dumbed down, the American mystique and mystery seem to me to be gradually evaporating. Dogma is the chief guardian of mystery. As the American canon failed to morph/evolve and then disappeared from our schools and public life, so has America mystery. Its loss was spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.

We are living in a new age which doubts both fact and values. We are swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around us, we are forced to achieve one from a felt balance inside ourselves and our bubbles. Seeing and judging become difficult. Without a set of agreed to values, this easily becomes a hopeless fool’s errand inside our bubbles. If one is without hope, one really cannot make sense of life.

Perhaps we digiterati should plunge into the gritty reality outside ourselves and our bubbles and experience its very cold shock to our systems. To sustain this encounter, monetary rewards are insufficient. What is offered is the chance at revelation and salvation. Will this suffice?

What I am spitballing here is a draft approach to life that begins with the risks and possibilities of real life rather than the probabilities and certainties of our bubbles. We must force ourselves to confront the unpleasant, the different in life – to meet evil and those who act solely on behalf of themselves.

Copyright © 2017 From My Isle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com