Better Than Real
There is a place where the streets are made of information, where humans and machines are indistinguishable, where attention is a commodity and flashy packages are named after the very thing they lack: content. This is the place where the real has gone to die.
This place is nowhere. You could roam the entire Earth ten times over and you’d never find it. Yet, this place is everywhere. It’s in your pocket, sleeping beside your pillow, watching you poop, always within arm’s reach.
You’re here right now — so am I.
Getting to this place is easy — a two-year-old can do it. You pull up the teleportation device you call a phone and that’s it: you’re here. You’re immediately transported, no longer experiencing whatever is happening in the real world. Instead, you’re now living in the digital. The real disappears, colors fade, sounds become muted, and the virtual realm cradles your consciousness, feeding you delicious dopamine right out of its hyperreal tit.
This place has replaced the real. Slowly but surely, what we experience here has become more important than what we experience in that old, decrepit thing we call the “real.”
It’s just like all those wise people said. No, they didn’t say it in the real. Why would they do that? There’s no one there! They said it here, where everyone really is: online.
When you eat a delicious dish; if it’s not here, it didn’t happen. When you go to a concert; if it’s not here, it didn’t happen. When you see your friends; if it’s not here, it didn’t happen. If the eyes of your phone didn’t see it, it might as well not have taken place at all — never mind what your human eyes saw.
If you have a thought and you don’t post it, did it even cross your mind? What do you think you’re reading now? I think, therefore I post, therefore I am. If I don’t post, how can I be sure I even exist?
Sure, these events might take place in “real life,” but where is this
“real” place you speak of? How can we access it? How do we get there? What can I type into my phone to navigate to this place?
If it’s not here, it doesn’t exist, and the real is most certainly not here. The real is nowhere to be found. No one has seen it in a while.
But what is real, anyway? Am I? Are you? That’s all irrelevant. As long as we are here, we’re better than real.
