Virtual Depression

As someone who is simultaneously fascinated and repelled by rapidly advancing technology I often find myself bemoaning my own apparent extinction process. I work in the publishing business and what we do is mainly print-based. But all around us the signs of a paperless society seem imminent. I don't have a financial interest in paper itself, but I do fear that it may one day cease to exist. Most of the media we consume is being faked on screens with no physical reality necessary between the content provider and the consumer. Everything about human life seems to be pointing towards screens. It's all about rectangles. Even the ethereal experience of music listening has incorporated the screen with the iPods and whatnot. A record collection has been reduced to a text list. People don't seem to want to touch anything anymore besides a mouse or a screen.

I recently subscribed to Netflix, a service which I do like, but the delivery method has already crushed any physical world, objective medium aspects. No more formal DVD case, you get a generic sleeve with generic printing. These discs are hauled back and forth by the post office. But then you logically figure that this is clunky and pointless; why not just download what you want from the internet? Well, apparently Apple is offering this now as well. The only barrier I see there is bandwidth. A regular definition DVD is 8GB and the new HD blu-ray\HD-DVD stuff is what, like 50GB or something. I don't see this as being practical to download, even with a cable modem. But that's just a matter of time. A future network will be able to pass that amount of data as quickly as one might subscribe to a pay-per-view cable TV broadcast.

Is there going to be any physical art in the distant future? Will mankind desire anything that cannot be put on a flat screen or projected onto our eyeballs digitally? And then I think that why even bother with showing you media\entertainment\education in real-time, why not directly affect the brain. A future Netflix where you just have to think about the movie you want to watch, your virtual fake numbers (money) will be taken from your virtual bank account and a memory of watching that movie will be implanted in your brain.

It makes me wonder what the point of medical science seeking to prolong people's lives is. The older you get the more disaffected you become from the younger generation. I feel jaded now, I can imagine how curmudgeonly I'll be at age 70! Humans seem really good at making all this digital stuff happen at such a fast rate, but it seems that nature has not caught up with us. We desperately want to live in a fantasy world yet our bodies are inextricably anchored in the physical world.

I keep thinking that at some point society will reach a breaking point and say, "Okay, enough with this fake shit" and there will be a growth of "old school" mediums. But maybe that is only my fantasy world, and the real world is a world where everything can be reduced to data and put on screen. Perhaps it is better to die when we die. Perhaps Tolkien had it right when death was considered a gift to mankind whereas the elves had to plod on forever. Did you read that story? I've got it on PDF, I'll upload it to your brain...

"What is real
What is fantasy
Are you who you are
Or what you want to be?"
-Mike Smail, Penance