Things weren’t that great before the pandemic to begin with. We weren’t doing, like, a super great job interacting with each other. Even the basic unit of human social interaction is already a sort of spiritual Turing test: I look at you and I say the words and I watch and I hope that there is some correspondent self in you that sees me, that your response in body and speech is evidence enough that I am not alone. What no one told me about myself – what I could not have possibly understood about myself – was that using my body to interact with other human beings was always going to be a superior method. Contact sports and sex and the stranger distributed intimacies of music, among others. Speech was always going to be the inferior option, perfect articulation requiring a needle be threaded between the twin seams of disjointed fumbling and circumlocution, just two different kinds of camouflage. But it was the preferred option, the agreed upon DMZ for us to see each other.
But now there is no one to see, and the mechanism I used to infer A Person in the actions of another has gone haywire. The blinking of my phone is starting to take on a strange malevolence, a personality that sees me in ways no person could. I confer strange knowledge onto the personalities supposedly present at the other end of any exchange – they know things, they have found me wanting. Or they are Simply Not There, for how could I prove otherwise? The lives of others, already distant, now seem impossible. What comes from a year staring at my basement wall is a frightening abstraction of others. I know there are other people out there, but I don’t know it the way I used to, understood as a presence I routinely came to reckon with, to understand and be obligated to. Rather, now the Other feels like a thought experiment. “How would I plan my day if there were Other People to consider? What would it feel like to be anywhere else but here?” These questions take on frightening intensity when the answers are so hard to summon. Even morality becomes a weird sort of linguistic trick when there is no real friction to remind you of its necessity In The World. People Online feel fragmented and distant from their ideas and language, the only signal that they might Be. And to separate language from person is to defeat the purpose of language in the first place. Why would I strive for consensus or understanding in a world where I Am The Only Real Person? Where challenging ideas exist only as a whetstone to sharpen my own rhetoric against and not as a testament to a living world exterior to my own, demanding compassionate attention? When conflict can be avoided as easily as putting my phone down, why form an argument? This was already the moral panic at the centre of the internet – How can a person have written something so blinkered and ignorant, surely not – but suddenly it is the substance of my life and I am terrified at the way it is shaping me. My brief forays into the simulacrum of interpersonal space – video, telephone – take on the character of a performance, some regurgitation of Every Fact About Me that I hope will signal my viability as a member of human society. My performance is a deafening “I come in peace” in every language imaginable, over which nothing can be heard. I have become incurious and desperate, the blind drive for connection cutting itself off at the ankles, eating itself like a Cool Ouroboros Tattoo.
My whole world has become cold language, a medium whose limits feel like cruel jokes, whose use in a vacuum undoes its own purpose. And I see the way this can grow from isolation to cruelty, when the reality of others does not routinely ground you, bring you back to understanding earth and your place on it. I’m here. I’m up here orbiting. The torpedoes are not armed. I would like to beam down.
Crud Meridian 