Existential Onlife

Humpty dumpty couldn't be put back together, All the king's men tried. The internet moved war to an immaterial  place--the internet is the mind and the  mind is the internet: a  fractured, sporatic, frenetic--an insoluble place.   Our minds can't be put back together if  that was ever the case to begin with. Modernism brought about fragmentation, postmodernism embraced it and made it a commodity.   Now, our minds have price tags. Individuality is sold and bought by people looking to express their  living, breathing self.  But that self doesn't need art, nor clothing to express it. It has words.  It has thoughts.  It has relationships with others which expresses as much.  In the old world, this happened in a space opened up to  entertain notions of gratitude.  Capitalism doesn't want you to feel gratitude.  It is  in the interest of companies to keep the gaping hole ali...

My passion for a long time has always been to analyze the intersection of Technology and Death.  At the surface, it is obvious how technology has changed the human mind, formed out its malleability. It is interesting that Google has handed over 1.5 billion dollars to a tech company called "Calico".  Their primary mission is to engineer life-enhancing drugs to fight off diseases like cancer. I am currently listening to the book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow .  It discusses how modern man has thought of ways to defeat all of the old world problems: famine, plagues, and war. The author talks about how more people die from overeating and diabetes than they do famine. Plagues are solved in a matter of months.  And a real world war hasn't happened since 1945. The two new world problems that man faces are both "death" and "happiness"--two problems that can be engineered if with the enough investment.

Never before can we see the global sprawl take rise--in the process creating a global consciousness.  As a people developing each continent and country over vast amounts of time, the internet in the silicon that is tying all the nodes of experience into one single, living entity. In the past, we could talk about valuing individuals from across cultures.  The internet, and the people who are making it what it is becoming--the tech behemoths, i.e., Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, are the ones who are the designers of our future economy, the developers of a global mind, a shared wiring of all countries. A cartography of the human experience, conditioned by technology to allow us to stare back at ourselves.  If the 19th century led the way to establish the modes of crafting our individuality--the 21 century is responsible for establishing the global mind, securing a transhuman endeavor.  The giants of the tech world are the scaffolding for our next step in the u...

This blog is a blog that tries to capture my thinking about the intersection between existential anxiety and technology, specifically the internet. It is a research, ruminative blog--one in which I detail my own ideas, while also making comments on what I read on a daily basis. If I were close to making a thesis about this subject, I might take a stab at it by stating the obvious: "Technology acts as a bulwark against existential anxiety".  This seems patently obvious though, so it seems that I must dig a little deeper if I want to unearth something worth reading. I have long contemplated this subject, so I think that it is a feeling that I don't think will die away.  I have always been interested in technology.  When I was younger, I wanted to be a computer programmer, even though I hadn't the slightest idea what one actually does.  I knew that I wanted to work with computers--that they were the cutting edge, offering a gateway to a happy life. My existentia...