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How to be humane in the late 2020s?
No, this is a question, no one seems to be sure.
I am experienced; I'll begin here. As in any discussion, please bring any ideas you'd be pleased to share, and consider me only one, among many sides on this issue.
I spend many days doing research online; in cyber-space, and this seems to be disconnecting me from many of my peers, in a geographic sense and also emotionally. One of the big challenges I come across, I experience each day, lies in an issue that I find rather easy to describe.
Recognizing this problem required years of research, because in my mind, I'd been seeking something that I could perhaps find online, inside the echoes of ideas that people share in public. Because the space of our shared ideas is so large, and in so many senses anonymous, that how could the idea I seek fail to be seen in such online space?
Then, as in any issue that plagues anyone, I began to realize the source of my dis-ease. The cause of my annoyances, of my angers, of my impulse to push aside closeness in any of my relationships, perhaps came from a problem in me?
A simple social reel described this phenomenon, when a popular folk musician sat down to learn from other guitarists. Someone in the room said, "you don't change how the instrument plays, you change how you play."
And after this idea echoing in my mind for months, after examining from each angle my connection to my research, I began to sense differently the space I am in.
My problem in online spaces is how big our online spaces seem to be.
Online space, "cyber space" as originally coined by William Gibson in Neuromancer, is described as "a consentual hallucination". This is the sum of the ideas that people choose to share in public. The recordings of real spaces, and the imaginings of endless impulsing minds.
The raging rush of ideas that passes us by in each moment is incalculable. In each hour, immeasurable. In each sleep, in each day, incomprehensible.
Lucky us, that so much of this rush is meaningless. And such a burden, in deciding where the meaning seems to lie.
Cyber space seems to be big, because in essence, our ideas can become so small.
As I record my ideas here, on my keyboard (measuring around 12" across), the nuances of my penmanship are meaningless; only the sequence of alphanumerics and grammar are recognized by the machine. These are the keys.
The keys I impress in my machine are recorded, in magnetic spaces no human eye can possibly see, far smaller than a single pixel on the screens we use to replay the recordings, those pixels also inordinately small and indiscernable.
No more pyramids or walls, no more bridges or towers, the engineering of our modern age seeks to build the miniscule.
How odd our obsession.
I call the ideas you're reading here an "echo", as I call most online media an "echo" rather than a "recording", because when there are so many records to go through, the cacophony and discordance has no other summary.
My echoes are going to be displayed in some index, alongside the musings of similarly sleepless composers, and biased to appear in proximity to others deemed to be in a similar education range and career path. The audience un-sensible, the copies numerous, the relays pushing our echoes as quickly as possible into the memory chips of our peers - our contemporaries, our colleagues, our companion humans on earth. Their screens read back the echoes, in hopes that the meaning remains clear as the signal propagates through precise rules of replay, replay, replaying as years and years go by.
As the keys I press are encoded, they shrink into spaces smaller than they perhaps should be. Smaller than they need be. Small is easy to copy, easy to reproduce, and easy to echo.
By making our ideas small, more of us can pass them around. The speed of ideas increases, and the emotional connection of each is compressed, becoming sharper and punchier.
'Shock and awe', 'clickbait', 'pornographic', and your page may be punchy enough to spread, may become a virus able to reproduce, may be a memory burned on our conscience as in so many other scars. There's language to describe this obsession, the scrolling, the doomsday repetition of small scars on a punished psyche, the inescapable loop of call and response, ping and pong, a gamification of pleasure and pain.
A chemical dependency is normally used to describe substance abuse, a drug-caused compulsion.
The rush of ideas and superficial connections that are being commercialized globally is also a dependency, and far more a problem of the masses than any opioid or opiate crisis could possibly become. Someone needs to be clear-headed to keep opiates flowing, no? Though in cyber-space, we rely on the communication channels in place to help us produce higher-pace replacements for the same.
How to be humane, then, when the increasing pace has no describable escape, and when the machines seem to learn the channels of action, of democratic and bureaucratic decisions and roles, of commerce and ecology and language and boundary, that slip and spill into the consequences of bloodshed?
This is the condition I seem to be seeing; less 'war' so much, and less 'blood-letting' in a medical sense, and less 'shed' as in a loss of excess -
'bloodshed' as in 'watershed', where a full region of geography, of culture and of humanity seems to be spilling into a sea.
How to be humane, in the late 2020s?
How to echo properly? How to amplify the meaningful, and examine for meaning in the rush of ideas that may harbor any?
If humans are anything compared to other animals, in this ecology of immediate communication, our condition is to be susceptible.
Susceptible to dis-ease, to apathy, to negligence, to reckless abandon. Susceptible to excess and rage and the dispassionate logic of numbers. Susceptible to numbness.
'Viral' is a real description, and the spread of these memes and earworms and eyecandies is as medically concerning as the debilit-ability of the animals who endure the afflictions.
Please no longer chase 'impact', 'hot news', or 'explosive growth'; these are signs of bad business, signs of high-frequency trading-blows.
Please build upon homes, meals, common ground, blooms; these are the solid pieces that bring us into company of peers.
And speaking of peers, there seems to be a slip in how we discuss them online; "peer-to-peer" relays are a sign of mechanics, and of how eager we are to adopt the machines (relays of simple encoded messages) as equals, our peers, perhaps our leaders.
No; please chase sunshine. Please chase clean scrubs and numerous grasses and a sea's crisp breeze. Poems beyond rhymes, meaning deeper than seems secure to discuss.
Spend less energy leading machines, and more in the sensation and encouragement of humane emotions. Learn again the basics of language, including the nuanced shapes and shades of each ones' bodies, those irreplicable prizes of animaldom, whom for each of us only one can be called ours.