A Disturbing Dream
While camping out this came to me in the middle of the night.
I imagined that I had to go online in order to view email but the entire format had changed. The new software upgrade changed not only how everything looked but how everything worked. Instead of a static screen I was looking at different images.
No words.
Just images.
Whatever I looked at for a few seconds came to life. One image was the facemask of Spider-Man but I had no curiosity with him because I was looking for my email.
Other images were views of people I assume were employees of the system or exact emojis of people ready to interact and solve whatever problem I might have come online to solve.
But there were no directions which to me meant there were inbuilt assumptions understood by younger more game and tech savvy people than I am.
Essentially I found myself excluded from this format into the Internet.
Now I was facing a more vocal and visual interaction and nothing having to do with words and numbers.
These had been replaced.
I sensed, however, when I looked at and spoke with these screen people that they were not happy. They were desperate to please as if their lives depended on it. Would they lose their jobs or worse? If emojis, perhaps they would be replaced. It seemed these emojis cared. But even in my dream it wasn’t particularly clear.
In my dream I went to the local internet company office and spoke with someone I apparently knew and explain that they were cutting out entire generations of active Internet users because their interface was not set up for that group.
It came to me as I explained this problem to the man behind the desk that it seemed this new format was more about entertainment (even than it now actually seems to be at least for most people) and creating artificial relationships online rather than seeking answers. It was like going to a circus or a fair rather than to the library.
As with most dreams it began to repeat and distort as I woke up and fell back to sleep slipping into similar but inexact duplicate dreams.
A few additional thoughts crossed my mind.
The first one was that Silicon Valley is actually Death Valley.
Both involve sand, parched earth, and the absence of real life. This of course is a metaphor but there is a sliver of truth.
We search for life in the Internet thinking it will provide us with the answers we need, but truth and life are not found there. They are found outside what the Internet attempts to show, explain, and even provide.
It is a drug that does not strengthen clear thinking. It can be used as a tool in aid important research when the mind is disciplined to use it, but its usefulness is actually quite limited.
I believe true communication and growth come through human contacts and conversations.
Writing like this might help people think, but even this without good conversations with real live people afterwards does little to improve us in healthy ways I’m afraid.
So share my weird dream with others and get a conversation going.