I cannot decide whether you are delusional, juvenile or just trolling..
Made me think of a chunk of a Charlie Brooker article I recently read in the Guardian
"The internet is a bit like a soap opera, in that the dialogue often seems phoney. As a human, you know this. You know a lot of that squabbling and babbling just doesn't ring true. No species that angry could have survived the invention of fists. Online, even a whimsical chit-chat about the cutest part of a kitten can rapidly descend into a bitterly entrenched civil war that tears families apart, with brother turning on brother while their mother looks on, weeping. Resolving Palestine looks like a piece of piss by comparison.
I used to worry that computers were to blame: that modern connectivity was steadily turning all of us into a bunch of fake, shrieking character actors. Pick an avatar, cultivate a "personality" that doesn't quite represent your actual personality, and shit out an endless string of entertaining brain turds for the crowd.
But pretending to be something you're not isn't new. Nor is conforming to expectations, or showing off for attention. So after literally minutes of fuggy medium-wattage thought I've decided the problem isn't technology, but us. Bloody us again. Davies (Dr Who Bloke) was on to something: ninety-nine per cent of all human discourse since the beginning of time has been little more than a series of clashing monologues. The internet simply allows more of those monologues to clash at once.
If you think that's depressing, consider this: almost every monologue consists of nothing but the words PLEASE AUTHENTICATE MY EXISTENCE, repeated over and over again, in disguise. There has never been a single tweet that couldn't be replaced with PLEASE AUTHENTICATE MY EXISTENCE. But then, it's hard to think of a single human utterance outside of Twitter that couldn't be replaced with PLEASE AUTHENTICATE MY EXISTENCE either. That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind, you say? Yeah, right. PLEASE AUTHENTICATE MY EXISTENCE.
If you could zoom out beyond the moon, beyond time itself, and picture the entirety of humankind since its creation to its eventual end, and somethow witness it repeatedly pinging the phrase PLEASE AUTHENTICATE MY EXISTENCE back and forth between itself, we'd probably resemble a squirming galaxy of bees endlessly performing needy little waggle dances in front of each other, minus the useful pollen co-ordinates.
Perhaps that's a clue to the next stage of our evolution. We've already boiled communication down to acronyms, emoticons and shrtnd sntnces, all of which are simply more efficient ways of transmitting the PLEASE AUTHENTICATE MY EXISTENCE signal from the fragile core of our souls out into the wider world. Maybe the next stage is to reduce it all down to a single noise. I'd favour a short, electronic beep, not unlike the noise emitted each time Pac-Man eats a dot. Instead of having to think of an amusing Facebook update to impress your friends, each of whom is so consumed with agonising over their own update they're only pretending to pay attention anyway, you simply push a button and transmit a little beep. Said beep is then automatically intercepted by your friends' software, which broadcasts a brief "acknowledgement" sound effect in response. So all "conversations" would effectively run like this (I'll translate as we go along):
You: Beep ("PLEASE AUTHENTICATE MY EXISTENCE.")
Them: Bip-bip ("EXISTENCE AUTHENTICATED. PLEASE AUTHENTICATE MY EXISTENCE.")
You: Beeeeep ("EXISTENCE AUTHENTICATED. DISCOURSE ENDS.")
Now that might seem robotic. Inhuman, even. But it's polite, and it frees up your brain for more important tasks, such as curing disease or baking brownies. So don't fear this inevitablefuture, but embrace it.
Beeep. Existence authenticated. Discourse ends
