I have to leave this cesspool.
A poor oversight of mine might be not pausing to comprehend the gravity of this present. We really do stand at the shoreline of unprecedented times, sociocultural anthropologists have never seen a time like this. I have to be ready because I too will be documenting, if and when I can. It always begins with the first world.
Nigeria is still preoccupied with her ancient rot to be of much interest. The little that filters into here makes you close your eyes; for we are still battling pre and post colonial problems, intellectual regression, religious indoctrination, and now, meta horror?
Either way, it’s as unsettling as it is surreal, as though one were the first man on the moon. No one else has been here but us. People still don’t grasp the magnitude of this ‘one giant step for man’. “Oh, using Twitter lingo with IRLs,” “those who can’t speak TikTok.” Exactly, that’s a part of it. You have blended with the communal database. Hyper-bonding, ‘one giant step for mankind’.
We have seen more people and heard more voices than any man from all the time periods before us. We have observed and read and read. We have scrolled past and stopped and contributed. We see how it affects the lower, more uneducated class when it infiltrates their sphere.
All those times watching ‘fooling TikToks’— a casual introduction to the forging. In them, it’s highlighted because you’re dealing with a lower awareness of the intricacies of media, performance, cringe culture/shame, and validation. It’s an innocent and oblivious skip. It’s still exciting.
There is so much dopamine at a sitting. Our neural circuits have never handled this much bombardment and attention. There’s no manual to read between the lines, no guide to decipher the comments. People are seeing, people are responding, there are likes. You can begin to sift through every facet of society and how this is reconstructing man and his self. Man and his new identity— we are running mad in ways that have never been accounted for and we can’t say for certainty if it is madness or the new norm.
The man who is performing is not doing so solely for the gaze. That has also become him. He is both the watcher and the watched. This has been explored in 1984, but that was merely the surface of surveillance. Influencer speak is now a thing! The kids are the same, similar in poses, language and fashion.
Nine-year-olds are in Sephora making ASMR videos and doing their skin care. Once upon a time it was the VSCO girls, and now it’s the Stanley cups. The cross-cultural conveyance of layers of shortly curated history and horrors. From the highly unstable caves of 4chan and Reddit to the manosphere and into Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and back out. It’s all one vortex. People have grown from boys and girls to folks in their late twenties. We can see their children and their parenting live-streamed.
The reality kids of the early 2000s like the Kardashians have echoed the horrors of early influencer culture and hyper surveillance. Now we live in a worse time where the script, the camera, the wardrobe and all paraphernalia lies in our very hands.
On Instagram, TikTok, YouTube reels and other quick doses of video form entertainment, there are people who have made a living out of absolutely nothing. “Watch me stare at the wall for six hours.” We have meme creators, Internet trolls, shitposters and so forth guffawing at their slop. A ratio here and a shit ton of engagement there. It’s so absurd and meaningless. It’s all entangled with capitalism too. You have to survive, and you survive by performing, and you’re still trapped in unfulfillment. It all started with being alone and goofy with your camera, imfluencers that arose from Vine being a notable example.
Ah yes, we can see the hull in the horizon. When else could we have been born? And you know, it’s so interesting looking at it from all perspectives. Inside, you know how sinister it is, and those outside are so blissfully unaware of the delicate nuances governing the metasphere. In the Nigerian context, it’s summed up by the typical supernatural paranoia of “don’t answer this number.”
But dear reader, you don’t know about the metaverse reshaping our collective psyche. You don’t know the videos shared of disabled folk are a ridicule to their beinghood/content, and not a heartwarming display of empathy and love. The post is rage bait. That’s a meme. This is satire. No, it’s fake. Serena Williams isn’t dead yet. There are layers and context. There’s another world.
True story, by the way. My mother once sent me a badly edited picture captioned “Serena Williams is dead,” and she was so heartbroken, asking if it’s true. I told her it wasn’t, and she couldn’t understand why people would do that, propagate such a crude misrepresentation of events.
