Our ostensibly insatiable desire for likes/shares/follows contrasted with our progressively more insular goblin mode default state is baffling yet banal. This once potentially incongruous juxtaposition pulled from a dystopian sijo is now a perfectly-functioning, self-fulfilling prophecy. The asocial socialite movement is booming. The relentless pull of social media is real. I suspect that we don’t really care more about the opinions of strangers on socials than those of people close to us IRL, but I have struggled to find even crumbs of anecdotal evidence to support this theory.
Those who use socials for more than mere voyeurism can spend hours scrolling, checking ‘like’ counts, and planning content. Creativity plummets, inversely correlating with the use of dull templates, trending audio, and catchphrases coined by tweens in efforts to keep up with the e-Joneses. We periodically disgust ourselves with this robotic behaviour and resolve to up the authenticity ante. But the struggle is real, so we rinse, repeat and regard every element of our lives as potential content. Instead of meaningful human interactions and sincere exchanges of words, we compulsively assess the Instagramability of a seascape or the viral promise of a hyperbolised affirmation. We forget copyright and intellectual property, never mind good old integrity.
We congratulate ourselves if we temporarily remove that download, complete a social detox, or delete that old profile once used to shift upcycled furniture and share ‘MISSING’ posts of already found cats. Those who have transitioned from temporary deactivation to full-scale deletion without being coerced into downloading a hefty zip file by a ‘gone forever’ warning are nothing less than modern heroes. But even the act of deleting apps to this end implies some sort of failure because we should have the willpower to simply ignore them, surely. We are effectively trapped in – and by – our own egos, captivated and captured, self-gaslighting.
An omnipresent dopamine-fuelled machine modelled on the science of addiction, a never-ending round of poker with limitless disposable and ever-younger players, is no game. These toxins are initially seemingly psilocybin-like, avoidable, put-downable, and innocuous compared with their opioid counterparts. But the muscle memory runs deep. Before you can reach for the cybernated vape, your hands are running automated scrolling processes devoid of any contact with the cerebellum. You realise that there is no panacea for these hyperpalatable drugs, antibiotic in nature.
Somewhere in a parallel universe, our immortalised e-selves wonder if there is more out there – real connection, human stories, the wonder of nature. I’m almost certain that my dystopian counterpart is currently speculating about the influence of poor lexical decisions on this cyber chaos instead of berating the real perpetrators. A brief look at the etymology of the word ‘avatar’ is surprisingly telling. Deriving from the Sanskrit avatāra and often translated as ‘descent [from heaven to earth]’, ‘avatar’ is a commonly used to denote computer representations of our human embodiment. It is logical that such insensitive employment of a word originally reserved for the earthly incarnation of spirits and deities was never going to do much for our humility. Perhaps Clo76547865 is onto something.
