To Infinity… and Beyond!

How everyday technology prevents us from knowing ourselves

This morning I ate an apple. It’s gone, or well, in my belly, and what’s left is the core. And here, take a look at this cup of coffee. Once I finish it, it will be empty. Next to me on the couch, there’s a novel. Once I have read the final page, I will have read it. Where the cup of coffee requires me to drink it up, the book requires my effort and attention to finish it from cover to cover.

These are ridiculously simple facts and examples of how the world around us works. They pertain to the physical, tangible and the non-tangible reality of the world in which we live.

We are surrounded by objects that are, are not, or no longer. By containers that can be full, empty or somewhere in between. And in addition to these there are non-tangible container-like concepts like stories, plots and ideas, memories, or lifetimes even, that have a linear progression. Now I won’t remember every sip of the coffee and I won’t remember the full plot of the book from cover to cover for the rest of my life, but the most important elements and impressions will linger, even if their impact varies from person to person.

I pose these compact examples because they resemble life. Life and living things are defined by finitude It’s what it means to be human: to realize that life and the world around us are limited. And then to come to terms with this. On your own. Hence the maxim “know thyself”.

A Roman mosaic stating the maxim ‘Know Thyself’. Wifi was slower than death those days.

But nowadays the reality of beginnings and ends that help us to get to know ourselves are defied by the digital domain. It grants us the opposite of the finitude that characterizes our human existence.

It forms its antithesis. And it is glorious. A cup that contains endless amounts of anything? Let’s go! These are the days of the endless immediate and, and, and, and. Where we carry our personal container of andlessness with us everywhere. We never switch it off and we keep ‘our preciouses’ close (and charged) at all times.  

Technology has become our sanctuary. Addict psalms of jubilation are the norm. Question digital technology, the internet, social media or screen addiction or, God forbid, move away from it and you’re out. Game over.

So, the endless digital highway has become the only highway for any field of work. We have immersed ourselves in it without realizing that its infinity has de-humanized us. The reason for this is as simple as my examples and it is rather Platonic. Everything in the digital domain still resembles what we know from the real world. But it’s just one step away from reality.

Several of Magritte’s paintings play with Plato’s concepts of mimesis.

Whereas tangible things can barely fool us, the internet’s design is to fool us. It places everything outside of its finite time and place. Naturally, this started out as something fabulous, but it has grown out of bounds. As an all-encompassing medium it has become a self-affirming dictator.

Think of it. Rather than coming to terms with the confronting reality of the world and reflect we choose the easy step out of reality and hop onto our screens. To bathe in our river of Lethe. Here the numbing endlessness excludes false and true, up and down. Here, in dopamine bliss none of it matters any longer.

The nihilistic infinity has no need for our responsibility, commitment or efforts. Behold the rise of depressed anti-beings who are constantly led away - and voluntarily lead themselves away - from reflection and the reality of their time, place and actions in society.

Although we cannot come to terms with the vast and inhuman infinity of the internet and its tentacle offspring, we now gradually get to discover its effects on the world and people around us. It goes against our nature, heart, mind and soul. We can think it. We can conceive it, obviously. But as humans we need tangible reminders of limits in our daily life to develop and live a life worth living.  

When I write all this, I do it to come to terms with it. To give it a beginning and an end. Of some sort. That is what writing is (and why we should write instead of AI). I strongly feel that humans deserve a life in which they are connected to beginnings and ends. I believe that it is a human right to cast aside the digital abyss.

Consequently, we should arrive at an alternative. We do not need to make this technology disappear. Nor should we. We have simply reached a tipping point where we want to restore beginnings and ends again. For our sanity and our health. For the future of art, science, nature and humanity. The time has come to radically revise the internet and its offspring.