What a questionable construct the Internet has become. Was it perhaps always like that and I just didn't feel it? Over 20 years ago, when there were still lots of promises and the excitement of
the new.
Today the Internet is like a slap in the face. The stuff of staid, narrow-minded, middle-class morality, smart-ass attitudes, self-righteousness, censorship, judgment, condemnation, pressure to
succeed, hierarchy, hatred, pomposity, vanity, vanity and conceit dripping out of the screen makes manure look like honey.
Is this because the programmers have left the Internet to clever algorithms?
Or because the programmers have remained immature, antisocial, out of touch with life, injured children? Who are wrongly celebrated as heroes and are massively overpaid?
Is it once again just money that is turning all noble ideas into business concepts designed to rip consumers off? With offers that, on closer inspection, no one needs?
Or is it the anonymity that invites hearts to turn the Internet into a sewer for unprocessed pain excrement?
Never before has a medium invited such egalitarianism as the computer or cell phone monitor. Everything is turned into neutral, two-dimensional pixelated rubble. No matter how much love a living
heart has put into something - in the course of total flattening, everything is trivialized.
By that, I don't just mean the minimal attention span of the scroll slaves. Even the few who are still capable of paying attention will rarely grasp more than a micro-portion of what can be found
in an original. It doesn't matter whether it is the photographed reality, a painting, a person, a place, a sound or a landscape. Everything is the same to the stupid, soulless computer. Zeros and
ones.
In addition, total availability trivializes everything even more.
Is it really desirable for everything to be available? Every book, every film, every song, every person. Everything can be accessed via search engine in seconds. If this were diamonds, they would
be completely worthless. The market is flooded.
Hasn't the value of things (in old times) been measured by how rare something was? Doesn't that inevitably mean that the flood of images, sounds, and words leads to a massive devaluation?
Is it just me who gets discouraged and frustrated when I find something interesting and then notice that the creator has duplicated it a thousand times? Or that once someone has gotten attention
with something, they milk it to death?
Does anyone remember how important a book could be when it was hard to get hold of, and how happy you were when you finally held it in your hands?
That feeling hasn't just disappeared. It has been smothered in a flood of availability.
Total access to everything does not necessarily mean that appreciation and respect have increased. It seems to be in the nature of sensory overload that things are categorized differently. The
result is that the Internet generation has become an anonymous mass of knowledge and consumer idiots. A teenager today knows absolutely everything - without developing the slightest emotional
connection to anything or anyone.
As if that wasn't enough horror for a text, there is also the phenomenon of creative theft, or synchronicity. If an avatar achieves a certain digital attention, thousands of others follow almost
immediately. Delivering the same or similar things. It has always been the case that ideas have been stolen and successes shamelessly copied - but never before to such an extent and with such
complete uninhibitedness. This creates a feeling of arbitrariness. Especially since in the modern copy-paste society no one can know for sure whether someone really means what they put on the
internet or whether they just copied it to boost their own vanity with likes. Which in turn does something to values. An old-fashioned term that you can no longer use without being
looked at strangely. Who needs values in a universe of total availability?
The internet is a gigantic bubble of illusion where real communication, real exchange does not take place and cannot take place. Too many senses are blocked out and hardly anyone wants to take
the time anymore. Instead, it has become a tool to feed the illusion of one's own importance and greatness. All those aspects that in real life and real interaction, between living hearts, would
lead to turning away from egocentric, vain show-offs are encouraged and even expected on the internet. "Look what I can do! Who I am! How great I am! How much I know!"
The value-free algorithms expect commitment from the avatars to the point ofsacrifice. They do not reward content, substance, intelligence, emotion, or even ability or talent. They promote all
those who agree to become slaves to the great Internet machine. A machine that never adequately pays for the use of slaves, but makes gigantic profits. With fatal consequences.
All over the world, beings I will never get to know, sit behind their computers and cell phones and create illusions of themselves and the world. With the desire for attention or, even more
banally, to earn some money. Even if two or three hearts should have something else in mind, they are drawn into the swamp of banality.
Oh, how fitting Corona came along. The perfect accompanying program for banalized, digital dehumanization. So fitting that the question arises whether Corona was a digital invention of artificial
non-intelligence to drown the budding humanity in its brew of banality.
Let us honor real friendships.
Let us bury past friendships. Instead of turning them into digital zombies.
Let us keep the experiences in our hearts instead of throwing them into the swamp, trivialized by digitalized images.
Let us share the experiences in stories in holy, cheerful moments when we come together in real life and pay attention to each other with all our senses. Mutually. In interaction. In real
time.
When in doubt, let us return to nostalgic transfigurations instead of vomiting digital canned goods into the world. Memories are in our hearts. It is good when things are forgotten. It is good
when things are lost.
Let us stop feeding digital banality and instead reflect on the natural essence of our existence.
If all of our senses are not stimulated, what is the point?
Digital illusions are the most dangerous drug that has ever rolled over our hearts.
Unplug!
Before it is too late and we become organic copies of digitally banal two-dimensionality. If we haven't already become one.