Retreat, a strike, or practice?
For the last few days I’ve felt I wouldn’t mind if the Internet completely disappeared, if I never sent or received another email, never visited another Web site. I have no idea where this comes from, but it’s been very satisfying to let it flow to the ends of my extremities and fill me completely. I still don’t want to update anything. I may not even publish this post.
I have the strongest intuition that none of this has done us any good. We speak of how the world is more connected now, but I have my doubts: seems to me it’s all on the surface, a flood of digital spittle. For all the so-called organizing and communication, the world still tumbles toward an inevitable reckoning with with the Nature we refuse to be a part of — as if we could! Humans are, basically, eating the world, and the Internet is just another utensil. A huge one, too.
That’s the view from this morning, anyway. I spent yesterday (and will spend most of today) reading an actual book for a change, Hampton Sides’ Blood and Thunder, which anyone seriously interested in this part of the world should read. The author mentions how families in the East had to wait a year or two to learn the fate of loved ones who fell along the trail out West, sometimes even longer. Today, of course, you might know in minutes, but is this really progress? What does it matter that “facts” are transmitted at the speed of light, when all the while we’ve lost the ability to sense and feel, to look out for ourselves?
This isn’t intended to be a reasoned argument, so relax. I’m just reporting from the other side, as it were, where for the moment it feels fine.
Comment by Number 6
1 July 6, 2008, 9:35 am o'clock |
you’re not the only one John. on a regular and increasingly more frequent basis i feel the same way, though still being plugged in to cable tv exponentiates the feeling immensely. the constant unending barrage of myopic homogenized conformity and groupthink endlessly screaming at you “BE LIKE EVERYONE ELSE!!!!! DON’T THINK ABOUT ANYTHING!!!!!! AND BUY MORE NOW!!!!!!!!” makes me want to go completely off grid (and pick up & move out there to the middle of nowhere with you. i can’t of course - too many responsibilities here, including both parents here at home terminally ill). everything in “consensus culture” and its expression in corporate media is all about narcissism and ego and acquisitiveness and the most shallow depraved basest aspects of human existence.
but i know what you mean - you just hit that threshold of tolerance where you just don’t want to deal with ANY of it anymore; it’s too much, too overwhelming, both in the concentration of self-absorbed self-reinforcing stupidity as well as just sheer volume. i feel like the line in the old ’80s movie “WarGames”: the only way to win the game is not to play.
“Too much information
Running through my brain
Too much information
Driving me insane…”
–The Police
Comment by K.J. Webb
2 July 6, 2008, 10:51 am o'clock |
You fellows, John and number 6, are in a great American tradition - of striking out for the territories (or longing to do so) and getting shut of “sivilization” with its corruptions, false delicacies and inauthenticities. I love that tradition. It produced some of our greatest classic writers - Melville, Twain, Thoreau, Whitman, R.H. Dana, James Fennimore Cooper - not to mention more recent ones like Snyder and Kerouac. The young guy in “Into the Wild” was in that tradition, minus the chance to grow old and get it down in writing.
When I was a youngster I wasn’t reading that stuff, of course, but I WAS reading the tales of the mountain men - Jim Bridger and Kit Carson and Jedidiah Smith. I was reading about the settlement of the West from Texas to Oregon, all by renegades, misfits and seekers. That impulse to break out and drift westward goes back to the earliest days of the Republic. Our grandfathers and greatgrandfathers (we who grew up west of the Mississippi) broke away from the crampedness of the Eastern seaboard. It was too much like Europe and everything that had made THEIR ancestors leave THAT continent. They couldn’t endure the constraints of cities or working in shops or never knowing what lay in the back of beyond. They wanted land and independence and adventure. (Of course they ended up getting those things at the expense of the Red Man, but that’s another story.)
This tradition doesn’t exist at all in Europe, where all the people who didn’t vote with their feet had to make do with stumbling over each other, several generations in the same dwelling, every man slotted into his allotted role in life, all drinking each other’s bathwater (intellectually and otherwise) generation after generation. All this made Europeans realistic and socialized (in both senses). Americans it made lonelier and freer.
Is the internet a way of mitigating that loneliness - the loneliness of an American living either literally or spiritually in the territories? A way of finding kindred spirits without searching for them endlessly, Whitman-like, Kerouac-like, on the open road?
I share the ambivalence of both of you about it all. It’s too damned easy to be deep. Nevertheless, I keep coming back.