The loss of reality doesn't happen overnight. It's slow, subtle, almost unnoticeable until it's too late. A favorite website goes down. No biggie, things change and nothing's meant to last forever. Your favorite celebrity dies. Well, it was just their time to go. A corporation you grew up with goes out of business. Shocking but, it happens. A sector disappears. Well, things change. One by one you lose the world you knew, until the moment you wind up in a place you went to all the time and have a disquieting realization; "There's nothing here for me anymore."
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that I used to live online. I'd return to reality to eat and to sleep, but almost all of my waking hours were spent on the internet, even when they should have been devoted to something else. A few days ago, I opened up Chrome, as is my habit, and suddenly my brain asked, "Why? There's nothing here for you anymore." It's right. Flash is dead, but even before it was killed off, the world it created had long been dying as free gaming transitioned to mobile. Twitter (or "X") is a raging dumpster fire, and I'd argue that Facebook and Instagram aren't doing much better. YouTube feels weirdly empty, as the people I once went to for inspiration and hope have been consumed by the void. Most of my favorite websites either went defunct or got bought out by someone, Nintendo is making it hard to find games to emulate (mind you, I don't do it that often), the world's publishers have gutted the Internet Archive, and what still feels worth visiting feels like a relic of 2010. I feel like the web as a whole has lost it's identity, and the people who run it only care about gutting the remains before they rot too much to be worth consuming.
It's not just an internet problem. The rising prices, the changing climate, the increase in fascist sentiment, all of these are big issues, but to me the biggest issue stems from a confluence of these issues and, in my opinion, is a direct cause of these issues; our collective Dreamworld is dead. It's been dead for a while now, and being a human, I assume that our leaders, being better at leading than I am, would notice this and be actively working to fix it. They aren't. They're still living in a Dreamworld that existed in 1990, a Dreamworld so old and frayed that it was inadequate even in 2019, before a pandemic arrived and shattered people's faith in reality. I'm no politician, but I know that if a random civilian can tell people need something new to believe in or else they'll lose all faith in their country, I know the politicians can to. We elected them for their ability to fool us, after all. As time goes on, they don't even seem interested in doing that. Only a select few of us have the right to be fooled by our leaders, and if we aren't fooled we're told we shouldn't have done the one thing everyone is taught to do from birth; participate in the world we were born in.
Now, it's not solely our politicians jobs to take care of us. All of us have a responsibility to shape the world and let it shape us in turn. But in order to do that, it has to be a world we can live in, and I've heard enough to know that it isn't one we can live in at all. Not when every corporate leader is squeezing their workers dry and even a blatant genocide is met with calls for cooperation rather than pressure on the assailants to stop. This doesn't feel like a world where we take care of ourselves. This feels like a world where we're kept in a perpetual childhood, the kind where your parents only love you if you obey them without question, and even then they'll sometimes mistreat you for no reason whatsoever. We're still dependent on our leaders for money, they just put so many steps between us and getting it that most of us don't get it at all. If it's not our politicians jobs to take care of us, why won't they give us a world where we can take care of ourselves.
You don't have to believe in subjective reality to know somethings wrong, and everywhere I look I see people talking about how this is horribly, dangerously wrong. Our leaders behavior goes beyond a refusal to se the Infinite, it's a refusal to see the truth, which is that the politics they stand for stopped being our politics decades ago. When we vote, we're being asked to choose between Fascism and the Status quo, and we've voted for the status quo because anything would be better than Fascism. But what happens when fascism becomes the only option we have left.
The loss of reality doesn't happen overnight, but it's creation can happen in an instant. All you need to do is help people see that they have no protection from the Infinite. I look out at the world, at a place you can only live in if you're very rich, and I wonder what it will take for our politicians to see that if they let things continue on, soon they'll be just as exposed to the Infinite as the populace they serve. Tell me, President Biden, do you want to live in a world that's only run by Dreamers?
No comments:
Post a Comment