Tron marked the beginning of our head long rush into the digital revolution, an allegorical journey mirroring our own cultural descent into the digital world.

Tron: Legacy heralds our return, and just like a shaman who travels to another world to bring back knowledge and power, we have hopefully emerged wiser and a little less naive than when we dematerialised into our hard drives.

The shamanic vision always begins with what we want to see; it’s what spurs us on to leave the safety of what we know in exchange for the unfamiliar and new. So we were seduced by a digital utopia, spires of liberated information and the bright lights of democratic free expression. We would have the world’s collective knowledge available in the blink of a cybernetic eye; all the world would be our friend through connecting in ways prohibited by meatspace politics and geography. Soon there would be digital sex, virtual clubs, superhero avatars with fully customisable, predestined lives.

But just as a psychotic riding in his spaceship to Venus, our reality was actually playing with our feces in a collective sanatorium. Making a real life connection with someone half the world away was actually a throw away two minute exchange in a text box delivered with all the disconnected severity of an autistic; the multi-tasking hyper-digestion of terabytes of information was a shallow, quick succession of badly performed tasks and poorly retained trivial facts; the deeper connection with family and friends via social media was a silent dinner with illuminated faces, punctuated by beeps and vibrating cutlery.

The Great Empowerment is still a glassy-eyed dream for many businesses and artists. The vast majority of us only do with the internet what corporations allow us to do: to think otherwise is the delusion of a bum who believes he is the CEO of the multinational corporation whose doorway he sleeps in. We deliver the stats and figures to allow ourselves to be more efficiently targeted by advertising, all the while entertaining the illusion we are on the verge of realising the status of the mythic Internet Sensation.

But eventually comes the great satori: we’ve had our hopes pinned on an illusion, and what’s more, we were never hopeless anyway.

The definitive scene in Tron: Legacy sees Kevin Flynn (Geoff Bridges) turn to his son Sam (Garrett Hedlund) to proclaim his folly for searching for perfection in the digital world, when it was right in front of him all along. Indeed, Flynn missed the best part of his son’s life as a result. 

It may appear as if we have simply returned to where we started; but all shamanic journeys end at the beginning, and yet the journey was necessary in order for us to return changed: with clear eyes to see how things really are, and how we might proceed as a tribe.

So what have we learned? Is the moral of the story to turn our backs on the digital world? Delete our Facebook and Twitter accounts, hurl our smartphones in the bin, sever our broadband connection and hit the ‘Off’ switch?

Although the social commentary found in Tron: Legacy is obvious, we should not miss the scope of its core message, which although might not have been intended by the scriptwriters, is most certainly a result of bringing Bernie Glassman onboard as a ‘Zen advisor’. The ‘perfection’ alluded to is not just the cliched, rosey vision of our offspring, but an intimate, existential perfection we miss each and every second because it is closer than close, and as a result we suffer by chasing after its reflection like a cat frantically pawing at a spot of light on the wall. The message is not just about losing contact with each other due to our digital fantasies or personal dreams, but about realising a truth big enough to contain all worlds, whether digital or not.

This message isn’t anything new, although its simple announcement at the heart of a major Hollywood film is certainly unprecedented; but as if to confirm the point that the truth of perfection is big enough to include all worlds, we see in Tron: Legacy the appearance of the ‘isomorphic algorithms’, a race of sentient programs who spontaneously emerged within the Grid: a genuine, digital life form. Flynn manages to save but one ‘Iso’, Quorra (Olivia Wilde), as Bridge’s deluded doppleganger, Clu, commits digital genocide by eradicating the race. 

Not only does Quorra become a disciple of the Zen Dude, but as the embodiment of all that is virtuous of the digital domain, her destiny is to be brought back into our world, with the promise of revolutionising science, religion and all that we know.

The Zen message tells us that nothing is bad by nature - in fact, quite the opposite - and Quorra’s story illustrates the fact that the virtue of the digital domain is really found in its liberation: By bringing the internet into our lives, instead of the other way round, the communications revolution can live up to its promise of genuinely augmenting our real relationships, keeping our families on different sides of the globe together, providing us with essential education and knowledge, and organising the like-minded into real world action.  

If we can learn to use digital technology and social media without it using us, it can help us to find what was here all along; and in its deepest sense, we can even begin to contemplate Transhumanist Zen, whether that takes the form of an enlightened human race genuinely enriched by the digital domain, or the possibility of sentient digital life realising its true nature alongside us. 

So the question is, can we live up to the wisdom we have brought back with us? 

Instead of disappearing into our hard drives, isn’t it time our hard drives disappeared into us? 

Like most people, I bought into the myth of the internet in the same way the hippies swallowed their own stories about peace, free love and happiness: with a great deal of naivete and a wonderful ignorance of consequence.

