Undertaking
Geir Moseid

Have you ever swam in virtual waves?

The other week I awoke one morning to a dream so aghast my mind was paralysed for days on end. A world was built inside my mind where human beings were emotionless, their sensations reduced to an abstract sense of longing for something unknown to them. These humanoids were eating protein shakes, with no taste, from plastic bottles stacked up in their fridges. Food was nutrition only. They were passing each other on the streets, filming everything they saw with their eyes, without meeting the stare of the other. This to feed a digital deity with information, their brainwaves turned into pixels, directly transferred to this artificial almighty instantly. A world where all surfaces were grey, where nature wasn’t needed, because there were no consciousness to appreciate anything natural, nature isolated to continents where no one went, areas everyone escaped, to pursue the dream of inanity. In this place, this world, people were walking, sitting, sleeping, like ghosts. Affection a myth from yesteryear. Blind to everything, enclosed and stranded within themselves, with only an artificial voice speaking smoothly to them, keeping them normal, guiding them further within the soft soap, navigating them further and further away from depth, from grace, a voice in a chip inside their skull. No taste in their mouths, color blind, without pain or regret, nor a notion of presence, past or future. I woke up from this dream and felt, truly and deeply felt, that this might at least be a blueprint of a prospect we’re willing to call future.

But who cares about dreams anyway? Dreams are noise. It’s debris from a wounded mind. We’re only algorithms the scientists say. And we better listen to science, or we might be outdated, discarded, left behind. Useless. The greatest fear of all. Uselessness. We’re stuck in a loop between the three corners of the triangle of humanism; the social, the liberal and the evolutionary. In constant fight, total spiritual war, always. We’re fed. Constantly we’re served dishes of perspectives. All for the future, the grim and solitary future, where no one cares about anyone, though everyone takes care to point out the mistakes of others. Where everyone is scared of being outside the norm, while no one cares about the normal, which ends up in a constant repetition of antipathy. Here where no one really cares, though everyone is ready to attack or reject the one that does. Softly, slowly, in herds, we break the dissident individual down, with bits and bytes, thrown at the ones who give a damn. We don’t have time for it, even though time is the only thing we truly possess.

Whatever. Who cares. Why not. These are the mantras of the day. That’s just the way it is. We’re anyway all heading this way. The return to animism, though without any instincts intact, no urges left. We all sit on the same train, the train towards color blindness, neglect and meaninglessness. All to be relieved of responsibility. It’s just the way it is. It’s the way it’s going to be. Don’t be pathetic. Your holler is hollow, because there are no ears here, to hear. We don’t care about your woeful squeal. We will never change. We will never break.

In a world where nothing matters everything does, all haphazard blowhard hogwash, and it does so equally. That was what we were always striving for anyway. Wasn’t it? Hope, change, equality, liberty. It must have been the grand prize, because here we are. Aren’t we? Surfing on the edge of history, the end of the great and epic story of destruction and delusion, clinging to a self-confirming doctrine, in rapid descent. The endless end. People looking down onto their screen in amazement over nothing, smoking dope to feel nothing, shutting themselves in their apartment, entertained constantly, to face nothing. Everything shrugged away. Dystopic some would say. Reality through dark shades. It’s reality around the corner. We’ve never been more connected, though never further apart.

We don’t want to revise, we want to be praised without being present, so how can we change? A disease is present in this prospect, a sickness derived from progress, served on a plate of denial. You’re a number, a tax number, a phone number, a social security number, the zeroes and ones you leave in the void. That’s you. Beyond this you’re not needed, we’ve got public figures taking care of that part of so-called society. Whatever you believe is you is a thing of the past, an aberration from the soon to be defunct humanism. It doesn’t fit within the digital evolution, nor the gospel of the blank-eyed nihilism of the day. Stop talking about an authentic self. There is no self. Scientists say. Better believe it. But you don’t need to. Belief is a thing of the past too. We throw the past in the trash can. History is just so nineteen forty-five, so two thousand and one, so year zero. And all in denial, to the fact of the matter, that the happy and smiling humanity we’re generating is finally and totally devoid of heart. And every single year we’re drowning in our tears. Water from our eyes, that somehow doesn’t seem to leave us, so it’s stuck in our chest, like a bulging fist trying to break through our ribs. Can you face the endless sky? Can you face the pain of the other? Are you ready to embrace the violence of today? Are you willing to pick up a sufferer from the pavement? Have you ever seen into the eyes of a child and felt awe? No? You’re not alone.

So I ask you again.

Have you ever swam in virtual waves?

– Essay by Kristian Skylstad