091420

They say you can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but I’m going to try.

I probably stare at my phone (or my laptop screen [or my TV screen]) upwards of 8 hours a day. I should check that number. They have apps for that now.

Like any great illusion, I can’t quite remember at what point my attention diverged from reality to distortion. It’d help if there was a revertible version we could flip back to to remind ourselves: an alternate reality without these alternate reality digi-verses we’ve ironically dubbed “social.” But we don’t have that luxury.

We’re here now, in the throes of irreversible cancer we’ve inflicted upon ourselves. Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, et cetera — these things all have names but no faces. They’re too big to identify. They’re too big to die. Critical mass remains tucked behind the horizon, and I’m not sure when it might appear, if ever.

The symbiotic relationship between an infection and an infected population is always further complicated by considerations of intelligent design. For instance, it’s an inherent feature of religion; I believe in god, and I believe god created all, therefore I believe god created plague. This is followed by the inevitable question: Why did god create plague?

Agency is an unavoidable curiosity, but only for trauma, it seems. We are all more than content to receive blessings and spare no thought on its origin or creator, if there is one. That is an inherent feature of humanity.

There are lots of plagues today, too many to count. There is the obvious one, the pandemic. Buzzing around it like a swarm of locusts so densely clustered as to be indistinguishable from a dark storm-cloud are infinite afflictions of the mind. There are people that see disease and crippling fear in places they did not before. There are people that refuse to see it at all, who through aforementioned tailormade misinformation addictions believe it all to be a lie. These are both sicknesses.

There is no panacea. Our symptoms — environmental catastrophe, codified racism, devastating food insecurity, rampant mental health crises — cast too broad a net. But there is one malaise at the root of it all, and it is generally good practice to treat the severe symptoms while focusing on curing the disease.

Why can’t the world’s most prominent so-called leaders and organizations solve any of these issues? Why does it often seem like it is in their best interests not to? Because truth has imposters now, and with astounding negligence (another inherent feature of mankind) we have invented brilliant and insidious operating systems that render these imposters both highly profitable and indistinguishable from what is true. That’s not “capital T” truth. The truth I’m referring to is as basic and objective as having a consistently reported death toll for a pandemic.

We have designed these little nodes for ourselves with panoramic, unbreakable windows, all in the name of technological advancement, and the illusion is not that there isn’t a barrier, but that we shouldn’t want to leave at all. Everyone I know is in here. Better to stay inside.

Like any great illusion, there is an element the audience is invited to solve, an ego-satisfying red herring to lull us into a false sense of intelligence. We imagine we’ve discovered a way to proxy the trick, and if it passes our firewalls, it must be magic. This is, of course, by design. The magician wants us to have this. It legitimizes how they plan to embarass us, and it shrouds the actual and entirely non-mystical trick itself.

So, here’s the real trick as I see it; InstaTwitterSnapTokFacebook is our node with the panoramic windows. We think we are surrounded by friends, but they are just numbers. We think we are touched and loved because we are “liked.” We think we are connected, but many of us have not even met each other yet. Many of us will live and die as holographic projections meandering around each others’ node, trading memes in the spirit of “communication.”

It is a cruel trick. The illusionist has given us everything we thought would make us feel together, yet we are eminently alone. Our nodes are so carefully curated to what we desire that they have become our reality, and reality as was previously agreed upon has become illusory and fractured in turn. Again, I wish we could return to the way things were, even if it were just for a moment, just to remember how it felt, but it’s too late. What a cruel trick we, the illusionist, have pulled on ourselves.

How am I going to put the genie back in the bottle? It is everywhere, granting curses disguised as wishes. I don’t think it’s possible, but doing more of this is a good start.