Wasting Away Again in Screenville

The Digital Panopticon

Thoughts on the Screen-Age Movement.

The reselling of opinions in different packages is the order of the day in Screenville. Analysts and analyzers all doing analysis for a sales pitch. Assertions of opinionated assholes for sale—masquerading as profound truths. How can we rebrand this stale meat in a brighter wrapper, a bigger advertisement, a more dynamic and repackaged presentation to sell over and over again for maximum clicks and profit? The truth movement has become a bowel movement—a plethora of rehashed endless regurgitations, incoherent views, dire warnings and bleak projections of (a)political, civil and psychological doom—the unimportant accountants and digital tax (attention) collectors reminding the world of their self-appointed importance. It's a rerun older than time. And it all hinges on a lack of paying sufficient attention to one's true self.

More and more I am shedding the wrappings of communal social media influences with every year I age and grow. A slow and deliberate process, my voluntary associations gain more focus and clarity as relationships deepen. As my screen time decreases, there is an increase in my external productivity and rightly so. This is akin to a shedding of skin, breaking comfortable patterns, and refocusing on the things that truly matter. With age comes an increase in the quality of our associations. Or at least, perhaps it should.

As spring is a cycle of rebirth, growth, seeds and ideas—the sprouting of potentials not yet fully realized, dreams also cross over from the invisible shores of imagination into thought waves, which solidify into visible experiential actions via physical growth of bodies—if we choose to build them. That is completely up to us.

As the dead go on fantasizing, the lifeless herds grasping for oxygen as it slips through their fingers, the lazy replaying the binge of a thrice viewed series, and the watchers who watch all the while thinking they're being watched, there are but a few who are actually PRODUCING. The sole effect of true creativity is production of a body/product of one sort or another. Ask yourself, what are you making? What are you consuming? Who is it helping? Who does it support? Where and how do YOU fit into that process? Is what you’re doing lifting up or bringing down civilization? Or are you simply neutralizing yourself with every tap of your finger to the screen?

The endless opinions, the long march of assertions, the long line of attentions, the flea market of cheap truths discounted and on sale, the grifters of drama and gab, the pointers of fallacy whose fingers capture the most views and whose object is blurred by a 'larger than life' literal screen image, the champions of mediocrity who parade as great minds, those with the most followers—the blind leading the blind. These are the games that people play—EVERYDAY down in Screenville.

Subscriptions have taken the place of friendship, idols the place of self-sufficiency, and chat rooms the place of class rooms. Digital martyrs usurped the taking of risks, and influencers the place of self-bestowed knowledge and wisdom. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The filters of reality are everywhere—in all shapes, colors and sizes—packaged and presented in myriad ways—yet they all remain the same—flowing downstream with the rest of the dead fish.

Who will remember them? Who will remember YOU? What shall you do this day that marks you different from that which everyone else has done or is doing yesterday and tomorrow? Whose will do you serve? How much will you sacrifice of yourself for the gain of another or the supposed greater good? What offerings do you leave to the world (if any) that come from you? Whose desire uses YOU to be fulfilled? Can you truly say “My Mind is My Own”?

There is an old saying, in fact a great many, and they go thusly: Quality over quantity. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Less is more. The higher the fewer. In the age of the screen, the attention follows the pressing of the finger—your sense appropriated via an app to the biggest non-experience in the world—the digital panopticon. A screen cannot touch itself or look beyond itself, but it has trapped billions of ‘attentions’ in its matrix. No art may come from it, no form can it make. No life or experience can it create. Its battery always dies again and again requiring you to give it life by plugging it in so you can plug into it. What is reborn of it? What life can emerge? What does it say about us all, that more people look at a minuscule screen daily than at a boundless sunrise or starry night sky? That more people hear a message alert than the song of a bird or the whispering wind? That vicariously you live while the whole world dies (Tool)?

If you could paint over your screen, what brush strokes would you make? What accents—what colors? If you could set ink to it like paper, what words would you write? Could you be okay with letting it die to never turn it on again? Do you ask it questions? Can you think without it? Does it talk back to you? Does it love you? Is it even real? How does it shape your world and your worldviews? How does it make you FEEL?

The whole human world is in your screen, waiting for you every day, every second. And where is Nature in it all? Where is God? Where are YOU?

The screen-less world of reality awaits your looking up for only a moment in time. Can you see it? Do you even know it's there? Do you recognize the truth for what it actually, really and truly is? How long before you look down again? How short a time until the world of artificial colors and sounds, voices and opinions, news and views, headlines and taglines, videos and memes, threads and longforms, posts, tweets, dings and rings shall infringe on your awareness to steal you away from life again and again?

The truth movement isn't in the palm of your hand, it's in YOU. There are a great many fakes and fronts in Screenville—personas, egos, critics, cynics, masqueraders, criminals, judges, gatekeepers, grifters, pirates, movements, collectives, agencies, corporations, governments, data (tax) collectors, cyber-martyrs, players and AI gods of the palm world. The only cost they demand is your attention. Nature offers her views for free—her only cost—looking UP.

Out here, in the real world is where you ACTUALLY stand. Tis’ good to remember to BE WHERE YOU ARE AT—that is, if you can still see it, lest your deVICE has screen-captured YOU.

“No one may call themselves a philosopher who isn’t first scrutinized by their own critical self-evaluation.” ~MBP