The Digital Environment/This Is PurdyCulture

If someone asked you what made humans unique, you might reply that it is our technology that sets us apart from our fellow animals. Of course, it is not the fact that we have technology that sets us apart. Birds hunt with wooden spears, termites build imposing towers of detritus in which they cultivate fungal gardens, and beavers are capable of totally altering their environment in the course of a few years. No, technology is not unique to our species. What is unique is how we use our technology: not to change the way we interact with our world, but instead to create a new world altogether.

A digital environment.

Right now, provided that you are reading this on a personal computer, you are existing in the digital environment called The Internet. It's a big place, our world wide web. You can talk to other people, play games, watch porn... If something exists in the real world, you can find an online embodiment of it.

As far as I know, no other organism or even group of organisms has created a separate space of cultural existence. And why should they? Most animals seem perfectly content to socialise, play and have sex in the real world. But we humans have a different way of looking at things.

First of all, we think we're pretty hot shit. This belief in the inherent 'better-ness' of the human species is called anthropocentrism. If you're not the scientific type, perhaps human supremacy is a better term? Basically, when you get down to it, it means that we're rather selfish, and to be fair, there's nothing wrong with that. You have to put yourself and your own first, or else life is pretty harsh. However, this is not to say that we should think only of ourselves or our kin. It is entirely possible to have a respect for and relationship with the rest of the world while still looking out for yourself. The two are not mutually exclusive, contrary to what most Buddhists preach. This principle also extends to our faith in our experts. We would follow our scientists off the edge of a cliff if they told us that they would invent a flying device before we reached the bottom (incidentally, even if they were to succeed, that flying device would emit hydrocarbons that would pollute our food chain and kill us anyway).

Second, we're pretty lazy. If we can push something off until tomorrow, we will. If we can get someone else to do the work we would otherwise have to do, we will. If we have to sacrifice some amount of physical comfort in order to be more responsible, we won't. This leads to such phenomena as slavery, global warming, and our current congress.

The digital environment is a result and an embodiment of anthropocentrism combined with apathy, or arrogance combined with laziness, if you like. You may argue that modern PCs were invented to improve our disastrous educational system, or that the internet was born of a pure sense of invention and the chasing of a great "what-if". And you'd be right, in some ways. However, what you're not thinking about is what education and scientific progress actually are. The former is a process by which we take young people at the point in their life where their mind is most malleable and indoctrinate them into our culture, whether they like it or not. Scientific progress is a game of chicken we play with our world: how cool can we make our toys before one of them malfunctions and levels a city, or more realistically and less dramatically, slowly pollutes our environment until cancer is a statement rather than a question. 'Education' and 'scientific progress' are just buzzwords, just like 'tough on crime' or 'terrorist'. You say them and no argues with you, for fear of sounding radical.

Just between you and me and the world wide web, I'm not afraid of sounding radical.

However, I am afraid of sounding pessimistic. Despite how gloomy a picture I've painted so far, those who know me know that I am solution oriented, and fundamentally optimistic for the future. So hang in there, the fun stuff is coming.

Before we get to that, though, I have to clarify why I think the digital environment is not a good thing. It's pretty simple, really: just as every part of the real world is reflected in the digital world, everything in the digital world is a weak, pale reflection of something that really exists. Why would you waste your time chatting with people on Facebook when you can have a conversation over a cup of coffee while people watching and listening to that cool new band? Why would you play a game about soccer when you can play a game called soccer, and get in better shape while you do it? Why would you stare at a PDF until your eyes are sore when you could go a library, get personal recommendations from a librarian, and enjoy a tactile reading experience in a pleasant public environment?

When you get right down to it, the simple and indisputable truth is that the world is really freaking complicated. The book you should be reading might be made of paper that's made of wood pulp which comes from a tree which the last surviving member of an endangered species of woodpecker lived in. Or, if you don't care about woodpeckers because of that darned anthropocentrism, consider that the tree is made of organs, made of tissues, made of cells, made of organelles, made of proteins, made of molecules, made of atoms, made of quarks, and even those are probably made of some smaller thing. The laws of physics tell us that every atom is related to another atom. Everything is dynamic; nothing is isolated. This immense level of complexity is what gives rise to such emergent phenomena as life.

The digital environment is made of computer code. Complex? Yes. As complex as quantum mechanics?

Never.

Why never? The electrical signal and the processor that enable the digital environment to exist are made of real particles. They have to be, and they always will have to be. Therefore, neither computers nor computer language could ever exceed or even match the complexity of the physical universe. The hosted system cannot exceed the complexity of the host system.

Holy shit, why does any of this matter?

It matters because complexity is what gives rise to everything you love. Reduce the complexity, and you reduce the love. Listening to music on Spotify is fine. Listening to music from a crackly record which comes in a nice big printed art sleeve, while playfully moshing with your bandmates in your living room which is literally vibrating from the bass?

Lovely.

Therefore, the bottom line is this: through my many years of experience living in both the digital world and the real world, and borrowing ideas from the most bleeding-edge science and the oldest ingrained beliefs of original peoples, I hereby assert that the digital world is inevitably and inescapably inferior to the real world.

It necessarily follows that there is no reason to stay in the digital environment. Now, don't get me wrong. As I will explain in later posts, I don't think we should stop using technology, even digital technology. What I'm saying is that we should pick up where we left off, what, 20ish years ago, and use technology to help us do a thing, not to do everything for us.

There's a few things I missed in this post. For example, the environmental impact of a high-tech society, or the psychological effects of being constantly plugged in. But there are already lots of people who can tell you about those things. I'm here to say what you haven't heard already. I'm here to write a blog about why blogging is bad. I'm here to use the digital environment to destroy the digital environment. This is counterculture at its heart, but it's flavoured with such cultural spices as a passion for badminton, a constant desire to play percussion instruments, and an affinity for Hobbit-like fashion.

This is PurdyCulture.

Stay tuned.