“Glyph” raises the ethical stakes even more. Set in a cultural moment defined by an unsteady relationship to reality — that is, right about now — it depicts people accustomed to scrolling by human atrocities on social media. Passive-voice headlines prop up the illusion that no one is responsible for them. Gazans waiting for humanitarian aid are shot for sport; asylum seekers are firebombed; journalists turn up in body bags. The present doesn’t feel entirely present, partly because of technology, but also maybe because we prefer it that way.”
Megan O’Grady from a review of the novel Glyph in the NYT.
I have not been able to articulate why these last 11 years have felt so strange, how unreal reality has become, how the present never feel present but always as if it is being rendered forgettable as it occurs. The combination of purposeful Trumpian dislocation with the light speed turbulence of social media — Noplace, Threads, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, has produced an historical amnesia and an anti-cohesion social molecule.
First, through our insistence on so regularly using small screens to meet the world, we flatten reality. It becomes merely a small picture, usually in motion, with human beings reduced to a sort of 2-dimensional animation. Second, trying to capture human beings in this way, especially human beings who do not look like us or live in familiar landscapes, scales down their commonality with us. Because we have become so conditioned to pictures in motion (130 years of conditioning), we have also become used to reading images and faces very, very quickly. Here is a famine. Here is a starving child. Here is a modern city. Here is the African Savannah. Here is a suffering face.
No lasting feeling remains. Very little breaks through to our constricting hearts and attention spans and imaginations. We simply see Picture picture pictur pict pic, and a kind of autonomic response occurs — famine-bad; starving child- oh poor thing, modern city-busy, big; savannah-lions, wild, sun; face – oh poor thing.
Now add to all that, the instantaneous connectivity of the planet, the technological ability to scroll, our endorphic enjoyment of novelty, the Trumpian tactic of “flooding the zone with shit,” and what arrives is the end of history as we have known it. Forget the average American’s ability to link cause and effect. Forget his or her understanding of how consequences play out over long periods of time in complex ways. In a media environment capable of ‘deep fakes’ and AI and ChatGPT illusions of authenticity, forget that American’s ability to or desire to figure out what is real.
Now meet the new-new thing — the contemporary American — either emotionally paralyzed or simple, cognitively incoherent, passive, alienated without knowing why, permanently anxious and angry and overstimulated.
I guess we’ll know when the end comes when that info pops up in our algorithm.
