You can feel it, can’t you?
It’s a low frequency hum vibrating right behind your molars. It’s the sudden, nauseating realisation that the sky above you isn’t actually the sky, but a massive, painted dome, and the director in the control room is an plethora of bots feeding on your dopamine…
We are all living inside the world’s shittiest, lowest budget reboot of The Truman Show.
Every time you post a photo of your food, every time you bleed out a perfectly curated hot take on a of the many billionaire’s platforms…
It’s like we’re performing for hidden cameras.
We are turning our actual, wet, messy human life into easily digestible content sludge for a database that does not love you, will not hold you when you cry, and absolutely will not help you hide a body.
There is obviously a silver lining and that’s the fact that people are slowly waking up. Yeah they might still be “making content” but they’re noticing it all and are taking a turn back to the days when we could turn the internet on and off at will and then go on with our lives.
You’re starting to see it happen and the boat is finally hitting the painted wall at the edge of the the current digital ocean or whatever you want to liken it to.
People are quietly, without fanfare, cutting the glowing umbilical cord. They aren’t writing grand departure manifestos like you’d see on LinkedIn. They are just slipping out the back door while the “powers at be” aren’t looking. They are deleting the apps, scorching the earth, and actively rejecting the tech bro fantasy that you need some automated AI “second brain” to manage your life.
Outsourcing your thoughts to a digital filing cabinet is the ultimate anti human act. Your first brain. Which is the squishy, imperfect one marinading in its own weird chemical soup, which also happens to need friction. It needs to forget things. It needs to struggle and make you question everything.
Why? Cause that’s the thing that makes us on of the rare bleeding heart humans who operates in the real world.
Yeah the online space is surprisingly small in comparison to IRL, but there are multiple vacuums that we can get sucked into and that’s the part of the internet that really messes with us.
We have to claw our humanity back from the glowing rectangles. We have to stop living for the broadcasts and likes and retweets and whatever else is being sold to us as the solution to our loneliness.
The only way to find that is through life and love and art and making cool shit that we can share with other cool humans.
It’s a fairly simple recipe and I promise you. It’ll keep you sane.
So that thing or creation you’ve put on the back burner because your online life isn’t as perfect as the coaches that coach coaches present to everyone? Get to it.
Go make some art or learn some new things or even start a conversation with a random person while you’re out walking your dog.
That stuff works like magic.
Stephen Walker.