The Internet is a vessel for collective spell-casting. You don’t believe me you say?
Where are you reading this from? Probably somewhere far from here and yet I'm there and somehow in your mind at this moment in time. The inescapable and global grasp of the Internet and our eternal engagement with it, has been a pivotal (r)evolutionary shift in our history. We are yet to scratch the surface of its potential and power, and the deeper implications of its existence, identifying what that says about us - the Internet is the genesis of a global awakening and an awareness of hidden communal connection.
Modern culture and its ideology of being constantly connected have allowed us to act as a sort of rudimentary hive-mind. Our access to, and saturation of information, media, and communication is both constant and instant - it is now possible to share our thoughts with almost everybody out there - our friends and family, their friends and family, people we don't know and never will, people in another country, and people who may not even share the same language as us - a single sentence spat out into the ether can potentially reach billions of people on the planet in a matter of minutes.
You, me, and everybody else possesses a form of direct access to nearly every other human consciousness on this planet - what could we possibly use that for? Memes, of course, to crowd-source the question of 'what is good?', because that is what lies at the center of all belief.
The fact that we have seemingly become ever more divisive and politically polarized is therefore not to be tutted at, wished away or met with calls for civility, but rather acknowledged as the only way in which an outcome - Truth - can be arrived at, copied, spread, and propagated to the point where its opposite seems wholly and utterly absurd. The idiom 'seeing is believing' is also true backward, perhaps even more so convincingly - believing is seeing and this is in evidence now more than ever.
We see what our minds project and what our contexts allow - we frame the world in the language we have at our disposal. What words mean is not something static and in the word itself, but something dynamic, unique to us specifically in the way we relate to that word. Language has an implicit kind of magical quality - by that I mean much like an imagined casting of a spell, it is widely assumed that speaking the right words in the right combination (and order) can influence and compel people to act, and this action is the source of social change.
This is why great orators have possessed great influence over the course of history - someone must be able to give power to an idea that can move masses to act as a single unified force of nature.
Ii-wy em Hotep - Patrick Gaffiero
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