§ ♣ These days, completely surrounded by sweeping digital science, I can seldom feel that erstwhile solace, that conciliatory flush, that liberating sense of being truly alone, serine, free, myself–inviolate.

We can shed our gadgets, roam the woods, hike the mountains, sail the seas, wander the barren deserts to our hearts’ content but henceforth we’ll always know what we can’t unknow. We’ll always know what we can’t deny, decry or defy ever again. We’ll always know that now the world and everyone in it are little more than cybergame caught and writhing captive in a monolithic web of countless other prey inextricably sewn together, not by the warm and silken threads of family, faith and fellowship, conjoined, not by the soft satin strands of brotherly love but rather always, wholly, inevitably, irrevocably by the sundry, taut, intractable bonds of inorganic science. We’re all potential cybercatch, cyberkill, cybermeat, today, tomorrow, ad infinitum.

Science works wonders every day in human services like health, communication and manufacturing. At the same time, it’s lessened our humanity significantly and done the odious deed at great expense to our  freedom. Like most progress, certainly progress undergone for profit, new technology is oversold, overused and overbearing. Nowadays progress has invaded every aspect of our lives under the auspices of science, often pointlessly. This is because profiteers have sold us on the bogus trope that modern, trendy, well-equipped and obligatorily cool mean hysterically drawn to every new advancement on the horizon.

All of a sudden we can’t survive without them, never mind that life was good for many years before the tech revolution. Not all that long ago, life was much simpler, more private, more palpably sociable. Back then life was more innately interactive, more relaxed, more blithely down-to-earth. It was joyous, more celebratory and free, quite devoid of that intrusion grown ubiquitous and ultimately disruptive on the social, mental, moral and emotional planes. That pervasive and eventually disquieting intrusion brought much broader unity for sure but then with many added superficial bonds and in their wake a new pejorative conformity and spiritual isolation.

At last cold technology has snatched a soulless place in the protean limelight, donned the flighty crown to become newborn if nonetheless provisional star of the day. It’s the graven image of choice now, displacing all disposable human idols, the most engaging if somewhat pedestal-bound demi-gods of yore, just deified flesh themselves but still living things with long trains of humanizing culture abaft.

Since the dawn of civilization human beings have paid deference to the nonpareils, the very few astute in certain ways come to aid, bolster, validate, the extraordinary, the emulable, the creators, great instruments of culture who have toiled, taught, enriched, inspired, icons, kindred spirits, a whole parade of artists, writers, actors, musicians, philosophers, a panoply of social, religious, political and corporate leaders. Nowadays we eat, drink and sleep cold technology. Some even genuflect to mute, indifferent science. The lifeless beast is more important than we are at last.

Now we’re always home, always available, always there for the outside world and its superfluous intrusions. We’re never, ever away, remote or incommunicado, even when making the hollow claim to have gone fishing. Think of it. We’ll never know the consummate solitude of an ordinary fishing expedition ever again unless we choose to leave our cell phones at home where they belong. For that matter, who in their right minds would risk the panic of insecurity apropos to such reckless abandon?

Wherever we go, whatever we do, we can never evade the salient fact that we’re all electronically interconnected. We’re stuck like flies in the byzantine monstrosity of a dark, sprawling, unbounding, fast-binding, co-opting, soul-crunching, all-consuming, inescapable spider web, entangled in this complicated network of invisible cord that mocks a door to freedom while in truth it’s just a huge, duplicitous trap that reins us in, curbs our liberty, skews our instincts, numbs our grasp, and writ large makes atavistic carrion of us all. More, all this interacts with new, updated, pluralistic, decidedly more sophisticated and all-encompassing modification to unbridled capitalism, the course original long since tinged by the aboriginal, a new-fangled greed machine, a strange new electronic commerce edging too close to world-wide cannibalism. Keep a careful watch for the Black Widow.

Everyone feeds on everyone else in this day and age. Worse than that, feeding time is all the time. Cue the fertile hunting grounds of Facebook, where every day we bare our very psyches for the amusement of strangers merely masquerading as real and trusted friends and where these seeming friends consume  voraciously every day the most intimate details of our own contrived, cut-rate personal lives.

This once worrisome act, now banal, quite routine by simple dint of everyday need and repetition has at last become acceptable and more or less reciprocal.

Add to the bleak scenario all the other bane of social media. Look at the runaway rancor, malice and hate speech released by rampant cowardice in the safety zones of ensured anonymity, yes, on Facebook again but too on such vehicles as You Tube, Reddit, Twitter, Twitch and way too many others.

Today, clicks away from each other, everyone dishes on everyone else. That’s the fact, the inescapable truth. Well, bon appetite. Me, I’m gonna stand back, stay back, kick back, hold back, hark back and turning an eye to sanity make a last-ditch effort to just “simplify, simplify.”

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com