Our thoughts are smeared like sticky sap across canvases we cannot see.
Blinking tentacles grope endlessly in the digital deep, scanning for unread minds to violate as we’re forced to remember increasingly complex encryptions to verify our humanity, on pain of exile, at the whims of artificial inquisitors in matrices typed into existence by six-figure psychopaths given the gift of proscription, justified by terms of service that, printed, would have spines thicker than the backbones of the ones who wrote them; and as we crawl side-by-side on all-fours in our binary cyberscapes, scraping by on caches of crypto cookie crumbs, even our non-fungible fellow man questions our manhood, a digital public square of paranoiacs wondering who among them is the liar encased in code.
Haunted by holographic avatars and postmodern personas, animated masks and meta-ironic aliases, self-professed trolls daring us to feed them from atop their clouds—the cloud—that has wrapped up the world in a dark web of synthetic silk, family photos and private conversations fine fodder for content creation, the algorithm all the while making a mockery of free will, selling our souls without our consent to the highest bidder, advertising our deepest desires or cultivating new ones, the accompanying products ready to ship in a business day or two.
Our digital footprints glow like lurid neon signs beneath the UV headlights of optimized search engines as they drive down algorithmic roads leading toward eternal crime scenes, all signs pointing toward dead end domain names and permanently deleted accounts, coming back to bite us at the click of a mouse, every metadatum traceable like a synthetic string leading all the way back to the knot tied around our doxes, incognito history doomed to repeat itself, so that even when the power is turned off the powers-that-be can still kick down our doors and swat us like flies at the behest of developmentally-arrested savants.
Beeping and buzzing smartphones vibrate in our hands like agitated insects to alert and alarm us with histrionic messages and hyperventilating notifications, our blue-light blinded and bloodshot eyes unable to peel away from the current thing, unsealing each doomed scroll in order to squirt out extra droplets of dopamine in the quivering cortexes of our pleasure-engorged brains, desensitized, overindulged, hard drives of wetware bursting at the seams with overloads of data, gigabytes biting into every nerve ending in an endless vacuum of digital agony, ecstasy, and apathy.
How can we unplug from power grids fortified like military bases, or run from millions of miles of fiber optic cables slumbering at the bottom of the sea like hibernating serpents, the nightmares of which we use to make our dreams reality?
How can we escape a network that has so irradiated the atmosphere with its electromagnetic effluvia that only the furthest corners of the globe lie safe beyond the concentric danger zones of carcinogenic generation, discharged day and night from graphene cell towers like hostile alien obelisks?
We check the pulse of our lithium-ion organs for hot button headlines, searching for bandwidth bandwagons on which to jump, in between autoplay virality more contagious than any namesake pathogen, keeping tabs on trending topics and download bar percentages while so many streaming services siphon numbers from our dwindling accounts, almost unnoticed, those parasitic vestiges of seven day free trials neglected to cancel but never in use, the endless slop consumed on watch lists having collective run times longer than our lifespans.
The advent of artificial artwork has replaced the highs of manmade transcendentals with the lows of the uncanny valley, the ensouled artist’s soulless usurper admirable only in its intelligent capacity to generate visuals more demented than man’s most morbid imaginings, those Turing-failed thumbnails optimized like torturer’s thumbscrews to induce the desired twitching of digits, engagement forever farmed from we who have been domesticated like so many unaware animals.
They say it’s just a tool, but what tool is there that hasn’t already been made into a murder weapon?