For a long time I believed unquestioningly the standard critique of our times. It’s the phones. It’s the algorithm. It’s our base narcissism. That our obsession with recording every fleeting moment of our lives betrayed a deeper malaise. We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment. We frame our lives through lenses, filters, and screens, trading the chaotic beauty of reality for a sanitised, editable version. Our photographs are not memories; they are advertisements, billboards for a life we are too preoccupied to live.
We spend every waking moment shovelling packets of data, an endless stream of zeros and ones, up into the sky. Our messages to friends and family? To the CLOUD. Our work emails? To the CLOUD. Our GPS data, willingly given and tracking our every movement? To the CLOUD. Our money — and I mean real, fiat money, not the cryptobro’s wet dream? It’s in the CLOUD. Our photos and TV shows and biometric data and news and banking and memories and the curated exhibitions of our boring lives — all are offered up to the CLOUD. It is He, *Dyēus Himself. He has returned.