Digital Panopticon

We know that the internet is a place, because we go there.

Clock into your daily shift. Key card in the form of a password.

Welcome to our digital globe, newly colonized. We watch and we interact as our small developments evolve by the day. 

We work to grasp the weight of this new collective as we perceive it through the lens of limited experience- like a midwesterner trying to fathom the Great Wall.

I used to tell myself that scrolling was actually a form of research. This is the world- soak it all in. Take notes.

Use this information like a vehicle to explore ideas and places that your grandparents couldn’t have dreamt of knowing.

But the expanse of knowledge is overwhelming. So we naturally settle into the safety of our virtual towns.

The human brain has evolved to interact with a community of about 150 people in its lifetime. 

I walk down my digital cul-de-sac, and it spans into a circle of about 2000.

My online neighbors are always smiling. 

Their lives are color graded. Their bodies are small.

And when I see these neighbors outside- in the physical world, I mean- they’ll all tell me the same thing.

None of it is real. The internet is for the highs.

And yet we re enter. And the neighborhood resumes.

The one unspoken rule that I’ve found in this place exists so plainly that it seems too obvious to reiterate:

When you are here, you must accept that you are being watched.

And it’s innocent. 

You visit a shop, and they take record of what you buy. It’ll be on display the next time you run errands.

You take a trip out of town. The whole of the 2000 knows. They’ll ask you about it in passing.

All of this is consensual. You can always leave it.

But you have to accept that the physical world relies on this one. To leave is to be forgotten. Silent excommunication.

This place has a strange currency.

The slang you use, the references you make- indicators of how informed you are.

Your music, your clothing, your posting frequency- how innately do you know the silent etiquette?

And you don’t have to know it.

But your neighborhood will be smaller.

I worry that the more time I spend in that world, the less present I am in this one.

I worry that I exist within myself like we do within that place.

I am an object to be perceived- to be beautiful, palatable.

And anything much more than that would be impolite.

I clock out and look at myself in the mirror.

I have my mom’s eyes.