i am merely an avatar on the internet. a ghost in the machine. my song is sung in binary. my voice is merely an electronic reproduction from sometime seconds, minutes or even days before. the face you see is not really my own.
i don’t even know if i’m at all organic anymore. do i feel myself breathing? do i feel alive? not sure. it’s all lost in a haze of pixels and sounds. am i being critical of a world that i enjoy? hard to say. i’m not sure that i even know the answer to that question. it almost seems a recurrent theme here. i am questioning my own existence while trying to identify what that existence means. it’s almost a dichotomy.
i wonder what it would be like…..walk the streets of new york or los angeles….and instead of bricks, mortar, flesh and steel…..a collage of pixelated graphics creating the entire landscape of the world. would it be any less real than the world i live in now? it would almost be more genuinely false. or should i say it would be more genuinely {null variable}? again, not sure. this almost reeks of kantian bs, but i can’t stop myself.
i could make up any name for myself. be anything i want to be. say anything i want to say. and find an audience, no matter how small. but what gets lost in human interaction? when we create an alternate reality in a place that can’t be defined, have we lost something? even the music that makes me move. it used to be an analog reproduction. now it’s binary. small streaming bits of 1 and 0, interpreted by a machine, remodulated into an audio signal. do you know how much i love the music? do we remember when music was created with breath, with voice, with wind, with a strum across a string? do we remember when our greatest musicians were talented? when our greatest musicians actually wrote the songs and believed in the words they were singing?
yeah. i’m criticizing a world i love. i’m criticizing a world i’ve helped to create in my own small way.
i could carry on dialog with women from around the world. i don’t, but i could. but i couldn’t touch them. couldn’t smell them. wouldn’t know what it’s like to be there next to them.
i can make myself a dangerous pirate from the seediest island in the carribean. who would know better? i’m almost certain i could find images to support this reality. or i could be a botanist from canadia or norwegia. i could be a porn star or a church-going, god-loving christian family man. would you know any different?
yeah. i’m criticizing technology. call it a strange mood. a weird place. i’m sick today. that could have something to do with it. it could also be that i miss a world that went away some time ago and, maybe, i’m just trying to re-invent myself within the current world. or maybe i’m simply having a nostalgic moment. i do have a tendency to be nostalgic. i think it accompanies loyalty.
these are simply thoughts i felt the need to share in that digital world i’m being so critical of.