Two Thousand-Fifteen

People talk about feeling the walls closing in on them. But it’s the opposite. 

The Internet is a vast expanse of everything and nothing and meanings everywhere.

But everywhere you stand the meanings and everythings shift and are different. It’s endless strands of nothingness; a mulch, a mush, a mashup of moments divorcing and remarrying at every instant. It’s endless snakes around your ankles, a mobius Ourobourous of patterns that make no sense and all sense at the same time. To stand up amidst this multidirectional, multimetan infinity is impossible.

The walls don’t ever close in: That’s the problem. Walls would make sense of it. Enclose a space. Define something. Allow the unpicking of some of the living tangle. Bring time to it.

Instead, the data does not flow but cancers itself through every possible atom there ever is or ever was. And it’s always moving, always mutating, always self-reflecting and spewing itself back out again in infinite copies of itself.

You, too, are data. You are tangled, mutant, strands of nothing. A double helix is nothing against such infinite power of averaging, of flatlining, of the race to a million billion shades of the same grey mush that was so seductive before it began; before we truly worked out that our worship was as useless as the god we created.

Deifying data killed information. Meaning is nothing. Everything is there, ready to be dislocated and briefly believed before being cast away in favour of the next shard, the new speckled lie. The trumpets of Jericho hailed nothing but the deluge. You can’t drown in it but you sure can’t swim. The best anyone can hope to do is to float, eyes open but mind shut against the constant frazzling ordure of meaningless input. Input, input, input, and there is nothing you can do because you invited it over the threshold.

Consumption has been replaced by infinite doses of data dressed in whatever flimsy masquerade suits the moment. The moment has been destroyed by the repetition of the infinite copy, the final and the perfect divorcing of linearity from humanity. Data units so numerous that they choke all meaning, that they bury context in a damp dust of input, input, input.

If you want an image of the future, imagine a lorryload of sand flowing into a human mind, forever.