In the Youtube video “All The Ghosts You Will Be”, content-creator Michael Stevens from Vsauce aptly points out that, “…we are not the universe experiencing itself. We are the universe ignoring itself”. This is certainly not only devastating news for any marketing campaign intent on selling a “vibe” instead of a product but also for the way in which we engage with media in general: if all those hours scrolling to the perpetually elusive rock-bottom of your favorite website aren’t even going to provide us with an actual “experience”, what will? Are we past the point of amusement, colling with its own eclipse into obsolesce?
If, in the Kantian sense, experience cannot be acquired through experience alone – it always being hinged to parameters outside of its own inception –, it could be arguable that our conditioning towards actions such as doom-scrolling and suffering from embedded urgency anxiety (Mark Fisher) is not birthed out of a tendency towards experiencing experiences through others but, on the contrary, out of our own indulgent lamentations of not having experienced enough in a given scenario. So, the aimless, in need of categories and concepts that would form experiences, wanders into the waters of falls-immersion, completely deliberately so, recoiling in the unarrival of experience itself; in fact, the parameters we haven chosen to confront experience in the digital world are neither categories, nor concepts and less of all tools that would form any kind of relationship outside of their own cybernetic web of cables and data. Instead, the concepts and parameters that lead us into cyber-space are being treated as if they are on autoplay; as if they are no more portals into a world distant from our real, tangible world but as if they just ended up being another commodity for us to demystify in the search of transcendence. From this, experience through experiences can never arise, not even subconsciously. Neither can a concept of Hegelian experience hold its own in the dramaturgy of robotics: if, according to Hegel, the path of experience of consciousness should leads us to a deeper, insulated knowledge of ourselves, than the inquisitive might, rightfully so, question: how are we to be lead back into ourselves when we are, most often, doing so through other people, with our consciousness not raise and heightened but put into sensibility-hibernation against the backdrop of the experiential world collapsing in on itself? It is certainly understandable to have parts of the digital experience be diluted into mind-numbing extensions of experiences – think of memes, short-form content, “influencers” etc. – that do not even foresee themselves coalescing into the experiences of other, chronically-online people, just like entertainment has always been a part of the human experience, but what happens when the overriding of entertainment blossoms into a kind of intake-lethargy; a non-place of un-experience, where everything is planted but nothing ever grows. What happens when experience is prolongedly unexperienced?
The cyber-corrupted idea of experience does no longer foresee any kind of adherence of the former to the activity of understanding, especially not when we are to consume more short-form content than the mind could ever really process. We do not want reflexivity; instead, what we want is a fast-track-pass towards experience without having to do anything for it, but not because the experience itself isn’t worth the trouble of eventually getting it. Instead, it could be possible to think about experience that isn’t worth the wait, not because the epiphany of it feels redundant but because our sense of time itself has completely elapsed our hands: when everything is “on” all of the time, experience itself is, by osmosis, perpetually experienced, bypassing knowledge and acting as its own point of inception, causing a rupture between the actions we are willing to take towards it and its eventual blossoming. Naturally, this diminishes the potential of experience in so far as for it to never reach its full potential, but it seems that this does not matter any more: as long as something, anything is configured in so far as to yield to any kind, event he lowest ones of experience, we are willing to suffer through the neglect of more profound experiences in favor of the ones that center time as happening in the present, constituting a reassurance of the present moment.
Now, obviously neither Kant nor Hegel had memes, TikTok or videos of amateur stunt-reenactors jumping onto furniture at their disposal, so it is fair to say that we ought to deliver some kind of different way of relating to notions of experience in the modern day. Do we even want that? In the same aforementioned Youtube video, Stevens remarks that what we really want when we find ourselves looking at videos of dogs, coffees, pranks, fails and foods other people eat is not to experience anything, but instead to be unsettled; to reach a place beyond a certain threshold of understanding, where the weird and the eerie morph into discovery. My only question is: the discovery of what? Nobody is “tricked” by cyber-amnesia anymore; anybody entering the cryogenic chamber of doomscrolling is doing so not because they don’t know what they are going to find, but because they wish to find anything at all. There is a difference here, and a profoundly important one: we are not unsettled by a phantasmagoric drive-by of information but by the interchangeability of what it is we are consuming, causing us to instead be unsettled by the fact that nothing unsettles us anymore and, by proxy, no experience is ever really finalized. Instead, what we are really unsettled by is everything that happens outside of cyber-space; the pages of a book that has to be read until next Friday, the person we secretly have a crush on but will never say or do anything about it, the problematic relationship public transport has to punctuality, the battle of low-wage against the ever increasing high-maintenance living. What we really are unsettled by is experience itself; experience we cannot simply just opt out of because it isn’t being presented to us between a click and a swipe; experience we are tasked with enduring because it is reliant on concepts that would compel it in the first place, concepts we then, in return, are dependent upon (salaries, transportation, social conduct etc.). We opt for the cyber-version of experiences – non-experience – when the weight of the parameters evoking experience despite of us reaches the threshold of unbearability, not because we wish to be unsettled but because the temporary lapsus of presence feels like a more tangible (intangible) experience than the present. Stuck on the train to your way to work? Fear not, for cyber-space is here to feed you intravenous resemblances of experiences that make the real dwell by comparison. We do not relish in the “alone time = phone time” equation because of some masochistic tendency towards being unsettled; we do so because the real scares us more than any agglomeration of digital particles ever could, finding the assimilation of para-experiences reliant on the body’s black-out more reassuring then the finality of the present, for the debilitation of movement, reserved for our thumbs only, secures us the prospect of experiences being possible in a quasi-illusory future we never reach. Sometimes, this is already enough.
