The electronic frontier. To paraphrase Ready Player One, that bastion of coolness, we have nowhere to go so we go online. Too late to explore the earth, too soon to explore the stars. The internet is no frontier no longer, but to this day remnants of the pioneering history still glow: the dregs and whispers of IRC, usenet, PLATO, MUDs, individual forums, vaporwave, any number of sites pre-redesign and then re-re-redesign. A hundred declarations of endless summer, a hundred worlds trapped in summer. A lot of little sites are still nestled behind labyrinthine rabbit holes, and a lot are lost forever. The bitter melancholy of life seeps into the virtual. This is the mentality internet usage gives a person. An illusion of omnipotence, like the internet is some epitome of content and information. They cry "kill the blog and you burn the library of Alexandria!" Yes, the internet houses an incredible variety of information and touchingly obscure things and thoughts, but so does the real world. The internet is not special. You cannot live your life on it and trying to is not satisfying.
The website theinternetisshit.org spells it out most excellently. In my experience, the heart of the internet, the rabbit holes and sub-subcultures and great obscure projects, should be left alone unless you are specifically searching for them with a practical intent in mind. Only then they can be helpful. You must separate yourself entirely from the electronic, and engage it only to your express and intended benefit. It will corrupt and corrode if you get too comfortable, and oftentimes works under your skin. It's like Bilbo's ring, I say. Once in a lifetime, something may resonate with you online in a way that genuinely changes your life. The avid browser may, once every couple of years, find detached and informed outlooks and suggestions on topics that they could never have otherwise and which will change their lives in a real and positive manner. But in return there is the muck. Hundreds of hours wasted except to form an urging, a glazing of the eyes and a jittery wasteland of the mind. A sullenness and a dullness and it is your death and you become a pathetic and unpitiably privileged extension of the computer. It is a privilege, a great show of wealth, to lose your life to the computer.
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The surest way out is a clean break. Using the computer is never worth the price, I think whenever I have the impulsive urge to lift that laptop lid. That phrase and a fair amount of resentment how I got unaddicted–although now it swells again. It was only this summer that I broke from the computer, and when the libraries reopened I read at least 1500 pages a week to compensate for the data. I rarely missed the computer. But when one must use the computer in life, plan exactly what you're going to do, in order, and why it's justified–why you need to go online. And use only one tab, a good principle of electronic use; there is no need for more. But in these days where already I fall back towards the machine, as if past apoapsis, I do acknowledge there are benefits. Life is tedious when one must always use a dictionary, cannot find reference photos for drawing (although lately...)–but these quality of life benefits are still not worth the price. This machine is a compensatory mechanism, not the mathematical tool it was designed to be. Corrosion and corruption, these are what one may see and recall in their excesses; an inability to balance on the edge of the virtual knife blade. If one were only more deft!–but we never are, never are. One wonders if the computer will be a deathbed regret.
Live! "The deeper the suffering..." The passage of time may bring tears to the eyes.
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