Politics on the internet is like exercise on a potato couch.
We are going to have to reteach ourselves how the world beyond digital symbols and images work: the analogue real that we’ve been leaving behind for the dictatorship of 0 and 1, of “only this” and “only that”, of infertility and saturation – a farmland purified of its earthworms.
The internet flattens people into two-dimensional objects who swipe but never touch. Hands stripped-down to fingertips. Connection strangled into loveless reaction.
The internet is making us forget the ordinary and the vital. It dis-members wholeness and dis-embodies consciousness. It has baptized us into a kind of reversing-stream of knowledge of evil and good, and the troubling grays in between.
Without that knowledge and ordinary vitality, we can’t read each other, we can’t help each other, we can’t reach each other, we can’t navigate our mutual and divided social terrains. Our beacons of hope dim and fade into the resulting despair, the wreckage piling up without salvage.
Any thing that is digitized can be copied infinitely and endlessly, without context or anchor. Which means: its value tends toward zero. A gluttony of junk abundance. An economy of cheap signs.
Which implies: of the few things of value still left to us are the things that aren’t yet digitized. The handmade, the heartfelt.
All of which means this: our attention, which is a necessary act of creation, becomes the last scarce resource. The real thing.
As such, the real value of our attention isn’t merely analogue: it’s prologue.
If we don’t faithfully value our attention, someone (or something) else always will, faithlessly authoring our epilogue.
The internet is hopeless. We aren’t. …not just yet.