PIXELS, LIKES, FOLLOWERS

 

It's time to walk outside, in the real night, under stars that are not pixels.

 

Sitting on a mountain of silicon, I look down. Beneath me flows the great current of our time: no longer a river, but a digital ocean with no shores, only screens. The waves are made of pixels, the currents of likes, the tides of notifications. We breathe only in this luminous liquid.

 

Today's society resembles an immense city of glass: transparent, sparkling, yet fragile. From afar, it appears like a perfect crystal, a palace of light raised by reason and desire. Up close, however, every wall is a mirror. We move among reflections: my face multiplied infinitely, your face multiplied infinitely, until we no longer know which is the original and which is the copy.

 

Every morning we bend over the well of our smartphones and always see numbers: followers, views, hearts red as poisoned apples. But the well has no bottom. The more we look at ourselves in the mirror, the more we empty ourselves. The water we drink is made of the approval of others, and the more we drink, the thirstier we become.

 

Food is experience, not just nourishment. The hunger that remains is the most ancient: the hunger for meaning. But at the banquet of consumption, meaning is banished, because meaning slows down, and slowdown is death for the market. Today's society is also a great hive without a queen. Millions of worker bees buzz around hexagonal cells of data. Each believes it flies free, yet they all follow the same algorithm, the same scent of digital pollen.

 

We are inside the Smartphone and outside the polis. We have replaced the polis with a single, synthetic thought. Outside virtual reality there is chaos, cold, the other. Globalization has produced the greatest fragmentation in human history.

 

We are alone in the shouting squares. Look at the squares: once they were meeting places, agoras where the word was alive and risky. Today, the squares are empty, or worse, populated by talking statues: profiles, avatars, identities constructed with filters and catchy phrases.

 

The true word is no longer the currency of choice; it's too light, overused, devoid of intrinsic value. And the soul? The soul, that poor traveler, has become a tourist. It travels fast. It wants fire. It wants silence. It wants the depth that only slow time and courageous solitude can provide. We're afraid of silence. We're afraid of the desert. We could encounter ourselves without filters.

 

Like the seed that falls into a crack in the asphalt and, against all logic, takes root, so within the glass society a strange nostalgia is sprouting. Nostalgia for slowness. Nostalgia for presence. Nostalgia for the truth that doesn't need likes to exist.

 

Let's start cultivating an invisible garden: that of the mind. Let's start measuring time again with the water hourglass, the water clock. Reason is not the path to God; reason does not process water turned into wine. We must stop, we must reflect.

 

Today's society resembles a man running very fast toward a virtual destination. He runs, sweats, panting, convinced he's going somewhere. In reality, he stays exactly where he is. It's time to walk outside, in the real night, under stars that aren't pixels.

 

Who am I when no one sees me? This is the cruelest and most precious gift: having forced us, by excessive noise, to seek silence again. In silence, man finds himself. And in finding himself, he finds others. Not as followers. As faces. Real, fragile, mortal, beautiful faces that GOD created.

 

QUARTAVEL ©