As we watch, helplessly, as internet-connected devices and gadgets gain further ground into every aspect of our lives, it is instructive to ask ourselves whether we’re better off than we were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. The answer is obvious, and yet one really has to wonder why we still allow this total 5G saturation. What are we getting out of the deal? What are we losing as a result of this rapid advance of screens and “connectedness”? I say we’re gaining nothing, aside from a mirage of convenience, the most dangerous drug ever to exist, and because it isn’t recognized a such, it is churned out at breakneck pace. Because of this, we are losing something fundamental that we will never get back. We are losing the real in favor of the unreal. Our attention is being siphoned, continuously pulled away from the real, as these gadgets incessantly demand our attention. Our childhood experiences have become extinct. No future generations will experience what we did. The banquet of high-speed, 5G, instant, technological pleasures is laid out in wait for every succeeding generation. We baptize, and are baptized, in the name of the Screen, the new god, and the last God. None will surpass it. The Screen, omnipresent, all-knowing, all-seeing, has brought about the end of history. What culture worthy of remembrance will be produced by the congregation of the Screen? The question answers itself. The screen infantilizes us, and we condemn future generations when we allow the addiction to cement itself. We know something is wrong. We know we’re being swept forward at an increasing rate. We feel helpless at the rapid advance of this empty technological idol.
We are the generation that now sees the false promise of technology. We are not better off than we were in the 90’s, or the 80’s, or the 70’s. The 70’s, which produced some of the greatest music, literature, and culture. The 70’s, father of the big block V8, burning the unfiltered high-octane aroma that is now as alien to us as the artifacts of the pyramids, bursting with creativity and life. A world that knew nothing of the internet but still thrived. We’ve allowed the sequential deaths of far too many American cultures, as we struggle to gain our bearings amid the ravages of technological innovation. The subsidized electric car hums by, while we, stupefied, push the smartphone into our pockets as we go about our day, paralyzed not by choice, but by technology. Endless content, calling to us from our pockets. This is what we are condemned to, future generations condemned to. Our short lives having been hijacked by a digital mirage, but we who knew a world without this technology knows what we’ve lost. Where can it go but downward? Where can history go but behind glass, to be gawked at but not participated in.
If it had the power, I would erase the internet. Not only from existence, but from memory. We do not benefit from this technology, as is now painfully clear. It has colonized every aspect of existence. We have gained nothing from this technology other than alienation, from each other, and from the real world itself.