Just as the hippies eventually sold out and became upwardly mobile middle-class consumers, so too has the optimistic, corporate-free landscape of the early internet slowly transformed into the digital extension of colonial economics.

And our lives have changed accordingly: welcome to Life 2.0, where we live on constant standby for the next ping/nudge/poke, where every whim to know/see/hear something is automatically indulged regardless of where we are, what we are doing and especially who we are with. We are so preoccupied with satisfying digital interruptions that we didn’t even notice when the promise of the web, those dreams we were sold as artists, writers, musicians and entrepreneurs, never materialized.

GospelLeaks

I didn’t really get online until my early twenties due to economic circumstances, and even then it was only at work. The web back then was a very different place with very little rich media content due to bandwidth restrictions and processing power; the main currency was text, and this text was accessed at set times, as an asynchronous medium should be.

My main interest was occultism, and the internet was a honey pot of hard to find books, secret histories and rare reports from other practicing magicians. Thanks to Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council, I downloaded and printed off the entire Nag Hammadi corpus and the Gnostic Gospels (all 44 of them), each day taking one with me to the local coffee shop to read at lunch time (note how the coffee shop was not an internet cafe, nor did it have wifi. I won’t even mention my mobile phone...). 

The internet was something very simple: someone somewhere would upload some very specialized content, and I would access it at certain times to read as I would a book. But perhaps due to the optimism of the nineties, somewhat embedded in the very idea of the internet, it also felt as if the web would allow us to do so much more with the impending accessibility of rich media. As a musician, I was about to discover how this exuberance over-promised.

The Worst Open Mic Night in History

Since the age of 16 I had flirted with music, and by the time I was 25 I decided to bite the bullet, record a demo and move to the Big Smoke to realize my destiny as a rich rock star. Of course, this was the old fashioned way of doing things; it was now possible to upload your tracks to a site called MySpace, have thousands of people hear your music and have record execs falling at your feet regardless of anyone’s physical location. Why migrate to the Big City, when a farm boy in the remote hills of Wales can become an overnight sensation by posting a scratchy recording on the web?

I was disappointed on two fronts. First of all, London is where every budding wannabe rock star goes to try and get signed. I would play 3 or 4 open mic nights a week, and at each venue I would only be playing to other musicians who would also take their turn that night. Second, MySpace was nothing but an online version of this same phenomenon, except instead of being regional or even national, it was a global gathering of all of the world’s musical hopefuls presenting their usually god-awful tracks to each other. MySpace was the Worst Open Mic Night in History. Unsurprisingly, I never did become an overnight sensation, and realizing this, moved on; sadly, most other musicians I met during this time are still desperately ignoring the obviousness of the truth: they wasted their twenties on a lie, one more mp3 upload isn’t going to make it happen, and no one is interested in a thirty-something wannabe pop star.  

Blog Off

Around this time a developer friend started a ‘new media’ company, and I became his first employee. I’m still unsure as to what my role actually was, but it involved sticking my finger in the online marketing pie, only to find my finger knuckle deep in shit.

Because that’s all online marketing is: excrement. 

Apparently, to be successful on the net, you need to structure your site a certain way, litter your copy with specific magical ‘key words’, go ‘viral’, develop your ‘brand’, ad nauseum. In order to do all of these wonderful things and become as successful and rich as the most successful and rich online marketers, just buy their books and attend their talks (of course, none of those books or talks will tell you the real secret: pretend you know the secret techniques of online marketing and sell them to an unwary public). Just as every musician can be a rock star, every entrepreneur can be a millionaire thanks to the power of the web!

I bought those books, I tried the techniques, I felt dirty. I tried to peddle the greasy spiel to clients, but if I couldn’t convince myself, who was I kidding? Later down the line with my own writing, I considered what I had learned about marketing and found that it was just a distraction from doing something of value. And guess what? After five years I’ve had a number of sites with a loyal following and a high hit rate without once looking for a ‘purple cow’ or worrying if my site is actually a ‘meatball sundae’. Here’s the unmarketable but realistic truth: I just wrote about what interested me to the best of my ability, and I’ve enjoyed a slow success in realistic proportion to the subject. Although I’m not close to being a millionaire, I am happy with what I do. 

So here’s a tip: if you need online marketing skills for a project, that project should be terminated now. Stop wasting your life baking yet one more Poo Pie; if it doesn’t sell itself, it’s bollocks.

The Great Yopping Gob

Perhaps the wooliest and most pernicious image of the net pushed by the Net Dreamers is The Great Conversation. ‘Get online, because that’s where the conversation is happening! Don’t you want to be a part of the revolution?!’. Cue anxiety over missing out: quickly set up a blog, get on Facebook and Twitter, and do whatever it takes to join in and get heard. 

