For intention, against media

Hope against a fatal disease

There is today a great dearth of intention, of thinking.

Not that there is a dearth of education or higher learning, there is plenty of availability of that (leaving aside the trouble of equitable access), or even reasoning, but I speak rather of the thinking in the day to day, when making a decision to, for example, walk to the fridge in the evening to open it to find nothing of interest, knowing beforehand of course that there was not going to be anything of interest. And in the decision then to wander without intention from that fridge to something unrelated, hunger unsated, as there was no hunger. The fridge and the falsely promised eating, consumption, was never an eating with the purpose of sating hunger, or even for the pure joy of eating, it was an eating borne out of absence. An absence of intention, an absence of knowing what to do, an absence of true action.

This absence is prevalent. It has seized our collective psyche and frozen our thinking and our ability to generate intention. While with the empty meander to the fridge the lack of intention is stark, the most common example, and perhaps a great source of this absence's prevalence, is the internet and the consumption of media. Who has been at their laptop and for lack of knowing what action to take, without even thinking about it, has opened Facebook or Reddit to "browse"? Or in a moment of calmness and solitude, such as while sitting on the toilet, opened their phone to fill that gap in their consumption, that gap in their unthinking? I have and I suspect the same for you and many others.

In modern America, the wine flows like water and the propaganda flows like wine. When one brings themselves out of the stupor that is media consumption, frees themself, even for a short time, from the habit— the addiction— of internet use, it is easy to find oneself lost in the void of time, that emptiness where one can choose to do anything but doesn't know what on Earth is worth doing. It is the feeling of having been deprived of the need to think about what to do when one could just scroll or watch a TV show and having to exercise that skill atrophied from disuse. But if we are to be free, we must cast ourselves into that chaos of possibility. We must at each moment choose for ourselves the actions we take.

In the 19^th century, while religion still gripped the minds of many Marx could declare religion and its historical character the opiate of the masses. Today it has become the internet. And in the way that history repeats itself, this mass internet addiction has taken on a fervour of a religious character. In medieval Christendom, to call someone an atheist was to condemn them. Today, when internet access has become widely accepted in United States as a human right (even more so after the start of the pandemic when it became necessary for children to attend school), and one is met with awkward stares and isolation (because it is a point of oddity, but also because the internet has become the primary, when not the only, method of socialization used today) if they do not engage with it (unless they are elderly, in which case they are excused from participation in contemporary forms of socialization by relegation to their own, separate worlds: the nursing home, gated retirement communities), it recalls the ostracization of the heretic.

But lest we wish to succumb the tyranny of social and mental control that is the current incarnation of the internet and normalized media addiction, then we must become heretical. Not just heretical, but fervently heretical. If the corporate teleology of technology is to be believed, it is the course of history one fights against when one ceases to be chronically online. The world is becoming more connected than ever before, they say. More connected however at the expense of our autonomy and personhood. And if one is to go against that foul reality, that reality written by those who profit from its acceptance, one has to become heretical.

I would be remiss if left this without any practical advice, especially when I speak despite my use of the indefinite third person from my own experience. I have published this online so clearly I cannot and do not sever the internet entirely. The key is to be intentional with it. A lack of intentionality in the actions I take, an absentness that falls easily into scrolling when there is a phone or laptop in front of me, combined with the sapping of attention and the endless drip of dopamine (mobile games are designed directly around exploiting this by placing the user in a loop of play-game/dopamine-release, then an ad or then offering an in-app purchases, then repeat) are the root of the internet's toxicity, and if I can learn to become fully intentional when interacting with the internet then the rest becomes easier. This cannot be done in one step, nor without dedication. To that end, I practice being intentional with the actions I take. If I am going to get a drink of water, I think "I am thirsty, so I am going to get a drink of water." If I pull out my phone out of habit, I try to think why and what I intend to do with it rather than reflexively scroll. This is an ongoing process: one of weening off of my addictive behaviors and one of consistent dedication toward forming positive habits, and a process that has been working for me, and might not for all.

This is in part a confession and in part a plea: a world where we are controlled by technology and the media we consume rather than the reverse is not the future I want, and I beg you to fight against it, for your sake and our collective well being... I ask your pardon for pretentiously presuming that you have succumb to the systems of control that have been meticulously and not without purpose put in place to subjugate our free will, to make us into the batteries that power the machine, and to make us politically engaged but confine that engagement to Twitter, Facebook and their ilk, to the safety of inaction, to the safety of spewing empty discourse into a void of blackness generating more empty discourse if not nothing. If I have erred in my presumption, I apologize, so long as you do not presume yourself immune.

Long before March of 2020, there has been great viruses in our midst. And their fatal disease, internet and media addiction, has claimed an uncountable number of hours, days, years, from the lives of its victims. These viruses which exist in plenitude compete for your attention and clicks, and evolve quickly to outpace each other. Our brains are not equipped to handle them, as can be seen from the parasitic attachment of the digital to our lives. Quarantine, inoculate, and arm yourself against them.