Ghosts Beyond The Machine

I’m assuming your reading this on your phone. Your phone: an (elaborate) glass box with (elaborate) blinking lights. We, as users, imbue meaning to those lights. All the doomscrolling, brain rot, social contagion and mimetic schizophrenia come from our end as observers of blinking light. That’s wild to me because nothing on that list is physical.

In the modern, industrialized 21st century world, our common problems are much less physical than they are psychological. And this will continue to be the case as these tools become more sophisticated, and more of the population becomes digitally native. We take for granted how much of our waking life is reliant on a cluster of ideas, the bulk of which don’t matter hours or weeks later.

Ghost stories are bedtime stories for children. But in a technologized society that runs on computation (boxes emitting an elaboration of blinking light), where matters of commerce and expression become less bound by physicality, everything is, de facto, a ghost story. Ideas are merely ghosts and ghost stories with a different label. We are all over grown children navigating bedtime stories.

Aren’t we all God’s children and couldn't God be another ghost?

You are fully formed and wise. And you don’t believe in ghosts. But I hazard to wager that you do without recognizing it. That you maintain ghosts (and myths) you believe to be real. Many of which will be disproven in the hours and weeks to come.

...at present, this ghost, typing the words you’re reading, is merely a collection of blinking lights glowing from a glass box.