Notes on The Electro Dome

And how I realized I look ridiculous walking around with my head in a fishbowl.

Thursday, Oct 24, 2024

Not too long ago we knew a lot less about the world, but had a much better adaptability to what it might throw at us. I worry about that loss of resourcefulness as we “progress” onward as a society. It wasn’t just the turning of people from farms to cities that caused that loss of adaptability, but that certainly seems to be a big part of it.

In part, it is what happened next, after migration to cities and the electrification that took place. We were for a short moment still fairly analog. But then came the Great Electronification, and that feels like the beginning step into this thing that feels like it’s leading to a dead end. In the bigger picture of time and humanity and society, this is all really just a blip. Blip. Blip.

But it is our blip. And that’s why it matters.

Soon after the Great Electronification occurred came the Internet, the Great World Wide Web. Global knowledge suddenly was at the finger tips of us all. Like the fruit of in the Garden of Eden, like Adam and Eve, we plucked that damn fruit without ever batting an eye or pausing to think about what it might do, or what could possibly go wrong. We were putting all the world’s supposed wisdom in one place, everyplace, so anyone, anywhere, anytime could know anything. And in some regards, it’s been wildly amazing. But in others, it very suddenly feels like it’s led to a rapid degradation and regression of society, of humanity.

We have each been given a tool to pull from the world’s most renowned tomes of knowledge. But it is with trepidation we now proceed, ever wondering if we actually have access to it all, or are we censored? And if so, who gets to censor? We take the device, but now with fear, I watch as so many lose their minds in a sort of fishbowl that is the Electronicsphere. So many keep their head submerged in it in ever increasing hours of the day, they get stuck in the endless corners of the Great Electronic Mind, forgetting that their only true reality exists apart from it. We walk around with the bowl on our heads, fish swimming before our eyes as we watch them, unaware of where we are walking or what we are doing. The allure is drunken, to sense you can truly be everywhere and anywhere in the world all at once, and it’s fiction. Clearly. But so many are making it their reality. And how do you share a world with people whose world is based solely on their own fed algorithm. It is not a shared experience. It is a shared delusion at best. And a world without true sunlight.

The world has become drunk on it. You see fentynal addicts on the street, wobbling in a stupor, their mind trapped. Somewhere so removed and isolated, so deep in the small part of their minds that their bodies do not function properly. In many ways this is what you see in on & off moments across the population as people glue their focus  to their phones as their bodies try to move through real space and time. Reality for them is no longer the connection they share with others to the earth we all were born to and share, but are attached to electronic signals that are shallow simulations of reality that only exist in LED nodules.

Humans have again been tricked into eating the fruit of knowledge, pulled into a trap of presuming we can handle it all, when clearly, we can not. We are not evolved for this quantity of information. We are not built for such capacity. Complexity does not necessarily make the world or our lives better. When confronted with this inundation of information we find ourselves frozen, lethargic, overwhelm at what we perceive as the world around us, when in fact the world around us is sitting calmly with the birds in the trees, and the wind blowing. You can see it in kids and adults around the world. Meanwhile we sit and watch so many across society losing their basic function of humanity. So many people forgetting the basic joys of life, and every day living. Forgetting what real food is. Forgetting about the thrill of the touch of a loved one. Forgetting the simple pleasure of watching birds arch across the sky and the feel of rain splashing on their skin. As people direct their attention, love, and time into this fictitious electronic landscape, they lose their sense of what the real pleasures of life actually are.

You see in the Electronic Hemisphere, more than the real world, your space is created and curated by a single driving principle… You are for sale. You are the product. And in a diabolic twist, you will give your money, money made out under the actual sun, to those curating the electronic sphere that is ultimately set up to do nothing more than capture, contain, and exploit your mind. They are willing to sell you you. And they keep the change.

We are building a house on sand and silica here. We are becoming reliant on an electronic foundation that has no bedrock beneath it. And the potential for calamity is becoming every day more evident. I’m not a doom and gloomer. I don’t think the world is ending. But I think humans are setting themselves up for unnecessary harm and challenges based on an addiction to electronics that could otherwise be mastered and contained such that they are useful without taking center stage. But we have to see what is going on clearly before we can make these things work for us, and not the other way around. Under the drunken allure that we can all “make our living online” with a side dish of hope that perhaps the robots will serve us, and not vice versa, our actual physical infrastructure once built by humans centered and grounded on the real ground, a world we need to function if we hope to keep feeding and sheltering ourselves as we move further and further from the land that feeds us, we are allowing our infrastructure to dwindle and erode while we silk our minds with electronic dreams, that maybe the robots can satisfy our hunger. We need to contribute to the real world, regardless of how we operate our income, and we need to be part of a social existence because that is where the roots of our humanity lie. So many have forgotten, or perhaps were never taught, that contribution is a critical part to not only a functional society, but to a satisfied and happy existence.

The electronic diodes will not keep the rain off our heads. They will not serve to keep us warm. They will not satiate our human desires and hungers. We need to pull our heads out of the fishbowl.

Being grounded in the outside world is of utter importance for humans. We were made to be cold and hot, experience the snow on our faces, and the sun in our eyes. We are meant to smell the empty desert wind and the flowering forests. While these last few decades of electronic drunkeness have been interesting, we need to reclaim our connection to the foods we eat, the air we breathe, and the water we drink. We need to remind ourselves that lust for ever more is a dead end and that by adding complexity to life does not necessarily make it any better. There is a beauty in simplicity. There is strength in knowing we are not reliant on ever-more. We are adaptable creatures full of creativity, but for the last few decades our creativity seems to be focused on accumulation rather than imagination and appreciation.

As I type this into my electronic device, I fully realize the ugly irony of it all. And that is why I say, this isn’t all bad. The world isn’t ending. But I think there is a better life, and a better society when we learn a little bit of discipline around this all, and clarity for what it can, and can not be, in our lives. The truest fulfillment in life does not come from this electronic sphere. This should just be a tool in our bag, but it should never been a place we become so submerged that we forget about the real world going on outside the glass windows, which is the place we humans truly belong.