...the internet is overrated...
...in search of an online purpose...
“The truth is overrated.”
-Paul Westerberg-
The following thoughts are true.
*editor’s note* Actually all thoughts are true. Only ideas can be false. Maybe also truths. That’s an idea. Truths can also be false. But that might also be false. At least I think?
The dopamine hits me like a fat fish in the face. A finger touched a heart on the butt end of something I wrote online and I felt, “hey, somebody likes me”. It’s strange how the normal actions of a stranger, acted upon a machine, performed inside of an application, can make mundane moments feel fleetingly special.
I have avoided being social with the media for three decades. Every new online space I am told to be on, is another opportunity for me to feel more offline. First I was told to make friends on Friendster. Take a picture of my head, attach a few identifying features, and friends could enter my mind.
I would connect with those I am connected to. I would know people I don’t know. I remember little about what I did there. I actually remember nothing. I did nothing there.
A few years later so did everyone else and the website disappeared. Like a yearbook for some high school we never attended, Friendster’s digital apparition rots on the dusty bottom shelf of a Sarah’s Second-Hand Shop in Spokane. Friendster’s forgotten memories prove only the significance of insignificance.
Thankfully there was MySpace to fill the void. All my life I had been in other people’s spaces. My city’s town, my town’s school, my school’s bathroom, my bathroom’s stall. My kingdom, a toilet. And now here on the internet I would have my very own throne. A space called My where I could show my My to the world. Take a picture of my head, attach a few identifying features, and the other my spaces would see my space.
This site too would disappear, but instead of completely vanishing, it reverse birthed itself, transforming from a place where people were, to somewhere where no one was.
NoOneSpace is still available. I’m not there.
I tried facebook. I tried twitter. I tried the comments forum of a western Wisconsin shoe store. Everywhere I go online feels like nowhere. I’m desperate for human connection, but being here, online in e-mail and blog form, makes me look like a corpse. I’m the dead undead, words speaking for themself, sentient ideas seeking out brains to eat and rot in.
This is not the flesh. This is not the life. This is just where I go to be forgotten in under a hour’s time. This is my-word-space.
I get in line to go online and have to go out to get offline. It feels out of line. Unneeded. Unnecessary. It makes me say unnnnh. Na na na na.
Oh my words!
Increasingly my dreams want less electricity. I evolve to devolve. Crawling primordially, oozing extraordinarily, exuding exceptionally, existing ectoplasmically. I want to feel like liquid. To swim and be swam in. To be a swami. Let’s go swimmi.
I envision a mission, planning for unplanned plans that don’t seem to pan out. Seeing breezes through the paper pages of trees so that I can know I’ve lost the plot. If I’m going to belong, I need to be long and stretch myself. I need to go long and touch down. To get up and get down.
The internet is overrated.
It is a dollar general store masquerading as an antiques warehouse. Piles upon piles of discount offers on information we don’t need. Roadshow appraisers assigning us their value for our worth.
Where do we sit on the shelf?
I am in the nickel bin, next to old wrinkled Weekly World News and nicked National Enquirers. I am a gossip rag, my investigations burrowed deep in the trash of my unknown neighbors. Recycled recyclables. Untold tolds. It’s incredible my value or the lack thereof. Buy me for free. Put me next to your fireplace for some kindle-ing. Let me tell you some truly tall tales (6’3” for those taking tape).
Anything we do online has a bottom line. We sell and get sold. Finding what we need here can take days, weeks or years. We might never find that job, that money, that independence, that friend or lover we seek. But the internet will tell you that it has it. It’s in the back room, just wait a second.
The internet is inefficient, not sufficient, therefore deficient, and we should probably all be fishing. Can’t you sea? It is a web of lies an entire world wide. Lonely, lazy, loony. It can’t tell the truth because it doesn’t know better. It doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. The internet isn’t myspace, theirspace or ourspace.
It’s its-space.
So I take a picture of my head, attach a few identifying features, and let my space see its-space, and its-space see my space. That’s it. That is all it ever was. I know that I can never be me here. I can only be what it allows. I am only what it shows you. I am it. This is it!
And if these thoughts are true, I might never really know you here. I would only ever know myself. I would only ever know it. But this can’t be it. The internet is how we know each other at least this little (a lot). Without it we would know even more about less of each other. Maybe the internet is underrated.
I am overrated.
I am a mouthy drop of water in the ocean. The internet instead shows you waves and lets you surf it. I just dry on your shoulder. There is an infinity of me’s inside of it, and we are all equal parts truth and lie, thought and idea, writer and reader, swimmer and swami. Its-space is just where we show our its to each other. These its are mine. Check out my beautiful its!
*editor’s note* The fat fish hits me like dopamine in the face. My butt end touches the fingers of my online purpose. I am here to see you, and to show you things. That’s it. Check out at this huge $#%&ing fish!
“Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.”
-Malcolm Forbes-
…thanks to and for there helping shape this version of it…if you want to read more about it please go to https://cansafis.substack.com/p/come-to-think-of-it...the internet, IT really is something…
ergo "lies are underrated?"
Nice article agreed internet is shiz on toast
Was going to say ‘this feels timely’ but I think its been timely for over a decade so does that make it a classic?
Need to hear more about this winsconsin shoe comment section, imagining a crazy bunch of foot fetish fiends.
As for myspace, at least we all had Tom! 🪑