In the beginning, the internet was a tool to see the parts of the world you couldn’t see from where you were sitting, behind a giant desktop tower with a 28.8-modem chirping at you as it fired up. I should know, I was there, I am ten-thousand years old. I remember it like the invention of hot-air balloon or The Bronze Age Collapse, I’m just that old. Technically, I’m 46, but that is all relative.
Somewhere along the way it got twisted, by commerce of course, commerce ruins all things fine and good. As the speeds went faster, and there was more and more money to be had, it became a lot less about seeing outside the box of your little life and about building the little echo chamber around each of us, telling us not what we wanted to know, but rather what we wanted to believe.
You won’t make much money from monkeys swinging from trees in the deep jungle or the lions feasting in the veldts, of course. Not nearly as much as locking them in cages and selling tickets to the zoo. So that’s where we are now. In all our own little bubbles. Selling tickets to ourselves, not even profiting from it. Being lied to that we’re being seen and told what we want to hear, no pay beyond the two particular forms of illusory script. Not even a forced-exile into Plato’s Cave.
We chose to go into these caves, to watch shadows on the wall. We pay rent on the damn things.
It mutated from a portal to see everything everywhere into a lens through which we interpret the world. We don’t believe in the world behind the lens anymore. We believe the lens is what’s real.
So, we can’t really know anything that’s ever going on, perhaps ever again? Did someone nearly everyone you know despises get elected because your real-world friends aren’t real? Or did they cheat the system wholesale, and then flood the internet with so many bots artificially supporting the person everyone hated, so that you can never question it? Even though it’s utterly a total lie?
As long as we see everything through a warped lens, in our rented caves, we can’t trust anything.
When I was a boy, reality was fluid at best. I saw a “Gilligan’s Island” once where the castaways were getting radiation poisoning from vegetables they grew from irradiated seeds and I wouldn’t a vegetable for months. The Transformers got a virus that turned them evil and I could not touch those toys for even longer. Watching the television from that old brown couch, I could not shake the feeling everything on there must be somehow real or at least based on real things, because if it made it to television, it must be based on something. I couldn’t accept it was all just made up.
But as I said, I am very old now and I slowly learned the difference. While everyone else forgot.
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