In this age of cultural criticism, punditry, general micro-blogging and endless gaffes, shock, and outrage on the Internet and beyond—although mostly on the Internet, perhaps in part because it’s a place that exists nowhere, like the Na-koja-abad of muslim mysticism, the Persian term for utopia, which literally means, “the place that exists nowhere”—but also because it is currently the primary means through which we interact with our society and is furthermore the average American’s primary means for self-expression in general. This bodiless heaven, where we can instantly and immediately be gratified of any unbodily need we have while our actual bodies fester in the increasing hell of our actual room, is an interiority exposed and the internal uploaded into the closest our technology has come to mind, with servers as stand-ins for the more mundane ganglia of people and people as stand-ins for the more mundane mind of the masses.
Our internal experience has been made external and is being viewed and judged constantly by persons we have never met, or even worse, is being judged by no one, while we ourselves are losing what sense we had of ourselves as a distinct place defined by beliefs and opinions even while the opinions and beliefs we DO have are becoming radicalized by the online communities we live in and thrive around us, and as a result we have also become a nation lacking rational discourse, all of which is because we are currently living a good portion of our lives in what Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject”, i.e. an object that is viscous, molten, nonlocal, phased, and interobjective—that is, the Internet.
As human beings, we exist in a variety of ways, and the internet, as one of the ways we exist, is extraordinarily new. The fears surrounding the internet are distinct but related to the sorts of fears that surrounded television and other innovations, like jazz, movies, even the advent of the printing press—Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner was worried that the overabundance of data the printing press could provide would be “confusing and harmful to the mind”—and generally speaking is like any particular thing that appeared to affect people in ways they had not been affected before, leading to the fear that comes with our sense of a degradation or loss of purity brought on by some tantalizingly strange newness, a change that some embrace in the giddy voices of recent converts while others scorn and attempt to suppress. However, concerns surrounding the Internet are also unique for a number of reasons.
For starters, the ideology of progress that has been fueling innovation for the past several hundred years is winding down to put it mildly. One of the things that make the concerns of the past so laughable today is that from the viewpoint of the present, these past terrors seem so innocuous. Progress continued to unfold as it would, and our world does not seem to be the worse for it—except that it does, it really does—but even the most innocent of innovations must of necessity have some sort of unstabilizing effect. Innovation is change after all. Just as it has been claimed that the Arab Spring would not have been possible without Twitter, I think you could also argue that the American and French revolutions would not have been possible without the printing press.
However, currently, the time frame is much more rapid, because it literally seems that a “bureaucratic lifeform” has been born upon the Earth and those of us trying to make our way in the world today are in actual fact living to feed this bureaucratic lifeform that does not function within the actual physical ecosystem of the planet and so cannot be faulted for destroying the actual ecosystem of the planet, just as I could not be faulted for destroying a whole ecosystem of fantastical flora when I dream. Have I lost you yet? Is this the Internet? Is this a hyperobject?
(The “bureaucratic lifeform” is an idea from a sci fi book I’m working on, and in that book it refers to a lifeform that lives inside the crevices of a dug-out earth, a lifeform that consumes through bureaucracy.)
Is it possible that technological development itself is a hyperobject that is evolving itself into a singularity? Perhaps!
Because ideologies evolve too, from the quaint “spirits of the wood” of ancient times, through the gods of the harvest and hierarchy, through a single deity loitering in the desert, to a long list of guys who claim to be the ultimate godman from Jesus to Nietszche and beyond. Ideologies evolve as the election cycle spirals out of control and the temperature rises and forest fires have killed off most of the spirits of the wood anyway. Which is what I was getting at before: prepare for armageddon because progress is done as an idea, and it has been replaced by a blind numbness and fear.
You see. Those spirits of the wood worked pretty well in their time, but now all we got are Disney and drugs to replace those many messiahs as the hyperobject continues its evolution. It is working itself up into places that haven’t been invented yet, and times we will never get around to seeing.
