The smart phone is more like a personal assistant. It is hemmed to fit your life and not just anyone's. And so it gives you the news you want to read about, the songs you want to hear, and the apps you need the most. The personal computer is the same thing and the iPod, the kindle and netflix, pandora, gps boxes, tivo, facebook, last.fm, google homepage, etc, etc, life.
Technology is intensifying the significance of the individual. Every new wonderous achievement that seemingly sits on the brink of the future is being marketed directly to you. This isn't so different than any other period in the modern era except that the advertisements are directly using our names.
"Morgan Milford, with the new iPhone you'll be able to send flirty text messages to that girl in your anthro class (the one with the nose ring and the neck tattoo) while simultaneously browsing pitchfork for the latest snobbery hipster music" This has been a message from Steve Jobs.
And so it's hard for me to feel like a part of anything. For us, the grandbabyboomers, it's been a long time coming, this shift to the I. They've taught us since we were in diapers that we can do absolutely whatever we want. "fulfill your dreams, the future is all yours, you are special." And sure, those are viable, true, and inspiring messages. But they inflate our ego. And so does all this technology. As if everything in the world is just a really on-point team of servants at my every beck and call.
And so it's easy to be apathetic. Because there are a million different causes and even they are specialized and if they don't match my particular DNA sequence I can put their plight to the back of my mind. In this way I can filter happily through the reality of the times, a reality that translates to 50 dead Ugandan world cup watchers and to the rising caste based honor killings in India and even on our front porch soldiers returning from the war living with post-traumatic stress disorder and a black shadow engulfing the gulf and all of these things that I just can't get angry about because I'm busy being told that I am the most important person in the world when really all "I" means today is consumer. And so as all of our group affiliations (family, nation, state) are falling to the wayside and I continue to make purchases that mark me as an individual and give more and more power to the one shared space left which looks something like a consumerist machine. And I can't even get mad about that, because I've convinced myself I need all these things, I need the computer and I need all this music, no worse than that, I've convinced myself I deserve these things.
I can say you're my neighbor but I can't even draw you a map of the neighborhood anymore.
You two [Robin and Morgan] evoked a lot of empathy and sadness in me this morning. To have awoken as it were to the brutal self-reflection of two obviously thoughtful and optimistic if cynical persons is invigorating in a way. I find however that whenever my introspection delves deepest my bitterness and misery at the senselessness of it all approaches proportions almost too high for my will to bear, "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." I pray you two find consolation in that a reflective world is our only hope of learning and understanding - not that you need consolation in fact 'bleeding with rage' will be necessary for transforming ourselves and our 'i-world'. You two write beautifully by the way, the hope is palpable atop the 'self-effacement'. The point if I got any of it was clear, the problem with the world is too many people looking in too many mirrors for all the wrong reasons and non to few for the right ones. Thank you.
Yes, that's where we find ourselves. Is relief a wilderness? It seems so sometimes. A place where there is only "I;" but can there be an "I" with no witness?
From within, it seems that there is no one, no conscious, sentient being that is free. I find my co-dependence keeps me trapped in the phenomena of being co-opted that you describe. I complain, but at the same time am to weak to refuse the rewards I get in exchange for my freedom. Giving up selected things allows me to step out of the Matrix, and discover that I am in a group of free compatriots.
Zen, not in it's classical sense, but as a useful, secular affirmation. A free person is never alone because the world presents itself in a present that defines accessibility. What I have found helpful, is to strip existence itself, and all its contents, of meaning. Meaning is a hook we carry in our mouths waiting for the tug of the fishing line of the Matrix. Life without meaning is not grim, like they want you to believe. It is clear. We are unfree when we cannot do without something that is ultimately controlled by the Matrix. Meaning is the uniform we wear when we do The Man's battles. Meaning makes us keep responding to ideals that have little to do with our in-site predicament . Without the prejudice of meaning we have less chance of interacting inappropriately to a situation.
Don't learn this and be young and poignant for a few years. Learn it and be young and poignant forever.
