Naufragé in the Digital Surge

This is a message in a bottle on the warm digital sea. This foundered soul writes to anyone who will someday read his thoughts.

I don’t ask for aid. I know that is too far off. Instead, let this message be a testament that I was once here.

For it’s likely this message will outlast me.

The digital sea grows. It sweeps everything under its tide. What were once disparate institutions like the cinema, the newspaper, the phonebook, maps, banks, marketplaces, social get-togethers, and libraries. They’re all now eddies in the tide. They’re whorls distinct from other whorls but constituted of the same medium.

Distraction is nearly inevitable in the current that brings all mots of thought near. And though we’re all caught in the sweep, we all fight our own struggles.

We’re a tribe unified by time and hazard but distanced by the flow. A unified school of circumstance.

We’ve tried to dike the surge, but it is too forceful and recent to tame. We’re in the first wave. Its crest is too high to see beyond and we must wait for it to ebb before we begin to turn the next away with discipline and artifice.

For now, the only means to escape is to seek the fresh air that wafts less powerfully above. At first touch, it is a cold and vulnerable place but our agency will only there be restored. Our bodies will soon grow accustomed to the barrenness of solitude. And it’s in the open skies that we will find our true tribes again.

We must build a resistance to the shock of exposure.

Though the tide is warm and we float weightlessly within, we are not creatures designed for such dependencies.