Self-Alienation in the Hyperreal Internet Age [No.2]

"washed away by the tides of the digital ocean, never to be seen again."

When most of your social interactions are mediated through a screen, can you really know who you are? Are you the avatar and username that you go by on social media? Or are you the human being using the tech? What if you go by many names? Who are you? What are you?

Are the avatars talking to you real people or are they machines? How would you know the difference? Are you a person or are you an avatar? Are you interfacing with the digital world or are you yourself a digital being?

I can only imagine the confusion of the overly online mind in this regard. I myself began to engage with the web back in 2007 and 2008, many years ago. I was 13-14 years old at the time, so I can remember the years before then. Before that age, I spent most of my time playing outside after school. We had a trampoline, and my neighbors had a playground set, so we found lots of fun stuff to do outside every day. I can’t imagine what it’s like for a kid today who has been trapped by the dopamine joy-ride of technology since they were the littlest of children. I don’t know how they go about negotiating their identities without significant confusion. In the digital world, there is no time, and there is no place. The endless digital plane is an ocean of the Hyperreal, where everything adheres to strange rules. Much like quantum reality, things can be real and unreal there at the same time. Things can exist and not exist at the same time. Schrodinger’s internet is the name of the game.

Were you caught up in an incredibly engaging conversation on a “forum” yesterday? If you were to go back to that same forum today and that thread was no longer there, how could you be sure your conversation actually happened? No evidence of it exists. Were you actually typing your heart out yesterday? Was that real? Whole histories of the web are submerged into deep wells of darkness over time, unable to be recovered. Only a whisper of that time, of that age of the internet, exists. Its home is only within the minds of those that were “there” at the time. Entire websites forgotten by time and a disinterested user base… These days even news media sites play into this. An ongoing, breaking news story article will go up that changes as information is added and corrected over time. Once in an argument in the comments of a Facebook post, I was wrecked by this process. The article that had given me key details the day before no longer said what it had once said. There was no evidence of what I claimed to be true regarding the incident anymore. It was gone. Washed away by the tides of the digital ocean, never to be seen again.

I never could find that fact or tidbit about that news story ever again.

What if I just imagined it? Was it real?

On YouTube, you can watch videos at 2x speed. Turns out your brain can adapt to that quite quickly (ask mine). What I’ve found is that the internet is quite similar. It functions as a civilization going at breakneck speeds, perhaps 30x as fast as it would if it played out in the Real. I recall the Borges’ Fable referenced at the beginning of Simulation and Simulacra by Baudrillard. What if you could map it all out, the history of the internet in the most minute of details? Is it worth it? Should we retain the histories of the cyber plane? Can knowledge be gained? Is truth found in it? Or is the desert, the wiped servers, the nuked databases, the inevitable end result of what so many spend their time on these days? If the graph (the map) of the internet, its interconnected links, are perfectly mapped 1-to-1, then does the map even mean anything anymore? After all, the map changes over time as the tsunamis of digital information flow across the plane wiping all memory of what was away. A map that instantly updates isn’t really a map at all, is it?

By the end of this engagement of humanity and tech, will anyone remember what it’s like to be human anymore? Or will that memory be wiped away as well? Purged from the servers to make room for new data to be saved and stored…

As a kid, an 8-year-old, my parents took me and my sisters to Disney World. They had a ride—can’t remember the name of it—that was one of those quasi-virtual experiences where they show you something visual and use tech to evoke your senses. In this case, the story was of an alien breaking out of containment on a spaceship and about how many people were slaughtered before it was once again contained. My over-active, 8 years old imagination couldn’t handle it, and as the experience ended, I ran into the safety of my dad’s arms. As he carried me out, I wept and kept asking, “Is it real? Is it real?” Nowadays, my family looks back on that, and we laugh.

Nevertheless, I imagine the children and even adults of today who have only known themselves as individuals in the digital world, those that are outcasts who suffer at school and/or suffer at home (or at work for the adults), those who escape to the digital world to get a sense of peace and acceptance. They see themselves as only really living, only really existing in the digital world, where they are seen and heard and appreciated by other disembodied avatars, where they get likes on their Instagram photos and on their Tiktok videos and on their Tweets. They are asleep in the Real and awake in the Digital.

What happens then when they attempt to log in one day to find that their social media accounts, the only true manifestation of themselves in their own minds, have been erased? They find that their only sense of identity has been deleted or banned for one reason or another, perhaps just a glitch made by the tech overlords. What happens when the entirety of who they are is wiped away in a moment?

I wonder if they think to themselves in horror, “Was it real? Am I real?”

Everything that they think they are is washed away, gone forever. I can only imagine what a 13-year-old thinks when the only source of identity for them, the projection of themselves into the Digital, is deleted…Who are they? What are they without the Digital?

I keep wondering if there is something inherently wrong with technology. I continually reflect on that question, though I tell myself that I know the answer. Despite that question, there are things that I know without a doubt. Many are living without a traditional understanding of themselves due to the ease of access to technology. They’ve never known themselves beyond its bounds. They are alienated from their own true identities as children of the Most High God. They are alienated from their Faith, their families, their cultural backgrounds, and their own Land. They only understand themselves through a screen, and that is the sad reality of today. They experience deep self-alienation, even alienation from their own physical bodies to a degree [Dive deeper into that concept here].

Previous generations have never known this disconnect, so understanding it is key to understanding my fellow youths (the under-30s out there). They must become plugged back into the Real. That is a key component to reconnecting them to Christ.

And for those readers who I have described above, understand this: YOU ARE REAL and were created to display the Glory of God! You are part of a Holy Lineage that will never die.

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