So we survive.
We do everything that is required of us. We move forward. We fight, claw, bite, scratch against the tide of overwhelming responsibility. We stare into the disappointment of lives that aren’t the ones we dreamed up as children. We stare at news broadcasts and internet memes that remind us how scary and ridiculous all of this is and yet we rely upon the somber seriousness of our lives to provide our lives with gravity–to tether us to these earthly responsibilities and habits designed largely to lock us into lives of modernity and mundanity.
I have ceded too much of myself to algorithms.
I watch them infect every moment of my network existence. They’re in my mail, creeping around in tiny letters proclaiming a better solution to this or that. They paint the edges of web pages with their certainty that the handful of items I looked at out of curiosity are everything that I need to continue my day. I grow impatient with the reminders of what I bought two years ago and certainly need to buy again and again.
I am not from this world.
I’m from the time when Knight Rider was king and a computer was a new-fangled device that you plugged into a Television. I’m from a time when we still said television; when we needed such things to watch shows. The internet wasn’t ubiquitous in my now. We plugged computers into phones with handles and cords. We played video games that didn’t look like real life or even try to mimic that. We told stories in books and magazines and made mixtapes. We loved conversations where we could see each other smile. We held hands and ran through the streets. At night we sat around and told each other stories. on the edge of cities there were fires and we sat around those and drank and sang and listened to music. In concerts we lit flames to signify our affection and togetherness.