I’ve met some friends through the internet and those rare people who share my interests with the same passion; but I’ve mostly spent my time talking as if I have Asperger’s to other similarly afflicted Great Conversationists. Every single forum I have taken part in, every debate in a comments thread, I have come to regret as a phenomenal waste of everyone’s time. I’ve spent hours fretting over long-winded and invariably pedantic discussions that mean nothing to no one; and every online environment I’ve facilitated for the Great Conversation to take place is always co-opted by someone’s issues (sometimes mine) given free reign behind an artificially distant avatar or anonymous account.

Furthermore, I think the majority of people don’t have anything to say at all. Not a sausage. I know that’s not nice, but then neither is the narcissism being promoted by thinking otherwise. And yet everyone is encouraged to say something, anything, just so long as we are all a part of the Great Revolutionary Collective Yopping Gob of Humanity.  

The only worthwhile conversations I have had thanks to the internet are those that have taken place between myself and a few people sharing similar interests, person to person, and usually over video call. If you want a great conversation, you’ll find them where they have always been: with people, face to face. The virtue of the internet can be found in it’s use as a tool to organize real life encounters; anything else is always pathological to some degree.

Twatter

My impetus to write this piece has come from a year spent on twitter. I shunned Facebook quite early as nothing illustrates the futility of online ‘friendships’ quite like a friend request from a racist mugger who vaguely knows you from school; but twitter promised concise, witty and snappy conversation between people with the same interests, so still holding on to the dream of the Great Conversation, I signed up.

At first, I used it mainly to announce a new blog post or video. But the more I used twitter, the more I found myself immediately tweeting any new idea that popped into my head. Before Twitter I would have an idea, and mull it over for a while: Sometimes it would progress into something else, sometimes it would turn out to be crap, sometimes it would tie in with other ideas in a novel and exciting way. The best ideas and connections would hopefully become well thought out, exploratory essays, books or blog posts.

My Twitter behaviour changed all that. Good, bad, poorly thought out, promising: every idea was simply jettisoned into the twittersphere, making room for the next tweet. My writing dried up.

Worst of all, I started to habitually check Twitter out of compulsion and with great excitement, and this regardless of what I found there. I would sometimes respond off the cuff, with whatever happened to be floating through my cranium at the time: I was essentially publishing the most shallow and meaningless thoughts I was capable of. I could see this in other people’s tweets too, and some were an obvious display of very strange neuroses. Is that where my behavior was heading? How many more times would I remind myself that it’s not possible to have a meaningful debate in 140 characters or less, and yet persist anyway?

Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

The first detrimental effect I noticed due to my internet behaviour was my change in reading habit. I’ve always read a lot and I’ve always liked books; but my book buying slowly but surely over took my capacity to finish a tome, and I would find my self reading more and more volumes simultaneously. No doubt some people reading this will see this as evidence of increased data processing and multitasking; but I can assure you it is nothing but the entrained behaviour of someone who can satisfy the need to know something in a second, with the expectation that knowledge will be presented in a grossly oversimplified and easy to digest manner.

This is the bias of the internet: a quick and shallow knowledge fix (so well done for reading this far!). So applied to books, we end up buying (with one click!) any work that looks interesting, satisfy that interest in a superficially fast way - usually within a few pages, and flit to the next text. Before you know it, you are knee-deep in unfinished books, once again hovering over the big Amazon Buy button!

With Twitter, I began to notice this impulsivity in my Life 2.0. Regardless of what I might be doing, any question would immediately be indulged by interrupting my current activity in order to get a knowledge fix. This would happen without considering the comparative value of what I might already be doing, the question itself and the answer I would probably find.

What are the priorities in my life? Will I die unhappy I didn’t check twitter on Christmas day, or because I didn’t spend enough time with my family? It’s absurd to even point this out, and so our actions betray the nature of the Life 2.0 fix: we respond to it with no regard to the specific importance of the knowledge request; what matters is that the craving is satisfied, and right now.

What difference does absorbing the - at best quite interesting, at worst narcissistic and neurotic - online contributions of our internet friends really make in our lives? Would we be in a better or worse situation if we dropped all of our social media interactions now (how many irrational fears has that prompted)? What might we do with our time instead? 

Personally, there are many things of incredible importance I could be doing right now, and there is absolutely no chance 99% of my online activity could compete. The genuine friends I’ve made (and still make) thanks to the web I naturally see offline or face to face via video chat as a progression towards genuine human interaction. There is no way I can justify the amount of time I have spent (and many people do and will spend) indulging the many dreams and fantasies we have spun about the internet over the last digital decade.

The internet is neither good nor bad in itself; as a tool, it’s what we do with it that counts. As to be expected, it takes time to develop a degree of realism and responsibility with any new cultural development, and at least for me, my naivete and lack of mindfulness has finally become painfully obvious. I would rather lose myself in the fireworks than upload a video of an event I actually missed. 

It’s time I uninstalled Life 2.0.

Further Reading

Program of Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff