this inquiry feels important and close to me right now, as our lives are continually more and more merged with our digital devices (maybe add something re: how our smartphones appear in our body schemas, or link to this piece from a line about that), and our cultural/societal understandings of reality and truth become more and more disparate.
i feel like i should contextualize this project within things that are happening right now and impacting me on some level: like all the anti-trans legislation, wild narratives around what does/doesn’t cause the unique culture of mass shootings in this country, and the “tik tok ban” (which would have truly horrifying ramifications)——even just through a lens of “horror” since that’s what so much of the media i’m examining is.
we tend to define reality as what is outside of digital media, which is just false, but either way, the things we construct within digital media mold what happens outside of it
our individual and collective constructions of reality are SO fractured right now. i don’t want to say more fractured than ever, because i’m not a historian, but like, what the fuck. like how do i exist in the timeline where Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump are tweeting about being red-pilled??? i do not think it is a coincidence that The Matrix——which Lilly Wachowski herself has said is a trans allegory——has been co-opted by the far right. What happens when as a society we’re told we need to wake up, but also lied to about what we have to wake up from, and what we will wake up to?
maybe it does make sense to talk about everything everywhere all at once, in re: to optimistic nihilism, as a release of the attachments of “cruel optimism”, to one that acknowledges not that nothing matters because everything is chaos, but that nothing matters because everything is structures, being constantly rebuilt and smoothed and mutated around us (seemingly at increasing speeds). it is an acknowledgement of our agency within that being the ability to build and mutate (and glitch, etc) as well, toward things that don’t have intentionally oppressive ends.
i think the “everything everywhere all at once”ness of our times is also reflected (in the scary way) in things like QAnon, where everything and nothing has meaning, and instead of a release or reclamation of that, there’s that (affective?) cling onto every single scrap, and an almost panicked desire to piece them all together in order to locate something meaningful (rather than building something meaningful).
address the “overstimulated numbness” of our culture
re: both malls and the internet as sites for this work: a tangent about capitalism and how it colonizes both physical space digital space, and our collective and individual imaginations (which, transmedia storytelling can be a balm to——but can also aid in, depending on who wields it).
CAPITALISM (and whatever has grown out of it that we’re in now) IS A BLACK HOLE TRACTOR BEAM, HOW DO WE ESCAPE IT I’M SO TIRED OMFGGGGGGG