Cyber Menace

In shitty apartments all over the world, one thing is law: you get the internet and you let your friends use it( unless you are very suspicious of them; in which case, why are you hanging out with them?). You don't even need a public terminal (say, for instance, a hilarious, very poignant, and svelte circa 1998 laptop you bought from an IT guy for a bag of weed) because almost everyone carries with them an internet capable phone now. So there's no question at all that there's some kind of cyber menace... and, check this out: it has already claimed lives!

It just makes sense that in a society so ill that it sometimes creates psychiatric disorders at almost the same rate as it creates landmark celebrities, there would be a cyber element. The internet is everywhere and still spreading. Some people can't look away from it or live without it. Being without it is missing out, but being part of it is not always what you want. Some, the wild or wise, might even call the contemporary situation one involving significant levels of Cyber Menace.

"This ain't your granddad's Neuromancer, kid."

Sure, it's easy to pish posh the point away by citing the unreal possibilities of the incipient cyber-era, which is so different from even what Nostradamus saw it was (due to relativistic drift and/or other variables) that contempory people are still trying to say what the hell is going on with no recognizable degree of accuracy. It's all... you know... dust in the wind kind of shit. Typos of the blogosphere business.

The internet business: the potential is awesome but the reality is also very convincing in another direction than what is classically termed hopeful. I don't really need to cite anything, I feel. Pretty much everybody has or has heard a fantastically gut-wrenching and uncomfortable internet story by this point. Facebook is turning some people into wrecks and offering hilarious insights into human nature to others. It's a fact of life, even: you play with the internet and you get burned. You get played. Or you get an okay laugh or chuckle while you shake your head. #SMGDH with a side of #LOL, please, and don't overdo it.

People's day-to-day living and actual worlds are all affected by the digital world. Well, not mine, but then again I'm a blogger and nobody cares, so I can actually sit down and look and see people get affected by the internet media they consume. It's a weird era, and unfortunately it's not always fun YouTube videos weird. I find it all very strange and I can feel its draw as much as the next human. Still, everybody should have to admit: a reality check is in order.

Beyond the hype, the laughter, the outrage, the trolling, the well animated distractions, and the jargon lie actual problems. Let's see what the impossible potential of the Cyber Menace can do about that, before we consider it a friendly necessity.

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The Irreal Era Continues

Heartless, heartbreaking times with chaos as the watermark. Memes and viral underpinnings for charity projects. It's brilliant. Chug a hot coffee, cure cancer – post the vid, go to social media heaven. Drink a venti latte for social justice. Post passive-agressive political screeds on facebook, and again in twelve parts on twitter. Walk at least four dogs at once to solve depression once and for all. Wait, what's that I hear? Is it the ghost of hope? What is it pretending to be today?

The character of hope is changed by digital media into a great big throbbing lump of aspirations and counterpoints. Tell everyone about how you feel about it. It's a singularity of hope and everyone's invited to discuss it impotently on the internet. Your savior and redeemer bathed in LCD glow in a dark room past midnight, this time definitely getting the words right on a screed that will change people's minds forever. No discussion of powerlessness or the futility of washing oneself in concentrated ideology.

Confident consumers. Hollow outrage. Adamantine charity. Lonely people alone in rooms 'connecting' over social media. Right... right. No that makes sense to me, I am not an atavist, thank you. It goes beyond the fears any individual might have, nobody can see the big picture as it is now, and in ten years there will be hundreds of deep thinkers telling us exactly what happened, armed with statistics and the works of others. Until then even the most schizoid collective fears are just whispers in the dark, convoluted night. Truth of the matter is the supposed wise men of the era are either pissing their pants or filling their pockets, or looking greedily askance at something we can't see, but everybody has a pretty good guess what it might be. Most of them are probably the pedigreed descendants of snake oil salesmen.

The pessimists of yesteryear seem insane or quaint. The worryworts of today are just white noise, minor problems crudely blown up to serve as distractions from underlying issues and developing crises. The public announcements of this era are all ugly and sterile constructions meant to convey (mis)information as efficiently as possible (the diametric opposite of the low points of pretentious wankery from 1210 to 2014), which makes everyone a computer with predictable responses to calculated inputs. Of course thought will likewise degrade, but for the great majority of people that's not even something to worry about or consider. As long as the algorithms keep working, right? We don't need to know where they came from. We got everything we need, right now... it's perfectly nihilistic.