Imaginary Relationships

I guess you could think of Bob Dylan’s “Every Grain of Sand” (which he played as an encore when I attended a concert of his just a few months ago) …

As it is (IRL — more or less), I currently have Andy Summers’ album “The Golden Wire” (1989) playing in my headphones. 🙂

Whether sound files or image files or simply plain text or whatever else, all of the content you are currently consuming via this channel is more or less imaginary. It is “appearing” on your screen (or through the speakers, or headphones, etc.). In contrast, if we were at a real beach, we could watch every grain of sand slip through our fingers and fall to the ground, as we have once before. Or maybe twice. Three times? Thousands? Millions? … ?

Probably many times before. Iteration upon iteration. Repetition. More reps. Many many more reps. Each and every grain of sand left an impression. Grains of sand slip through the cracks, they all fall down to the ground. And we watch as they do so.

That was the world before the Internet. That’s still the world the way it is today. But something has also changed. Today, there is also this text, these images, these sound files, these updates, these algorithms, apps, … and lots and lots and lots and many more lots of ASS (artificially sentient slop). It’s like the slime oozing out of your TV set (as Frank Zappa used to say or sing or whatever).

Hundreds of years ago, Henry David Thoreau lamented that people lead lives of quiet desperation. I believe that’s no longer the case. I think we have moved on beyond such despair. Today (in so-called “advanced” economies), people increasingly lead lives of imaginary relationships. Many people can no longer identify when some content they are “consuming” is completely imaginary. The words and images and whatnot more they consume on a daily basis are often entirely fabricated and have no relationship at all to what we might have formerly referred to as “reality“.

An entire generation of largely illiterate youngsters bark into their so-called “smartphones” … and actually believe that what the device responds has something to do with “facts”, “the real world”, “logic”, “truth” or anything like that … besides making a buck off of these poor little suckers.