To
progress. To move from one thing to another. Linear time. The past:
worse. The future: brighter. A dichotomy of motion.
Dystopia
is the inverse, but the same, a romanticized past, a future of
unbearable ugliness and privation.
In
the rhythms of the greater world, there is another story.
&
Cold in the early morning. Wake to snow-covered fields. Half-moon,
bright in the rich gray of the sky, above the ridges of white and
black.
Woodsmoke. Even the fence rails, even the willow branches wear a
ridge of snow.
&
On the weekends we make excursions to town. Use the internet, make
calls. As if visiting our old life for the afternoon.
The internet has colonized our pockets for a long time. Endless,
expansive, always available. I can think back to a time before my
smart phone, before computers were ubiquitous even. Before internet,
before the sites that have become verbs unto themselves. I knew a
time of floppy disks and dot-matrix printers, and before that
typewriters. They are sense-memories, properties of my childhood.
They seem distant, historical. The internet age has suffused all
recent memory.
Sometimes we stand in the trailer, reach a mental impasse. We don’t
know what we want to know. In the past we might have whipped out the
phone, a game of search engine quick-draw. Now our hands flutter in
the air. We should look that up sometime, we say. Then we usually
forget about it.
This is straining in some ways. Friends who reached out to us by
electronic means before, now hear radio silence most of the time. And
there is a certain emptiness our time on the internet once occupied –
a sense of being interconnected, in the know, reading widely (if
somewhat shallowly) on many subjects. There is a feeling of loss, for
what stood in for community and networks of kinship.
Standing aside from it, one can see it is only an approximation of
those things we crave, connection, kinship. But we are in the
transitional mode, an awkward moment, filling these spaces. We don’t
have a village to canvas for knowledge. We don’t have tradition to
turn to. But at last we can really recognize it, begin to grieve that
absence.
In that place, we now put tactile knowledge: how to dig a parsnip,
how to plant a garlic clove. The smell of wind before it snows. The
honking of geese, the wheeling of hawks. How the firs stand silent
and dark and still on the ridge.
We focus more on the daily, the moment. Where the internet felt vast,
my mind frantic in its attempts to consume the unending stream, now
my mind feels expansive, ranging through thought and memory while I
dig carrots or pick kale. This isn’t always comfortable. But it
feels enlivened, real.
&
I feel I see the internet, and the companies that own it, in a new
light, or at least recognize my subconscious thoughts about them. I
realize how much fear they inspire, a carefully controlled,
unmentionable fear.
This is partly because we know they must have a great deal of power –
they have so much money, and access to information. And beyond that
they are not physical things, amorphous, inchoate, leviathan yet
insubstantial. Great cloud-like daemons floating on the horizon,
aware of everything we do or even want to do. We believe in their
existence utterly, even as they exist nowhere except in the lights
that project images from our computers.
Just as social media seems to have taken the place of community,
internet companies seem to be the gods or powerful spirits of our
time. Capricious, unknowable, their limits untested. We beseech them
in queries at the search bar, and they seem to answer, and for the
moment we sigh relief. Their existence is a foregone conclusion.
I imagine fairy tales told in some future time to keep children in
line:
The google is always watching, it has one eye that never shuts.
The google is totally silent, you’ll never hear it coming. You can
ask the google anything, but then it will know everything about you.
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