Although, to be fair, it should also be pointed out that the Internet is more like a facsimile of a hyperobject than the real honest-to-god actual deal. It is a manufactured area that we experience as a hyperobject despite its being different from a hyperobject in certain key areas. It gives the sense of being Molten, as in being “so large that it refutes the idea that spacetime is fixed concrete and consistent”, but there are certainly physicists who would argue that no matter how large we think the Internet is, it’s not large enough to seem to transcend space-time. It appears to be both Nonlocal and Interobjective—as in not in any particular place and existing primarily between objects—in this case ourselves and our computers—but there are actual places where the internet is stored and functions through. Furthermore, the Internet is only Phased in the sense that sometimes I am in it and sometimes I am not, while the Internet itself is always humming along. But does the Internet “adhere to any object” it touches? As an actual Viscous hyperobject is said to do? Does it remove ironic distance?
We are still the same social, rational, emotional animals we have been known to be since time immemorial, and occasionally even a little spiritual when the spirit moves us, because we all still worship one of the ten thousand gods to make our way through the world today, but everything we are is tied up with everything else. Every once in a while, someone’s come along who wants to categorize humans as specifically this or that, featherless bipeds or rational animals, the result of our DNA or the flakes of God, but none of these stick because each one is just an interpretation of the very messy affair of people and what they have been known to do. But, as humans, we have been fairly successful in modifying our environment in such a way that we can traverse it differently. We no longer have to forage for food, but can grow it ourselves in patches of land we tend occasionally as we roam or is protected by a fence beside our stationary house, or there are some of us who grow food for others who do other services that we all acknowledge are necessary, or that we can work parts of the earth into intricate machines that can themselves make the manufacture of the basic goods quicker, or that can themselves manufacture other intricate machines, until we have then begun to develop machines that help us think, and that we can think through, and that can then modify thinking. This is where we are now.
With the Internet, the whole purpose is specifically that I can on the one hand, present my thoughts and feelings without in actuality being invested in those thoughts and feelings, that I can experience my own mind from an ironic distance, which is specifically how the Internet adheres to this objectless object we call ourselves, this conceptless concept of me. I turn myself into an other, an externalized limb with which I reach out to others through the on-going channeling of my private thoughts into a public arena that continually judges and re-affirms those thoughts in a stream of virtual back-slaps, hugs, and high fives, and through these on-going value judgments my ironic distance from this me-who-is-not-me begins to break down until the lack or loss of this affirmation becomes quite literally a painful experience, more painful because it is silence. There is no actual human interaction. No affirmation is given in a way that my body has understood affirmations in the past, except for perhaps the gold star from our teachers, the stickers and “A+” on the test, but not the mature human affirmation of handshakes, hugs, smiles, and actual accomplishments. And the judging, devoid of the intonation that works as a mediator between speaker—and listener—guiding the listener through the literal meaning with an emotional accompaniment that helps soothe and punctuate our thoughts—leaving the listener open to interpret every possible criticism in the worst possible way and quickly escalate any critical discourse to the nuclear level. We have become children angling for praise from our teachers and paranoiacs lashing out at our peers.
It should also perhaps be pointed out that the very concept of a hyperobject was created to discuss ecology and specifically, according to Timothy Morton, hyperobjects, “not only become visible during an age of ecological crisis, but alert humans to the ecological dilemmas defining the age in which they live,” and the Internet itself, is in some ways the antithesis of this, a massive coping mechanism of a species facing the very real possibility of a civilization-ending cataclysm. Is the Internet like a populationwide blindfold—where Obama is not an American citizen and muslim, while out here in reality Obama obviously is indeed an American and not a muslim, for example—as the lemmings plop over the edge of the cliff? Obviously the Internet is at the very least informing public opinion, but does how we interact on the Internet affect how we think? Before we go any further, we need to look at what thinking is and how it manifests itself.
