This is a particularly and newly lonely time to be living. Like living inside a packet. The bottom’s fallen out, or at least it feels that way. We used to, and can’t now, both as bare fact of existence and as anti-suicide measure, regard life online and life offline as two separate things – two spaces governed by differing value systems and rules of engagement that were to be necessarily navigated differently, one of them definitely realer than the other just because it was touchable. This was never really true. These weren’t two parallel terrains; they were the same, there was always someone on the other end of whatever—there was, always, real skin in the game, and now we find ourselves unprepared for the dimensional merge that really wasn’t.
The things that made online and off seem like different territories have been dismantled, the vanished supports that drew someone to the internet as an ad-hoc refuge are now the normal, uniform experience – a chilling removal of familiar irl sympathies and humanizing identities within a community shared by simple proximity, leading almost everyone abandoned to just their one life to shrink into, to supplement with their own stable vices. It’s the extension and concluding of the long hawk circle of corporate, neoliberal capitalism that gen-x reacted to with the overly simple sentiments of not wanting to ‘sell out’ and get a ‘shit, soul-numbing’ job (a sentiment entrenched in classism and privilege, but still one that realized some kind of wound was being inflicted) – they were reacting to this death’s head of erasing, corporate sludge, the first large waves of dehumanizing wage slavery en masse, the co-opting of escape routes into a blob-like whole of bone-crushing isolation and destruction (lol, 90’s wtf, amirite) and now these serve as the plot of shifting earths where our daily life stands today. It’s a certain kind of clever violence that’s almost elegant in its removal of humanity; how many people think of the people they work with as co-workers, as a mental group apart, despite spending large portions of your day around them, sometimes seeing only them in a given day? How many compartmentalize time at work almost as if a dead time, as almost hardly part of your ‘real’ life? And after years and years of this valueless, destabilizing drainage, we are so fucking tired all the time, we are so beaten that it is hard to foment community offline. Virtual connection is now a universal necessity and it is really lonely. For large swathes, what is there to log-off to?
The internet has traditionally been a place for people to connect who were isolated from their surroundings. It may have been the only pathway to reach someone like yourself, like a safety rope thrown out to not feel alone – it is now a rope everyone must throw in an increasingly isolating world. It’s a controlled space and an annihilating one – a monoculture whose curation has begun to exceed even the longest reach of the bloodiest hands and when content spirals beyond the means of control, what is left but to instead create context, to manufacture the context in which we – all of us within the joined territories of online and off – experience reality.
Enter 2019 bb! Enter this firework miasma of garbage, watch Joe Rogan say ‘you know, that’s a real good point’ about the age of consent of a 2D loli. There’s a four-hour video lurking somewhere in someone’s video editor about the skull shapes of immigrants and how it ruined a particular video game’s subreddit and it will not be first or the last to be uploaded. A maw of chilling opinions, bravely paraded and supported, that slowly embolden the fucking worst dregs of human capacity, routinely resulting in actual body counts. I’ve wondered what it takes out of a person to piss into soda bottles within a dimming, friendless existence as I piss in my own, too afraid of reading a text message for want of what to respond.