Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

Consumption Guilt

We spend more and more time con­sum­ing oth­er peo­ples’ life by-prod­ucts: sub­scrib­ing to their blogs, read­ing their tweets, look­ing at their photos.

I don’t cre­ate enough in my day to day: I’m tired of see­ing every­one else’s muse expressed, and not indulging mine.

Worse though, is how wide­spread this is: it reach­es far fur­ther than my own lit­tle imma­ture exis­ten­tial cri­sis. Too many of us aren’t pro­duc­ing any­thing worth­while: not mak­ing art, not writ­ing any­thing inter­est­ing or thought-pro­vok­ing, not con­tribut­ing any­thing more than body heat to the col­lec­tive human existence.

Our gen­er­a­tion is going to start feel­ing guilty about that. It should. We’re wrapped up in meta-meta-meta-news, repub­lish­ing and reblog­ging the com­men­tary on anoth­er blog about some arti­cle writ­ten dis­cussing some arti­cle. It’s just mis­er­able, watch­ing the same regur­gi­tat­ed bits float across the wire, only bare­ly mod­i­fied from one URL to the next.

Write a let­ter to an old friend. Take a pho­to, even if it is just of your cat. Shoot a video. Skate­board down a moun­tain. Hike back up it. Define your exis­tence in your own terms, not as a com­bi­na­toric equa­tion of oth­er peo­ples’ lives. 


Fuck meta. Go make some­thing.

So you’re say­ing: make more things to blog about so oth­ers can com­ment and blog about it?

skate­board down a moun­tain? that sounds like a great way to remove the most cre­ative and fun types from the gene pool, thus mak­ing the prob­lem worse in the next generation!

I think our soci­ety now days are lack­ing a true grasp of real­i­ty and pro­duc­ing actu­al “phys­i­cal” prod­ucts. Take myself for exam­ple. Every­thing I cre­ate are on the com­put­er such as web­sites or graph­ics, noth­ing you can phys­i­cal­ly touch or smell. All my lat­est achieve­ments have been on build­ing on my “vir­tu­al” social net­work­ing infra­struc­ture rather than going out to make real friends. What’s next? How about just plug me into the matrix and get this over with.