insides / outside
once again i am an old man screaming about how the internet is killing us but please just hear me out
to be a living thing you have to have an inside and an outside1. cells have a membrane that selectively lets certain things in, lets certain things out. blocks certain things out, keeps certain things in. to be a thing at all you must have some kind of border, some kind of boundary, that separates you from the rest of the world. you cannot interface with the world if you do not exist separately - it requires two agents. your insides are soft, quiet, and slow, and the outside world is loud, bright, and fast.
ideally your insides stay soft. they move at a slow pace. they are sensitive, impressionable, like moss growing in a cold, damp cave. and when they produce something strong enough to leave the cave, to stand on its own, that thing can pass through your cell wall into the outside world. it can be anything. a feeling, an idea, a demand, a question. anything that started in you and bravely went outside.
but this system takes time. it takes time for things to grow inside of you and be ready to leave. and i’ve been thinking about this process, and how the internet has sped it up so fast it’s almost instantaneous.
the internet encourages you to think something and share it immediately. to bypass your membrane, to bypass any process of sifting, discernment, waiting or mulling over. ideally the internet would have the time between you feeling something and you sharing it be non-existent. less than zero. it should take negative zero-ty million seconds. fuck it, install a catheter that runs directly from your soul into the colostomy bag of public discourse.
you have no membrane on the internet. no border. letting yourself live on the internet is like taking a mossy terrarium that has been self contained for two million years and cracking it open in the hot, dry desert. thoughts that are born outside burn up quickly, like debris entering the atmosphere. only the broadest and bluntest objects survive this process. something delicate, intricate, unsure, or ambiguous, may only be able to grow inside, and be taken outside when it is strong and ready. but we do ourselves no favors by killing any feeling that can’t survive its infancy, any ideas that are born without armor.
thinking something and immediately tweeting it is like giving birth to a baby and letting it walk directly into traffic. these ideas will have to become inflexible in order to survive. but this means never growing. if you are chronically online and do all of your thinking in public, you have no insides. instead of being limber and hydrated, the muscles that build your thoughts are tough and shrivelled like sun-dried leather. your thought process, your emotional interiority, should be unpretentious; soft, squishy, wet,2 like the inside of your body. not hard, fixed, ready to fight. if you have made yourself impenetrable on a cellular level, it is impossible to even know or experience yourself. if there isn’t a world that exists inside of you, if you don’t have little interior moments observed only by you, what’s the point? you put your soul out in the sun and let all the juice evaporate
thanks for hanging out in the cave!
This concept, and the initial idea for this essay, came from the book METAZOA by Peter Godfrey-Smith.
lol pussy
Love this. So perfectly expressed.