Algorithm-driven social media usage has hastened the collapse not just of the collective present but of our personal temporality within it. Past and future are minute-to-minute sacrificed upon the altar of engagement in a ritual observance of the self unfolding illimitably, incessantly. With the reduction of all things to content–war, famine, baby photos–simultaneously without relation but nevertheless co-referenced individually, all meaning (or what remains of it) is lost within the soup of the hyperreal.
When in response to a presently unfolding tragedy photos of downed aircraft make the rounds of the usual forums and sites and apps, it must first be vetted whether they are pertinent or were pertinent two years ago. The erosion of agreed-upon truth, of history, the division between reality and simulation and simulacrum, remains consequential to the survival of our society. We are indulging in the fruits of the 24/7 news cycle, the elevation of tabloid journalism to the status of papers of record, casual blending of political ideology and entertainment with both consumed as evidence of the other. The effects are tangible.
What we are presently without is an understanding of how this relates to our personal experience with the truth or, more accurately, our personal experience with the mechanisms that have eroded collective truth, which have necessarily by degrees now eroded our personal truths as well. Without temporal linearity, we live in an eternal present. A neverland in which our spirits atrophy and we will remain at 55 as interrogative of our identities and experiences as we were at 15. For we are that same person. Merely our clothes have changed, our personages, our personal semiotics.
Our interior self-conception cannot cohere into a narrative without a relational view of linear time. With the collapse of temporal continuity into an eternal present we lose our capacity for reflection and so, our capacity for hope. For change, for aspiration, for envisionment of any kind. And so are prioritized all means to collapse the horizon, to banish its existence from the mind and in its place install a kind of fugue. We become hollow. Spiritually unhoused and adrift. A vacuum thus presents.
Emptied, the vessel lay in want of a host. Desireful, in truth, of inhabitation. Any comer so long as the mind inside was spared all contemplation of an interiority revealed now to be without scaffolding. The potentials were numerous. Profits were assured to be immense. The graveyard was full of deities, of ideologies and movements in search of human emancipation.
Simulacrum has become the new godhead.