As much as we would like to see the dystopian future represented in sci-fi stories, fiction has been overrun completely by technological advancements, and even while we still don’t have a flying car, most technology imagined by past writers is currently true.

Think about the watchmacallit, the iconic wrist watch used by boomer detective Dick Tracy to contact remotely to his superior. While this was just a dream in the fifties, it is available now on retail stores as smart watches. The possibility of finding almost any kind of information on the net, being able to have a conversation with someone on the other end of the world, or simply surfing through dozens of friends posts while waiting for the dentist to call us is overwhelming.

Digital Reality

We have created a new digital world that is more than a bunch of bytes, it represents a completely new domain where information is much more valuable than the material elements used to hold it, and while Greek philosophers saw body, mind and spirit as the triad that defined the whole experience of existence, current affairs force us to understand the digital domain into this spectrum, as it is even more real than materiality.

Think for a second about modern bank accounts. As you deposit tokens (cash) into your account, your money becomes digitized, the tokens are taken away from you and you are left with nothing but a mostly useless piece of paper and ink. Once your money is deposited, it is the information that counts, and if a hacker happened to erase bank accounts, you’d have your money disappear in less than a second, leaving you with nothing but a bunch of paper deposit receipts that you probably have thrown away already.

Now, on a second branch of thought, once your tokens are deposited into your account, you will be able to buy practically anything anywhere around the world, but no physical transaction is made, only digital operations backed up by a digital status of the account, but few or no physical, material money is moved at all between banks, as money moves so fast that it’s practically impossible and unnecessary to do that.

Technology has allowed us to do that, and many more things that we have grown used to and in fact, take them as granted. We, as a society, have developed a whole new world where digital transactions and representation are much more valuable than real life actions. Data is more important even than facts, so big companies spend millions on looking good on the net, even if their service and/or product is not at all the quality they seem to offer.

Misrepresentation of reality

By allowing us to have practically any kind of information around, we have become used to shaping our reality, and therefore actions and decisions based on a digital representation of the world, but curiously, it holds little, or no ground based on reality. A person may look very happy and successful on his profile on facebook, but be miserable and unstable in real life.

The same happens with practically anything we see on the net: products, persons profiles, promotion, etc., just like those people who bought some nice clothes that looked fine in the picture, but it turned out to be awful once it arrived.

In fact, material reality is much less appealing than digital reality, so much that we can get a great digital picture of a particularly boring scenescape. The augmentation achieved by current technology allows us to get a clearer perspective of the material phenomena just by integrating it into the digital landscape.

The digital domain is an exaggeration of the real world issues, it has become a hyperreality on its own, reflecting just a bit of the real world, just enough to make readers angry, upset about current world or local affairs and become frustrated by the inability to work towards solving a problem that affects them.

The internet practically substituted the TV, just as the TV substituted the radio, and the radio substituted the newspaper, as this substituted word of mouth communication. Even if it looks as if we were tighter as a society, we are not, we are just victims of a time where even communications are fake, much more so, the content they replicate.

We are shaping a world around image, around superficiality, and a fake representation of ourselves, and mostly everything around the net is greatly exaggerated, even news. By focusing on the surface, and not deepness, we have managed to create a superficial world, where “likes” are more valued (even though useless in most cases) than real rewards.

We are still idolizing fame as a goal, even if it’s given by saying stupid things on youtube. This is not new at all, as popularity has become vital to young people as they fight to transcend in a world where becoming popular is more important than actually being useful to society.

Datascape pollution

The Internet has been so open that it has become full of trash data. Repeated contents, fake news, fake research, incomplete information, misguided ideologies, etc. It’s amazing that god google will always answer whatever you want him to. Ask it if aliens exist, and it will report thousands of pictures and proof that aliens in fact exist; ask if aliens don’t exist, and you will find thousands of debunking information around the inexistent outer space visitors.

This is a big problem, as it allows people to believe that whatever he is thinking is right. People don’t debate over facebook to learn, they do it to find validation of their ideas from similar minded persons. By having someone acknowledge their belief, it becomes real for them, so it should be true for everyone else.

But somehow, somewhere, we forgot that postmodernism, the intellectual movement that helped shape today’s selfish societies, was based on every person having its own experience, which is completely valid today, so why are we trying to force our view of the world into others? Anyway, people prefer to be right than growing up by learning something, and by having lots of trash data around, it becomes easy to have long debates where no one actually wins, it’s just a waste of time.

What use is having the biggest network in the world if it doesn’t hold any clear sense of utility? Most communications – as we noted before – are fake, people are fake, information and news is fake… we filled the datascape with trash, making it very difficult to find real sources of legitimate information.

By having all this garbage, the internet stopped being the oracle it was, fed by universities around the world and people with epistemic knowledge on what they wrote about. Now it’s just an open channel with lots of garbage and entertainment content, most data outlets designed to capture the user’s attention for the longest time possible, not by feeding something ontologically productive, but just entertaining in its most simple way.

But that is what people actually like. Having tons of possibilities, most of them will probably choose the one that doesn’t require any deep thought, and may just let them be, with no challenge at all, under the excuse that they watch TV or any internet streaming provider because they just want to relax.