IMAGES USED TO BE GODS
The screen is a sort of dream.
It replaces dreams, actually.
The way feeds seems to happen to us—unfolding in our presence (and they do the opposite of “feed” us).
Like a stream, cold water magnifying stone, but one that’s too full of meaning.
Like a cancer. It’s possible for things to mean too much, actually. Or rather, they “mean” things to us for no good reason. Or the meaning they deliver is out of synch with the cycles of our emotional bodies.
The way other people’s (or the more ideal—corporations) images come in like thoughts. Like how our own thoughts used to. Or the presence of a cloud, a river, flickering flame.
That’s why we don’t dream much when we rack up the screen time. Do you know what I mean?
Remember how we stopped remembering our dreams, but we thought that was just a part of growing up?
When we look at the land all day and smell woodsmoke, then we remember our dreams at night.
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It’s not just the oceans that are polluted. It is our semiotic and psychic space, too.
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Ancient mystics and current village elders that “we” make a habit of ignoring warned about this, about the colonizing of the mind with images.
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Images used to be gods. At the very least they transmitted the presence of the divine.
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Now they still are our gods, perhaps now our demons, though we’re in a bit of denial about these facts.
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We’re goddamn animists. Of course a glowing screen looks like magic. We crave relation with Others, but the torrents of micro-contacts that come through the screen are not quite Other enough. Not...quite...
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And maybe there is magic there. Of course there is. Screens saved our sanity as young cyberpunks coming of age alongside the internet. But it’s not where magic comes from.
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There’s domesticated magic and there’s wild magic. I think we would all choose the latter if we had the opportunity to. Ironically, though, that’s the one choice that capitalism leaves off the shelf....
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This isn’t simply critique. We ARE the cyborg kids that Haraway dreamed of.
And now we’re trying to grow up.