The Wires and Data That Starve Us

I spent part of my life working at water and wastewater (sewage) treatment plants, where expensive equipment and talented professionals worked tirelessly to clean the filth and products of pollution expelled from society, including much of the naive regurgitations of our embedded or treasured professions.

As difficult as this process was—I have also found that it is by no means comparable to the types of waste and rubbish that can be heaped upon us and haunt us in the bloated deserts of the digital world. The electronic sidewinders of social life can vacuum away our souls like a sucking sewer. It can covertly rob us of all personality, value, and our natural world—if we give in to its wisely encoded entrapments and infiltrations within our own—far less guarded neural network.

Vast and hidden server farms, with processors coupled in their colored spider webs—woven by the spindles of countless routers and flashing switches hum—bundled into massive sinews of wire and fiber optic flesh. They carry your inquisitiveness, curiosities, desires, envy, ego, and learning—even your personality. Cooling fans scream their exhaled fumes through heatsinks and cooling coils, enabling the machines (and us) to thrive perpetually in their tailored—concrete highways of purposefully filtered ecosystems.

Buzzing hives—waged to keep the millions of cables and processors habitually fed and cooled, stand ready and willing to provide you with their cavernous cravings, proven by so-called “focus groups” and clandestine inverters. They market their rubrics and algorithms for their own gargantuan supplies of avarice, using compelling curves of sheer naked hubris. AI works overtime to find new ways to sell you and your hidden desires as a mouthwatering product to endless sucks of gaping and hungry mouths.

While effective in small unremitting measures, social media can quickly spread its hellish wreak into selfish indulgence, clothed in unbridled egocentric shadows of xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and narcissism. And after a daub of digital numbing—you will never seem to have enough virtual friends and followers. At its apex of saturation, it will make you feel worthless—sad, or irrelevant, in a world’s chattering cafeteria—so satiated within its epic failures of a more promised grandeur.

The wireless fogs have also spread into your workplace and, more recently, the private confines of your home. The “internet of things” has bestowed IP addresses to devices like kitchen machines, light bulbs, door locks, garage openers, toilets, security sensors, and a multitude of cameras and video devices. Eventually, your pets and your babies will be tagged. So ubiquitous are these that you forget just how many there are or how they listen, awaiting your commands or the directives of another remote hacker’s prey. Lying in wait to hold you hostage or to rob you of a morsel of the flinching privacies left in your once cherished society. Or worse—the rapid disappearance of any of your childhood innocence.

There is no form of active treatment in the supply pipe of this deep and extensive digital drain. What flows inside is permanent—what wisdom or pictures we reflexively post are stored indefinitely, meaning indeed—forever. We just have to let it go, and work harder to treat ourselves, our actions, and our passions. To show others how we can begin to move on—and become dispersed lighthouses in this bilge of an endless horizon of thick asphyxiating computerized darkness.

This wired technology—packaged to simplify and improve our flooded lives has even robbed me of many more essential things in life. Its mysterious circuits have worked hard to suck me in, and it is a constant battle to prevent its conquest over my family and me. It has succeeded in amplifying stress, anxiety, and depression. And I can never recover the lost time, the real-time with my ever-hallowed household. It has vacuumed these instances into its dusty brown bags of choke—to be discarded forever, into the wired voids of unforgiving regrets. It has taken my breath with it.

Yes—we live in an altered world, where dry desert sands of fear are gnawing away voraciously at the once firm and monolithic bulwarks of green forests of faith. Our ability to vocalize effectively in a friendly interaction of any empathy is becoming a lost art. In fact, when was the last time you were able to place a phone call and have it answered by a natural and rational person? When was the last time a door was responded to by your beseeching knocks? Even an effectual door into someone’s weary or needful heart? When was the last time you heard a genuine discussion or debate without the players calling someone a name or shaming their actions, bodies, or personalities? Instead, the digital drains of our minds have only brought the world together in a mean-spirited flood of ad hominem exasperation, devoid of any kind words or cherished words.

It appears that it has become more natural to be told what to do or how to live—how to believe and how to die. Our unique personas are slowly but purposely sculpted by a new artificial intelligence—hidden behind the thunders and smokes of our closed-up curtains of indifference. Myriads of tiny quantum brains can slowly carve us into what they perceive—more resembling themselves. Machines, chugging out the hours, days, and years—in stacking gigawatts, fueled from the digital drains of our lives—with no authentic feelings and with no authentic love. Draining away the last remains of any possible connection to a natural world that flows beyond our drab crypt of terabytes.

I grew up near a copper mine—renowned for being the world’s most extensive open pit excavation. Its depth and width are unfathomable to describe in mere words. You need to see it to believe that man could excavate something massively broad and deep! Stalwart mountains were removed, and all that is left is its waste of yellow and ocher tailing piles, which skirt the foothill remnants of a once pristine and unspoiled mountain. This gaping hole in our planet has provided much of the copper wire we use in our world today. Now I wonder if those wires will ever possibly find their end. In this digital domain of vast excavated space, I wonder where they will ultimately lead us to. Will it help build hopeful futures, or will it drain our weary souls!