#296

No matter how much I write about internet--its pernicious toxins, its miraculous fruits--its mysteries, lies, and obfuscations--its great telescopic beam aimed everywhere and nowhere--it feels like I hardly say anything. This is probably because I don't know much, if anything about internet, in the end, no matter how much of it I read and experience. It may be like a dream, in that it is an unreality that is integral to the makeup of reality. One cautious observation: its portion of that makeup has grown strangely and of its own properties, like an organism. Or a virus, or a cancer. 

Often one reads what internet scholars have to say about internet and one can agree, while wondering why it doesn't feel like the whole story. I think this is because any one person is only ever writing about a small part of the internet, like someone describing the part of an iceberg visible above the water. The internet is thousands of miles of deep, deep ocean full of icebergs--truly, the net is vast--but typically we zero in on a few peaks when we talk about the whole shebang. I mean, there's trenches down there. Billions of cubic meters of water. Why so much babble about this or that algorithm, or a couple of companies? Because you have a word count on your article. Because books and dissertations can only be so long.

Again, like a dream, writing about them is no substitute for dreaming them, and if there is an art and science to dreaming, there is only so much that others can tell you. The dreamer must dream in order to dream. So it is with perceiving the internet--diving into strange waters to see what you haven't seen before. Fishing for strange fishes.

Most people just hang out on top of one or two of the most enormous icebergs, trusting official reports about the reality of the underwater vastness, and call that the whole internet. Just like most people read an article or three, an introduction, an excerpt, and a short-form analysis, then feel qualified to tell you all about Aristotle's influence on Western thought, or what Nietzsche really meant, signified, and believed, or what effect a needle traveling at lightspeed can really have. These people don't know shit about fuck and can't be talked or listened to by any individual with even moderate presence of mind, but they are legion, and amongst themselves, they reinforce each other and create a certain social reality of perception and sufficiency of knowledge. They cannot be taught further, except by the next fragment forthcoming from their usual sources, which they absorb only to maintain the intellectual capital which is socially functional to them. And in the end, society has lots of functions to fill, and there is nothing wrong with that. We can't all endlessly wonder what the deeper meaning is to every phenomena that we encounter in life, or live as completionists and subtext addicts. People have a busy day to get to, so they'll eat disinformation over breakfast and regurgitate it over lunch.

Of course, this can be stressful nonetheless, but it doesn't really matter any more or less than, say, a giant humanoid insect in your dream telling you that in the crystal caves you just traversed, you left behind something important--yet, you cannot turn back. That is also kind of stressful, but functionally, concretely, you can keep dreaming, shift the dream, do whatever, even wake up. Neither will it interfere with you unduly in waking life, though the memory of it all is something to chew on. Similarly, on internet, it's easy to keep your mouth shut, and click away, or log off. There is more to think about elsewhere, different nutrients you could be absorbing, new and interesting vistas not available above the surface of the water that you could contemplate. 

Internet is supposed to tell us something about the real world; it is even supposed to inform us about reality, but that is not what it is really for, and not what it really does. But what even is the real world in the first place? The iceberg metaphor is equally applicable. 

No one knows anything. It's fun to exchange ideas about it, nice to think about, but far as I can determine, the only truth that has never been known by anyone lies in accepting and admitting the unknowability of the truth.

--JL