Pixels Up Your Nose

Last weekend I watched the Netflix documentary about the Fyre Festival. If you haven’t heard of it, it was a music festival that was supposed to take place on an island with luxury accommodations. To say that’s not what happened is the greatest understatement ever understated.

I came away in awe of a couple things in particular:

1. One single person’s capacity to create a belief-space for so many other people that sucked in money, time, work, on a massive, massive scale. This guy putting on the festival is a compulsive liar and yet people went for it. The believed him. It’s just the current US administration in a different venue. His medium is belief. His workplace is the insides of people’s heads. His strength is other people’s weaknesses and willingness to believe things that they want to believe. And by the end, he was doing it AGAIN. I mean, what the HELL.

2. Okay and then I thought about how willing we are to live in our heads, and what that’s Not — which is sensory and dimensional and — felt.

The people working on that festival knew in their guts that it wasn’t going to happen. But they kept going anyway. Man, it showed how important it is to take things in with your whole self and not just your eyes and ears.

(I’ll get into our compulsions to hand stuff over to an Authority Figure sometime later because wow, that’s a THIG too.)

A studio smells like linseed oil and sawdust and oil pastels and rag paper.

A bike shop smells like oil and tires and your feet make a shuffling sound on the concrete floor.

Restaurants have a sound mix that’s unmistakeable. It’s not even the same as a coffee shop.

You can tell how a sporting event on TV is going from the next room by listening to the crowd sounds. There’s the frustrated-home-crowd sound, the just-scored sound, the annoyed-with-the-refs sound.

So why, oh why, do we look at pixels all day? Does it give us a sense of safety? Keep us from feeling overwhelmed? Because no matter how high-definition an image or a recording, it is Missing Information.

Humans filter. Back in the day, we had to tell the lion from the tree and the grass. I get it.

But when we accept someone else’s filter, we give them power. Our power.

So we do — what? Virtual Reality? Artificial Intelligence? Automation? WHY???

No, no, NO. That’s just going farther into the cave. Come out! Smell the grass! Bounce a damn ball!

Everything is a representation, INCLUDING your brain flipping your visual cortex upside down before it hits your brain-hole.

Yeah, social posts make us feel things. The way THEY want us to feel them. Liked, Shared, it’s THEIR paradigm. There’s no gutteral noise or subtle nod button. Just a damn hand.

So here’s an exercise: Go smell stuff. That’s it. It reaches your brain a whole different way. Memories come pouring out.

May you enjoy the beverage of your choice, may you encounter something stinky, won’t you be my neighbor?

— Betsy

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