One thing I am pretty good at is making the invisible visible.
In this moment, I am using that ability to make something visible that has been designed by corporations to be invisible. Nothing I write on this subject is meant to shame any one of us for our “weakness” to or “dependence” on the layers of technological interfaces we interact with on the daily.
I am sure we can all understand this has been done TO us by corporations, systemically, for profit and with scant care for our physical, mental and emotional well-being and with no care for (and the counter-intuitive impulse to destroy) the general well-being of Earth and her inhabitants.
I understand the irony of bringing you this message via the interface of Substack, but I literally don’t know of another way to do it at scale. My hope is that by naming the seemingly inescapable technological interference, we each will be inspired to find our own subversive ways to disrupt these systems and find our own work-arounds.
The first question I have for us is - what do we consider “social media”? Is it just meta, x, dischord, tiktok, insta, snapchat? Do we include youtube, substack, google, dating apps? Or, “was this you” fraud investigation texts from your bank, online surveys your postal worker or grocery clerk needs to be considered for raises? Instacart, door dash, uber, lyft, amazon, everything in the app store?
All of those technological attempts at optimizing our human interactions - we know one thing for sure…
They are not social.
We do and say things online we would NEVER do or say face to face.
The online space is where we most forget our shared humanity (or it is purposely obscured from us) and where we go against our natural sociable instincts the most.
These technological "spaces” are literally anti-social.
Clearly we need another word for them.
If we are feeling bold, maybe we could start calling them what they are…
Interfaces - between you and me, us and them, the individual and the corporation.
Actually, it is more accurate to describe these interfaces as a myriad of overlapping interfaces, of which we only see the top one – the one “closest” to our screen; but behind that are many more, many of them buried layers deep under all the rest (but affecting our lives just the same).
Which is why I feel it is important to name what is happening here. When we believe we are connecting online to one another, we are actually just interfacing with someone else’s pile of interfaces.
We have become so accustomed to these technological interfaces (myself included! I too, am a fish swimming in the internet just like you!), that when we are off-tech-interface, it feels weird – like if we aren’t online, our lives aren’t real.
It is because of the omnipresence of these tech-interfaces that the illusion of participation somehow begins to feel more “real” than actually participating. Virtual and augmented reality trump actual lived experience.
Examples of this phenomena include:
If I go for a walk without my phone, do I really get the health benefits of the steps if they aren’t being tracked?
If I host a successful event but don’t take pictures and post them, was the event really a success?
If I go to a party but am not included or tagged in the photos posted of the party, was I really present and having a good time?
The phenomena can also work in reverse. For example:
If I purchase a health supplement that Instagram suggests, but never take it as directed; I might be confused as to why I’m not healing faster.
Or, if I buy an oracle deck, but never use it and only take it out to show to friends, I am not expanding my divination abilities like I planned to when I bought the deck.
Or, if I subscribe to a fitness program, but rarely access the teachings to move my body, I am likely overestimating the health benefits I am receiving.
The illusions are strong and we can be fooled in all directions.
And, although these industries like to shuffle their feet and intimate that if we are “looking at our phones too much” – well, that is because we are weak, and prone to phone addiction; the truth is much more complex.
This is something beyond any supposed moral failing on our part as individuals.
This was done TO us by corporations, with the “blessing” of little government oversight (especially in terms of preventing tech monopolies) and lack of proper restrictions and taxations on these corporations. Bit by bit, they trained us and acclimated us to their addictive, hungry-ghost technology.
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For profit, corporations (including but not limited to tech companies) compromise our minds, our connections to one another and the natural world. They subject us to untold amounts of terror and fear-mongering and (largely successful) attempts to influence and control what we do with our minds, bodies and lives. They make us less healthy, more anxious, more depressed.
They make us miss the things that make life worth living. Through their lens, those things – our dreams, our visions, our hopes, our free will – do not matter at all unless they can be photographed, cataloged and exploited for profit. We are all data-mined, attention bought and sold.
Yes, maybe this is a catastrophe for the world, maybe it is not.
Maybe, as my visions have shown me, the pendulum will swing back.
Nothing, really, we can do about it anyway; the horse is out of the barn and this is going to be a hard one to get back.
But I’m making a point of naming it – all that happens when we only interact through the interface of our screens. It becomes impossible to see the whole picture ever - everything is cropped by design; we NEVER can get the full view.
Also, and perhaps more seriously, the majority of this technology seems to be at cross-purposes with our hearts and souls, creating disturbances in our energy fields which can result in physical or mental detriment and well as the atrophy of our individual and collective imaginations and the thoughtless degradation of the natural world.