The tragedy here is that these future experiences never manifest themselves – or rather, we only seldomly follow through on them – because they would pale in comparison to the hyper-realism of cyber-experiences, too real to be real but hyper-real enough to become a resigned projection of the expectation for experience. Instead, we find ourselves in a predicament where obsession alone already implies and creates experience. This obsession (with the often mundane) might be foreign in the beginning, but the bodies apertures and it’s symmetrical extremities soon grow fond of it, of the joy in resignation in favor of the cleansing annihilation of the senses, which, then again, makes experience outside of cyber-space impenetrable: if experience is the result of various strategies and concrete concepts, the only experience arising out of deep-fried networks must be one that is completely extraneous to us. For how healing and solemn the time spent with our eyes glued to a screen might seen, all we are actually doing is perennially switching between seemingly infinite channels, the content never fully coalescing into a resemblance of experience but only remaining the reminder of a potential experience to be had, which, as pointed out beforehand, only seldomly seems to manifest itself. Reality outside of the digital realm is, as Fisher already aptly points out, no more an advent but a form of collective dreaming; the dreaming of experience to eventually be had, with our time in the present spent wondering where our future – then present – plans went. Any kind of synthesis of cyber-time related experiences cannot lead to anything outside of cyber-space itself, for cyber-space fails to materialize any congruency to the outside world; an outside world that requires our bodies to be moving, our mind to acquaint themselves to the “real”, the non-digital. In cyber-space, we don’t need our bodies anymore, and even the thumbs – as penultimate extensions of the body merging with technology, second only to consciousness itself – mentioned earlier become replicators of automatism where the prospect of experience is more important than the actual process leading towards it. We crush our physical mass, willingly, into a shell presupposing its own existence into the digital, shocked not by anything that unsettles our core but by that which propels it out of the digital “experience”, or rather the digi-capitalistic process of meandering that masks itself as experience. No destination is ever final, no information ever enough, only sufficient in as far as we can determine sufficiency to be of the here and now, with tomorrow’s sufficiency being up for grabs, day in and day out. The Unsettling has unsettled itself in as far as it would be more detrimental to our doom-scrolling delights to eventually discover content-rock-bottom and be reminded that, unfortunately for our digital projections, we do inhabit bodies; bodies that will inevitably search for the next rock-bottom somewhere else. We cannot be unsettled in cyber-space, for that alone would constitute an experience outside of it. Instead, experience transmutes into a de-morphous expression creating the impression of itself. Failure is what keeps us coming back, in the hope of the next time being victorious against the fleeting impression of experience, all the while hoping to fail in order to be mystified anew. We are unsettled when we cannot access cyber-space, when we are robbed of the possibility of bypassing experience into impression and actually have to bulldoze our way towards the former. We are most unsettled when the line between in-and outside of cyberspace is defined for us, when we ultimately feel the line between metaphysics and the “real” being divided more thoroughly when, in reality, all we want to do is merge with it just enough to forget about its perimeter, never venturing outside of it: “phone time = me time”, we whisper to nobody but the millions of virtual avatars we are perpetually connected to in order to feel at ease, to feel as if we belong, to what is still up for debate. What would really be unsettling would be the time travel either towards a past that does not foresee cybernetic Facehugger-infection or a future where we do not latch onto the black mirror anymore because of its then obsolete nature. We don’t want anything, not even the present, embryo-nized into perpetual feedback both proto- and post-now conditions, never to be fully formed.
