Dear readers, for those of you weary from the brave expedition that took you to the distant end of my lengthy first post, I have fabulous news: there’s more! Though there’s less meat on this one. In this polemic against the internet, you’ll find more questions than explanations, more complaints than insight, and even a tiny bit of science fiction.

In my previous post, I discussed theories on the goal of technology being the replacing of the natural world with one absent of inconvenience and which the mind has mastery over, and how the internet increasingly appears to be the site where this dream might be realised. While this reality might flourish in the dreams of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the internet of today is a world rife with its own exclusive set of limitations. 

There’s an increasing sense that we, and even multiple we’s, may exist and realise themselves on the internet. I can be a supermodel on Tinder, a foot lover on Grindr, a macrame bag weaver on Estsy, and a philosopher on Reddit. The foot lover can be having a private conversation in Kuwait while the philosopher hops from Krakow to Toronto to Rio in a fierce debate that will be immortalised in the endless tomes of forum history. My doubts, however, are that these identities are only half-baked. Take game design for example, the labour to “immerse” players is what drives much of game development, but the dream of fully pulling players into the game is still far beyond the horizon. 

The virtual realm, which in the future we may well settle down and start a family on, today may only be peeped at through keyholes and tiny windows in the form of phones and computers. We enter this realm by proxy of texts, videos, voice notes and emojis, but our flesh and our consciousness make us too bloated to fit through these portals ourselves. So much of our lives have been tossed, irretrievably, over to the other side. A swelling crowd of memories, relationships and even jobs wave at us from the other side of a canyon we cannot cross. I feel like Winnie the Pooh when he got stuck on his way out of Rabbit’s house, arms and head in the fresh air while the rest of him is lodged underground, not only can he not get out, but he can’t go back in either.

Since around January of this year, the far left side of my keyboard has stopped working (I would tell you which keys, but the effort is more than you could imagine) and rather than fixing my laptop, for the last eight months I have had a constant tab open of Daft Punk’s Wikipedia page (which I was originally drawn to via a nepotism investigation, the results of which turned out, shockingly, blue-linked) from which I can copy the letters, numbers and symbols I need to use. My recent job search has certainly been thwarted by this inconvenience, however, I have noticed that this annoyance is not unlike my general frustration with using technology and the web. The internet has undoubtably made communication more convenient and I wouldn’t say I’d rather message-via-pigeon than email or iMessage, but it is exactly the increase in convenience that makes it feel more inconvenient. We are lulled onto the internet under the false pretence that on it, anything is possible, and the obstacles of space and time have been shattered. Well, I for one feel greatly unsatisfied by this unkept promise. 

Imagine, for a moment, the mind through an analogy inspired by me and my laptop’s turbulent relationship: the outward expression of what is experienced in the mind may only be operated via a keyboard (not entirely unlike the control panel the emotions in Inside Out operate) on which we can express our thoughts through speech, writing, painting, singing and all the rest. Keys may be added as we develop and discover new ways of expression, but we are eternally frustrated by its inadequacies. In the online realm and through its many material appendages, we are far from being unplugged from this archaic keyboard. In fact, all the keys on it, except a scattered few, are completely unresponsive. There are definitely a few add-ons exclusive to the digital version of being, but if you ask me, I know what the real thing looks like and stitching on this knock-off is messy af, and don’t even talk to me about the label.  The question really is how the internet will progress, will meaning be transferred more and more without obstacle? Or will we forever be slamming our fists against the keyboard? 

Take for example my current scramble for employment, I mentioned this in my previous post. While applying for jobs, I lament at the pointless ways in which companies get candidates to present themselves, hours have been wasted inputting each GCSE and answering the many variations fished from the pool of arbitrary questions. Are my answers really indicative of my ability to perform this role? In my frustration, I can’t help but imagine plunging my head into the computer screen for the potential employer to dip their fingers into my brain. There they might thumb through my memories, map out my aspirations and score my essence, gaining a profound understanding of my suitability for the post (not to mention a truly existential experience). 

I experience a similar frustration with passwords and authentication. I wish Santander or iCloud could simply reach a lucent hand out into my soul for verification, forget ‘what was the name of your first pet?’, come and see him for yourself through my eyes fourteen years ago, and feel as I felt when I first met him in Carr Farm Garden Centre on my tenth birthday. If ambivalence is, as Raud suggests in Practices of Selfhood, the site where the self is realised, then, so long as I never have to input another password again, I’ll happily tell the self to shut the door on its way out. 

In Fragments of an infinite memory, Renouard imagines a reality where technology allows for communication completely unhindered and we, like angels, can convey our exact current state of minds to each other. A Snapchat “memory” popped up today, it was taken seven years ago from a crowd at Leeds Festival at 4:51am, a crumpled gazebo flies through the air to the tune of dubstep. If we could send real memories to each other on Snapchat, how would this one be received? Would the recipient experience, exactly as I had, the distant discomfort of four-day-old blisters, the vodka-blurred vision and the elated sense of freedom reserved only for seventeen-year-olds at music festivals? Would they receive the memory in its current state, deformed by time and distorted by the lens of my current mood? Or would their subjectivity exert its influence on the memory, changing it fundamentally? That is to ask, would they experience it as me or them?  

Of course, this technology would have higher aspirations than Snapchat, it would transform human communication beyond recognition. Speech would become a whimsical and shockingly imprecise quirk of the olden days, we would be looked upon as a primitive people, trapped in the lonely confines of the brain, hoarding knowledge and memory like dragons sleeping on mounds of gold and jewels. The contents of the mind would occasionally trickle out, flattened and deformed not only by one of the many flawed methods of communication, but also by the whim of the communicator. 

Allow me to dip my toe into science fiction with this excerpt from a historic record written hundreds of years from now. Fearing their technologies might fail, humans of the future decide, after centuries of neglect, to take up the pen and write their histories:  

Before the 22^nd century and the democratization of all knowledge and immortal memory, people invented many ways to communicate with one another, today these methods are considered impractical, unreliable and have largely fallen out of use. We currently may experience these methods of communication from the Great Memory, ‘speaking’ memories are popular among young people, they feel both repulsed and nostalgic towards the ambivalent world of the spoken word.  

I wonder if the technofeudalists would reach this far into the future. I can imagine millions of us sucked into memory farms like an all-encompassing version of TikTok, we couldn’t just put the phone down if our consciousness’ had been uploaded onto it. Or maybe the effects of this revolutionary shift into transparency would be so profound that lords of the internet would wither under the searing light of universal clarity. How could we be isolated, targeted, and modified if all knowledge and memory became shared? 

What other ill-forces could this digitised reciprocal telepathy cleanse from the world? Or would this just mean the cloud had finally been granted access-all-areas to the elusive human soul?

By William Partridge

Litro Magazine

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