My dear, if I explained it to you, you still wouldn’t understand how we got here. It’s data. Everything you are is data for mining. Currency. Emotions are farmed for your reaction. The bodies are there for manipulating. They ceased being relevant molds and reflections of identity a long time ago.
For those wondering why gym culture is on the rise, it is merely the second stage of BBL culture, of the aesthetic renaissance. We don’t even look the same as bodybuilders from the past, obscene ‘roided’ physiques taking the place of balance. There’s an urgency for transcendence, for statement, for semi-perfection.
The body standard lost relevance ten years ago, this is all very different and more complex. “We don’t dress like what we believe in.” But what exactly do you believe in? Goth is literally on Pinterest moodboard and TikTok videos are accessible. With so many subcultures available to us, anyone can like anything. Our ideologies are not so sacrosanct anymore. All of this while still being very aware and authentic.
One of the greatest currencies now is relatability. It’s so easy to build a parasocial community, by merely preseting oneself as ‘real’. “I too do that exact same thing.” Yes, minus the lighting, editing, retakes, script, aesthetic arrangement, and coffee order. We know.
There you are, in the cyber world. All your questions and phases and movements and the times you sleep or can’t sleep, and on and on. Why have you not understood where you stand? You are not in any other place but the 21st century. You drive smart cars and clap your hands to play music. You encrypt your thoughts in the marketplace, and Instagram is a dreary sight of personalities formed for amusement—and we are all so very aware of it, but at the same time, not.
AI is a very logical progression to this reality. It’s been foretold for ages. The dawn of the future: the cross-blending of machine and soul. Man and his creation in one. We’re in a vacuum. Why’s this so hard to understand?
I guess this is the second mirror man didn’t know about. The first time, you see your reflection after being brought out from the wild. This time it’s a hall of mirrors. I presume it’s unsettling. Don’t worry. The world isn’t ending anytime soon. We just started.
People have been living with crippling loneliness and self-isolating before technology. If anything, technology actually caused a heightened emphasis on bonding and an inability to do without it. So much of our validation and self-worth is hinged on meta codependency.
That’s not how things used to be, but the times have changed, and that’s what we have now. Before, people used to move to the next-door city, and you’d never see them again or make contact. You had to wait for ages to get a mail back. Life was slow and far apart.
The death of community that commentators have fixated on is way more complex than Artificial Intelligence that made an appearance a mere five years ago. And even with community, no one ever said that fixes anything or offers anything more than an audience to the physical performance.
Not to worry anyway, the knee-jerk response is also human and natural. It’ll take a while to get used to. This is how factions arise. It will never end. On this very hill, anti-AI fanatics will stand until it becomes a religion of its own. They already say the same things.
It’s a bit funny and telling of the lack of insight that you live in a meta society wherein individuals operate in both the physical and cyber world but are afraid of confronting the permutation chamber. You’re already part hologram. Have you gone through your Google history before?
We’re experiencing early-stage reactionary hysteria. You won’t believe it, but the reason they all sound the same, with the same lazy ideas, is because you’re all drinking from the same contaminated, self-righteous pool on Twitter. It’s the same pool that lights up misguided righteous indignation in young teens. I was once a teen, and I too know what it’s like to suddenly be aware of all the weight and injustice in the world.
It’s not that desensitization is the solution to everything, but feeding off on each doomer tale keeps you trapped in a very interesting prison—the one where petitions and reposts and hashtags and prayers and boycotts seem like they matter and are doing anything. The one where you want it to actually count so bad that it deludes you into being fanatical.
Baby, the world has been bad since we were born. It’s a new age, all of post-modernist doom and cyber fusion. Get familiar with the neon ring lights, mechatronic voices, the foreboding fear of replacement and all the ghostly echoes and data-encrypted footprints. This is our time. It is inevitable, a logical progression in the matrix.
Tobechukwu Kpakpando (Contributor)
