Old School Internet

In conversation I’ve taken to preceding the words Facebook and Myspace with unnecessary definite articles.  “I don’t use the Facebook,” I’ll say, or, “The MySpace is for idiots.”

It’s an effacing acknowledgement of how deliberately, stubbornly (even curmudgeonly) out-of-touch I’ve become with the popular online landscape.  Whenever I express this distaste towards self-styled “social networking,” I am invariably challenged for a reason.  People act as if I should want to tie my Internet presence to my corporeal person, to cast myself as a celebrity-in-miniature.

I see little to no value in this.

The Internet is intangible by nature, a gloomy sheol populated by disembodied ghouls, each trying to carve an ephemeral fiefdom out of its ever-shifting sands.  If the nihilists are right, and all human achievement is but written on the winds, then that is doubly so for the Internet.

“The Internet is our generation’s Vietnam,” I often say, and I am only half joking.  The online shadowplay is how our spoiled, weak and feckless generation gives form to its peculiar demons: entitlement, consumption, selfishness, and unbounded ego.  Every man on the Internet is a little ersatz god, carving meaningless commandments onto illusionary tablets of stone.  The allure of “social networking” is the illusion of teeming Israelites waiting at the foot of the mount for you to bless them with your wisdom.  Cobweb of cannibalistic sycophants, strangers and egomaniacs form, feeding one another through mutual attention.  Sheer numbers of believers—and whosever believeth in me, I shall also believeth in—give form to the shadow, to bring corporeality to the incorporeal wastes.

This pleroma quickly threatens to become kenoma under the influence of a million little demiurges.

Yet the times change, and despite my crabbishness I am something of a neophile.  The day may yet come where I abandon my snobbish “old school” mentality and set up a tiny outpost of flesh amid the sea of electrons.

The day may yet come.

Until then I will stare unflinchingly into the unformed chaos of digital space, delighting in the power that anonymity affords one in a world of ubiquitous celebrity.