NAB
With a smartphone in our pocket, more and more of everything
we do is prized from us as data and used to direct our subsequent behavior in
everything from purchasing to entertainment to holidays. It’s not a happy state
of affairs but most of us trade personal data for the chance to engage on
social media, watch Netflix, or search for a new job.
article here
Armchair philosopher Michael Sacasas has reframed this idea
into a thesis that, online, there is no present, only variously organized
fragments of the past.
“The internet, as a mediator of human interactions, is not a
place, it is a time,” he blogs at The Convivial Society. “It is the past.
Literally.”
Far from the metaverse being some idea of living in the
moment transposed to a virtual environment, anything we do there is in fact
already governed by things we did or said in the past. It’s a trap from which
there appears no way out.
“The fundamental fact of our online experience is that we
are at all times expanding the massive reservoirs of the documented past,” he
says.
Any interaction online from audio to video, social likes,
shares, buttons hovered over, even forms filled but never submitted, location
data is readable to a machine and is exists perpetually.
“We no longer encounter the past principally as a coherent
narrative informing our present and future action into the world. The past, as
now encoded in ponderous databases, can be readily and endlessly
re-interpreted, reshuffled, recombined, and rearranged.”
This activity is what now consumes our time and energy, he says.
For example, because we live in the past when we are online, we always find
ourselves fighting over the past. Yet the overwhelming amount of data
“cascading inscriptions” as he calls blurs any line between what actually
happened and the present.
“Soon, it becomes impossible to map the course of the
conflict or even make sense of it. And nothing changes.”
This is suffocating our lives, he suggests, preventing us
from actually living.
“On the internet, action doesn’t build the future, it only
feeds the digital archives of the past.”
Our online actions are reduced to ritualized behavior, tired
routines, unimaginative and reactionary responses, a place where “databases
generate moods.”
Since the “digitally inscribed past” is chiefly legible to
machines this becomes the means by which to program the future. Human activity
is diffused into an ever receding and chaotic databases of the past. Those
databases are mined and processed — by AI algorithms — “chiefly in order to
predict, manage, and structure our future actions.”
His decidedly bleak outlook concludes, “On the internet, the
past is a black hole sucking the future into itself.” Furthermore, as the
databases of the past grow “their gravitational pull absorbs ever more of our
attention and energy. Consequently, our capacity to inhabit the present and
imagine the future deteriorates.”
To that extent then, we might as well give up since we’re
clearly already flesh for The Matrix.
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