Vantage points and Illusions

Plenty has been said about the craziness of our times, the changes that technology introduces to our lives and the dilution of the physical space in favor of the virtual. But though 80% of our daily routines have shifted towards the digital world, it remains shocking to see what this shift is doing to our sub-consciousness. While the eye gets used to perceiving reality over the screen, our minds and our neurons are undergoing a heavy confusion, as they are no longer capable of distinguishing between the physical and the digital, while the output still needs to account for some sort of compatibility with “reality”.

And while the physical world still entails some degree of human interaction, the maneuvering of the digital world entails only avatars, keyboards and often times plenty of solitude. Most people find comfort in the anonymity of the internet, while others are simply happy of having eliminated the often times awkward and undesired interaction with humans in the real world. The Metaverse, as some sort of medicine for an ever-growing agoraphobia that the internet is instilling to our lives. The disease and the cure in one package. Chimera and Bellerophontes. And if life is not complicated enough as it were, one would hope that there is also an Antiverse somewhere out there in the expectation of regaining what’s lost in the process of evolution when time would start running backwards taking us to a more familiar and more comfortable past. A past where human interaction was the norm and not the exception. Where human interaction promoted the notion of harmonious co-existence and where the rules of respect and acceptance were high on the values-agenda. When things were still very much personal and every human action triggered another human’s reaction.

Do not get me wrong. Evolution is a one-directional process and is as needed as can be. The only concern I have is with the pace of changes, which leave none to very little time for adjustment. And while off-springs are no longer ordinary human beings but the complete overhaul of the species, the tandem becomes harder to balance. Younger generations come with an embedded technological intelligence in their DNA, while millennials are struggling to convince mankind about the traditional values of mutual respect and harmonious co-existence as the pinnacle of social coherence. Where we are today is probably nowhere near where we anticipated to be twenty years ago and prior to the introduction of the internet. The best example to describe the threat that is happening to us, is probably with reference to the current atrocities in the Ukraine invasion by Russia. This is not a war of “equal perception”. Older generations who have seen or lived war conditions before have a much more realistic awareness of what is going-on on the ground, while “Screen Generations” are perceiving the events no different than the images of a video game. Feels almost like a “double distilled” erosion of our reality, one at the level of events themselves and one at the level of our mental perception of those events. Reality portrayed through a screen is running the risk of being seen as just another genre in our entertainment offering and God forbid that it will soon become subscription based. But even the image of the Ukrainian President repeatedly on TV, no matter how desperate his pleas and callings, is wearing-off rather quickly and is difficult to beat the broadcasting numbers of appearances of the average Joe on a reality game, which is usually only one button-switch away on the remote. Parallel worlds perceived a-la carte. And I am sure that the sub-conscious of a fifteen-year-old may digest the images of a destroyed Kiev the same way it absorbs and processes the images on the screen while playing “Call of Duty” with his buddies.

And there is a second leg to this ongoing threat which is time-related. My generation used to say that “repetition is the mother of knowledge”. And back in the day, knowledge was research-based and the product of a conscious and cumbersome individual effort with a number of cross-checks and balances for validation, while today it is everything you are being fed over the screen. Hence knowledge today is lacking the vetting and verification of its accuracy by its provider and its validity can take on as many forms as your imagination can ascribe to it unless you chose to embark on a verification process yourself. It almost seems as if knowledge has become a heavily guarded commodity which is no longer accessible in its root form by everyone, but is controlled by some undisputed, self-appointed higher authority, whether it is called Wikipedia, Google or anything similar and we have all surrendered to the “Papal Infallibility” of the uncensored internet. And with the internet having become the primary source of information knowledge has compromised its independent validation.

On the flip-side of things of course, one could argue that acquiring the information at the lightspeed of the internet is making us much more efficient in our daily tasks and routines. And that is partially true, no doubt. But there is an enormous difference between looking up “dry” information on the internet, such as the provisions of a legal act as opposed to seeking other types of knowledge and information that require a critical-thinking approach, e.g. anything with an historical background that nurtures legacy disputes which are being carried forward even to today and remain the thorn in the relations between two or more involved countries. There, your information uptake is heavily dependent on your preconceived opinions on the matter, your educational background, your nationality and other criteria and often times is lacking either the factual knowledge, the objectivity or the experience to back-up your position. And the internet then, offers you generously a platform to promote your opinion, even if false or completely unsubstantiated from a scientific point of view, but yet you have been promoted to become a “feeder” for others that may or may not scrutinize the information prior to its consumption depending on their agenda, their mood or their ability to do so. So, in many ways, one can compare that process to the mechanics of cancer in the blood stream of a human when it falsely replicates DNA information. The replication of unvetted information on the net is causing the cognitive cancer of the planet. Especially with history one has to be extremely careful. Historical information cannot be compartmentalized and disconnected from its time-depth without risking its complete falsification. And that brings us back to the Ukraine invasion. What are the chances that a sixty-year-old and a twenty-year-old have the same understanding of the causes behind this war?

In conclusion, technology has many advantages, as it harbors major disadvantages. It can be weaponized and it can be an instrument of cure. One thing, however, that it cannot do for sure is to erase human memory and history that is transposed through the human DNA from generation to generation. It may confuse and it may provide education. But it can never eliminate the notion of time, or alter the intrinsic sense of justice and injustice. It can connect us, as it can take us as apart at the same time. But it cannot lie to us. It can be imposed upon us but it cannot win us over without our own will. In the end, it does sound like just another complicated marriage, doesn’t it?