If we think of thinking as the behavior of mind, as in how our minds act and interract with what we sense, then we can clearly say that while we are on the Internet and interacting with the Internet, our behavior of mind is affected by the Internet. Could we also say that increased sense leads to increased thought of both the productive and staring-at-the-ceiling variety—as we respond to comments and expect comments, have multiple windows open that we check, as well as looking to the Internet to confirm, deny, and define things we are unsure of. It becomes like a literal prosthetic mind that we are constantly falling back on and depending on as well as looking to for a variety of circumspect and genuine reasons.
Of course, there are those who would say, So what?!?! The problem is that the Internet is a technology that is increasingly with us all the time, which means that unlike earlier technologies, we are not arguing about the effects of using this technology on the viewer or listener’s personality but on the effect during use—for we have all become addicted to our iPhone7 prosthetic minds, and so discussing how our mind behaves while using this prosthetic mind becomes a very relevant and pressing concern.
And while using these aforementioned prosthetic minds, I need my thoughts and feelings to be judged well and good by my peers at all times. I am self-censoring and self-editing my thoughts and feelings to fit with what is acceptable within the larger societal framework constantly on Facebook and Twitter. I no longer have this notion of myself as a distinct kernel moving through the world, and am instead proudly displaying myself as a member of the larger hive-mind.
Of course, people were never distinct kernels, but the computer, as a facismile—also—of our internal experience made public—can trick our minds into thinking that we are in fact instantly and easily attached to the minds of others through a magical ether that suffuses and connects the entire globe, and it is specifically this perceived vision of the Internet as a shared mind that leads to the rise of rage and irrationality in the walking-around world we believe we actually inhabit. On the one hand, there is no accountability when we act as part of a shaming herd while on the other, the most minor off-the-cuff comment can lead to a person losing their livelihood and being shunned by their friends. We are each facing avatars of ourselves when we face the comments section to the New York Times, and those avatars are not forgiving.
Meaning comes as a challenge to the larger face of meaninglessness we must endure daily. Meaning is not easily given. It does not come lightly, and it will not increase your likes or shares or positive comments. It does not come in the form of a soothing new age melody. It does not come in comforting pictures of far-away places or the cute pictures of babies. It comes from looking yourself in the mirror with a critical eye and asking yourself honestly and clearly, Why am I here? What am I doing here? Who am I?
This specific activity is private and impossible to share, and the less we are alone, the less we quiet our thoughts, the less likely we are to have this experience. As our internality becomes increasingly externalized, we know ourselves less and less, and therefore the weight of the meaninglessness we must endure only grows—as we send out ideas through the stream of Facebook, hoping for some kind of affirmation that we are correct, and always hunting for more friendly faces and voices who will affirm us in how we think of ourselves.
The world is changing. This has been my mantra from as far back as I had one—which is pretty far back—first time I told my little brother, Enjoy it while it lasts, Jules, it’s all downhill from here, he was in preschool and I was a year or so older. But now that the world is actually and truly changing, and my country is twisting itself into the most unusual of balloon animals, and a few of us are straining towards the heavens—literal, actual heavens or the on-going illusion of the progress of the world as an ideological necessesity and literal reality—and the rest of us are watching our cities begin to burn with a vengeful fire. The through line of the day is the binary character of our societal universe is increasing, for or against, yes or no, share or shame, and we are complicit in this.
I live online. I teach kids in China from the comfort of my home. I have put out books FROM China through email and paypal, and I have put out music that only exists online. Without the Internet, the entity that is Mutablesound would no longer be, but issues like #BlackLivesMatter versus #BlueLivesMatter is an internet-created issue. The simplification of ideas leads to the potential misappropriation of those ideas, which leads to persons having to constantly state explicitly and at length the nuances behind an idea that should be implicitly and immediately clear in the ideas themselves, i.e. saying that black lives matter is NOT saying that blue lives do not matter. It is only saying that black lives matter.
But who am I in all of this? How do I live out my responsibility toward my fellows and my friends? Who is the person living behind my eyes? Am I the person I believe myself to be? These are questions that cannot be answered online.
—GBoyer
Boston, 2015
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