Those are the facts.
We are all trapped, I know.
And, it’s not all bad, I know.
Sometimes I do have fun on the internet.
But I am tired of being a corporation’s profit by allowing them to farm my attention – which I do in order to continue to make my way within the seemingly inescapable labyrinth of consumer capitalism.
So, I want to make it clear what it is taking from us and I want us to find ways to get back all the goodness that has been lost.
Having a spiritual practice is a partial antidote.
May we all find our ways to clock out of the technology interface realm – even if only for a short time – in order to help us SEE IT FOR WHAT IT IS.
That the tech-interface is the unreal thing -
Not our bodies.
Not nature.
Not the Sun, the Sky, the Volcano, the Ocean.
We ARE real. Even if the power goes out, even if the internet connection is cut, we remain…
Can we use these interfaces for good? I am hypothesizing we can.
I encourage us all to examine what I’ve said here through the lens of our own values and then decide where we want to direct our time and attention.
Should you accept this challenge, it will be tricky. It’s all a hall of mirrors within a much larger, hall of mirrors.
But, what IS life going to be about?
Do I want to look at rays of sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees?
Do I want to look at the picture someone else took of sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees?
Until next time,
Jess
NOTE: this post was partially inspired from this banger of a post from Brett Scott of Altered States of Monetary Consciousness. It is a deeply educational read if you want to get fired up about interfaces from an economic, philosophical, ethical perspective.
Because the fact being that
Whatever's in front of me
Is covering my view
So I can't see what I'm seeing in fact
I only see what I'm looking through
- Fiona Apple, Window
“As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical “therapy” to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.
…
I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains, but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically. In many cases, gardens and nature are more powerful than any medication.
…
Clearly, nature calls to something very deep in us. Biophilia, the love of nature and living things, is an essential part of the human condition. Hortophilia, the desire to interact with, manage, and tend nature, is also deeply instilled in us. The role that nature plays in health and healing becomes even more critical for people working long days in windowless offices, for those living in city neighborhoods without access to green spaces, for children in city schools, or for those in institutional settings such as nursing homes. The effects of nature’s qualities on health are not only spiritual and emotional but physical and neurological. I have no doubt that they reflect deep changes in the brain’s physiology, and perhaps even its structure.”
- Oliver Sacks
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
- Wendell Berry
To Give This a Name, Astonishing
Since the weather is mine, or the window
even the separation from the weather,
it is my body, only my body, that knows
this weather. Whatever shapes those crystals
fit, edges connect, they coalesce, fall,
agglomerate, and change in fragile patterns,
original, infinite as the continuum, whatever.
I see the veil of illusions, the momentum
into which I may thrust my arm, hand, fingers,
to feel from the couplers and nerve endings
my heart glowing out from me, crushing their
geometric inventions, the silent click of crystals
fracturing. At this moment thinking that the shapes
of starfish, along a similar lattice, reflect another
pattern of angles crossing and recrossing within
the magnet of an invisible circle. The weather
fills my lungs, is allowed by the multiple corporation
of my interlocking cells to conjoin within the oceans
and abysses of this fabulous puzzle and I become
the weather as it becomes me, as water, the enabler,
mirage of pattern, illusion of vapor, snowfall,
even the window, all fractals become conjured out of chaos.
- Ruth Stone
Sojourns in the Parallel World
We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension - though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it Nature; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be Nature too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal - then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we've been, when we're caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
- but we have changed, a little.
- Denise Levertov
Listen
After Derek Mahon
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
- David Whyte
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“But something within us knows that these are world creating choices.
And that we are powerful.
And that, fundamentally, no human being is more powerful than any other.
Our power comes from when we exert our will and consciousness to choose something that is outside of the programmed choice - that is what shifts things. That’s what gives fuel to the forces of synchronicity that guard us.”
- Charles Eisenstein
“…magic is and always has been a strategy and tactic for living. It is a form of creative resistance, a way of understanding the universe and navigating it, a deeply relational way of being and collaborating with human, non-human and extradimensional entities and even machines.”
- Amy Hale
“Awareness itself is the primary currency of the human condition, and as such it deserves to be spent carefully.”
- Andrew Olendzki
“Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.”
― Marcel Proust
The internet somehow brought you and your meditations to my awareness. I am so grateful for this! And here I can have a positive social interaction by epressing my gratitude.
Thank you, Jessica Snow, for being a ray of sunlight, warming me in the cold, distorted digital world. Your meditations are helping!