Doing something analogous here- going through people I followed and randomly reading the past…do you still feel the same way?

I’m unhappy with the loss of tangibility, too.

The tangible is part of the cement of the self.

I think this is about becoming un-anchored… we can’t actually do without contact, without sensory perception, without feedback. That’s why solitary confinement is the severest of punishments and sensory deprivation evolves into hallucination.

We have evolved our 5 senses through survival - parsimonious nature has reckoned that they are necessary and sufficient, alongside interoception, to make sense of the world and our context at every point.

We are each the sedimented and contextualised accumulation of experience, which itself is our own individual aspect to reality and interaction with it, processed semi-simultaneously and archived.

Our self is the continuing interaction of this accumulating archive with the present. Our self necessarily contains all our sensed contacts- each sight, sound,touch and taste and feeling conforming our reality, and then it also contains the anticipation of these inputs, feeding into our projections and expectations of reality.

So, what happens when the present is strange to our historic senses? Perhaps we become strangers to ourselves- no sensory echoes, different answers to our sensory questing, nothing that rings a bell.

Migrants have this experience too, and develop a more or less intense craving for the foods and sounds and smells and sensations of their pasts at some point. A culture of remembering and consolidating develops. Of holding to and holding on to…sometimes a feeling that morphs into nostalgic nationalism, need for tribe.

Seen like this, assimilation is also loss, a second internal migration and distancing and so it can not actually be mandated, just evolved- negotiated over lifetimes and helped by love’s new bridges. And by ‘keeping in touch’ one way or another, not breaking the chain of events that makes a coherent self on the road.

Post modernity,though, we seem to have collectively accepted that less is better.

Friction-less. especially. Superfast, supereasy, superficial, insignificant, loss-less, cost-less…as if dollar cost was the actual measure of anything. Less ties. Fundamentally less presence, less contact, less substance, less sensory work. Existence-lite. Lo-fi.

‘Low fidelity’ in all senses and in every sense of those words.

I think this has been a eureka moment for those who look to sell a product of whatever type- the discovery that humans are ambivalent at best about humanity and all it takes, especially the work it requires. That people can make do with messages instead of speech and presence; worse that people turn out to prefer it. So we got the worst of all worlds, vices out of virtues: culture as ephemera, politics as fiction and comfort as lifestyle product… ‘Brand loyalty’ the only goal.

We are always in tension between past and future, advance and retreat, novel and familiar. Against this ambivalence, sensory re-anchoring reminds us who we are and how that who came to be.

I don’t know how this ends up, when the only material for sensory craving to work with will be digital. Virtual. And owned by platforms. Digital natives never get homesick?

Seems like I am circling myself too- https://medium.com/@jangas/the-problem-is-a-loss-of-dimension-frictionless-interaction-where-the-ingredient-that-is-cut-out-7ad915c8db46

From 2016, way back when this site felt differently…