Monday 12 FEB 2024
I’m in the digital wilderness now. A modern-day Thoroeux, chopping up a log cabin for contemplation as bits and bytes etched on a screen. I’ve got my own plot of digital land via domain name. My 52 bytes and domain storage, if you will.
I left the gated community of Instagram behind. My place in the suburb receding in the rear-view of my browser history. I didnt’ bother packing up my “content”, just left it all behind. Instagram posts gathering dust in a silent account. My follower account slowly moving towards zero with nary a question or cause for concern.
It wasn’t just Instagram, either. Twitter, or “X” was abandoned, too. Same deal. More bytes gathering bit rot as its “Last Accessed” date, hopefully, exceeds a threshold triggering automated account deletion. Barring that, placed in a cohort by some desperate data scientiest eager to please the metrics, and, let’s face it, the CEO: marked for death in a cohort of inactive accounts. It’s suburban landscape is replaced by an intentional absence of people, ideas, outrageous accusations, and outright lies.
I only have one social network account now. An occasional visit to the digital city core to keep up appearances with the bureaucracy that runs it all: LinkedIn. We make those visits sparingly, grudgingly, and quickly. The empty messages, the blog post screeds, red notification counts insisting upon themselves. We login as a digital citizen manifest. And manifestly assent to its destiny as the “DMV” of the net.
We are alone now. “Living in the hazy moment between the alarm and the awakening.” Nobody will follow us out of the gated community, nor tag along, skipping, through the residential coterie of echo chambers. No. It’s a banal abandonment. Quotidian in all the ways that matter. A successful French exit where the guests never realized you left until weeks later, recounting a story and it occurs, fleetingly, that so-and-so was there, and then…not. A look of puzzlement that is quickly replaced with the need to continue right over the speed bump of my unexplained absence.
I’m in the digital wilderness now. And it’s quiet. I can still see the result of civilization in my access logs. Drones for Nation states and malicious actors probe for weakness. The young AI rep naively scanning the contents of my digital parcel to update it’s model. Full of zip and optimism. The automated pings from the various utility companies in the city core tracking status codes. The indexer, a wheezy old bastard, still canvassing the neighborhood to “update” its now antiquated digital version of The White Pages.
The indexer is old and prone to mistakes these days. I consider a robots.txt file, but that is more conspicuous then intentionally leveraging the defects of its default design. I want my privacy, of course, but there’s no need to tell the advertizers that.
“Oh, privacy is important to you? Yes, it just so happens we have a product here that helps with that…”
Or even, “Oh, privacy. Of course, of course. Except….what is it exactly you are trying to hide out here? Don’t mind us; we just want to look around. For the kids. You understand.”
The indexer knocks on the door. No privacy sign in sight. Just a normal website. Nothing to see here. The indexer knocks on the door, sees the status code return as 200 along with a summary of what this address is registered as, and marks it into his index. Or, more than likely, because who really lives out here anyway, decides that including this address into the index would actually dilute its value. Nothing is being sold here. It’s just text mainly. And the keywords, nothing interesting that can link it to the storefronts in the city. Maybe next time.
Humans, though, are few. If any. This is the point. The silence in this digital backwater is palpable. And how could there be without a yearning to travel out of the relative safety of the suburbs? Or, even know that there is a backwater to travel to. The gated communities have their own isolated access point specifically designed to discourage travel outside the confines of the area it harbors. They are built like medieval cities, walled from the barbarian horde living in the wildlands. And the citizens see no need to venture out. For what? There is nothing out here. Neither landscape, nor fantastic beasts. Only the ramblings of crazy people, exiled from public view; or the reclusive psychosis of individuals, deluded by their own worth; or, some other hazard brought on by the flesh. No. What is out there is not relevant. And relevance, specifically relevance that tends and trends toward sales and market purposes, is what’s really important.
“Commerce, JimmyBallzack529: that’s the name of the game. Let me show you some items here that might help with this……”
I’m in the digital wilderness now. I’m reduced from static to dead air. I’ll have to be careful. This is where the delusion can set in.
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Monday 19 FEB 2024
I’m driving towards the strip malls paved along Highway 1. It’s sunny, with a chance for boredom. The truck rides much smoother on new Michelins. I mash the touchscreen and pull up the Pandora app while trying not to crash.
I almost crash anyway as the first song starts up. It’s bad. I’m embarrassed by how bad. Who would have allowed this out the door? Who would have had the gall to think this was fit for consumption.
Like, wow.
I keep the truck rolling forward, and settle in.
The song continues.
I steal a moment away from the road to look at the touchscreen. It’s my song. From the last album I released a few weeks ago.
The embarrassment doesn’t subside. Instead, it gets worse. The volume knob cranked past its duty limit.
I tell myself that it sounded good in the moment. But now…?
It’s a mystery how pieces change. That critical distance is crucial. I see nothing but flaws. I half-expect to look up and see traffic at a stand-still, pointing, laughing.
But it is a blank ambivalence. Traffic keeps moving. And so do I.
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