i miss the 2000s and 2010s. i don't think i'm alone in that, but i think i have a strange relationship with y2k and the 2010s, with how i've always engaged with the internet and even my own life.

i really started getting involved with the internet in 3rd-5th grade, when i was just 10-11, eventually peaking highly when i was around 12 and 13 with my forays into smaller message boards and forums. i sometimes look back on those forum pages and see how depressed i was, lmao, but as a struggling kid, the internet was the only place i had as therapy, as kind of unfortunate as that is.

it's not usually standard for a kid in 2013 to know how to use IRC, and actively engage with people online through that format, and i think people were a little shocked i was a kid doing that sort of thing. with few people at school that i talked to (being the "smart kid" focused on academics), chatrooms, online forums, games, YouTube, became the places i directed my attention. i don't even really remember a lot of my time or the things i watched because i was so inattentive. i still am, to this day. many of my university peers are significantly more intelligent than i am. they know all about movies, art, tv shows, how to draw, and all i am is just a silly little guy who skips class and hands things in last minute. how am i even a club leader at that institution? i guess one could argue knowing about IRC and small forum boards could be intelligence, but i think of myself as a person with easy bravado. if i don't know, i say it, and just move on, not really needing to know more unless it's necessary. i digress though. i think a big portion of my lack of knowledge is the time i spend on social media, as much as i try to get away from it. the 2010s and 2000s had a better relationship with social media, in my mind.

they're all kind holes, in a sense. social media apps have become those bottomless holes—voids we fall into more than we climb out of. i think of screens, phones, as kind of like windows. having access to a window one can look through and nearly anything they want is a power and a curse that modern technology has given us. we stay in our own rooms, our own holes, not really experiencing many new things unless we want to, unless it's pleasurable or content we want to see so we don't need to see the real world that we occupy. the COVID-19 pandemic is a big portion of that, i think. forced into our own shells of our rooms, attending class, talking to people, trying to do anything, we needed to stare into that void to find the human things we needed. i haven't completely recovered from that, and i don't think a lot of people our age have, either. the lockdown just made our phone addiction worse, because we needed to use our computers and devices. why not entertain yourself with the screen while you're at it?

perhaps another portion of this, my social media addiction, my own perceived "lack of intelligence" is my difficulty with reading too. i don't consider myself dyslexic (though i very well could be), but i struggle with reading more than i do writing. i kind of just tend to skip reading and not really absorbing knowledge, kind of just skimming through hoping i'll get the "idea" without any of the hard work of dissecting every single word. typing is easier than scrolling, i guess xD

regardless of that, i think the 2010s and 2000s were perhaps easier in their relationship with technology. phones were made for their purpose of talking with another real person. AIM and IRC got you in contact with real people, and it was a lot easier to decode if you were talking to a fake person or bot. generative AI and character AI make that especially hard now, i feel. sure, it could've been easier to control television and cable programs, and maybe facebook and myspace weren't the greatest of social media platforms, but, really, who cares? technology was an asset, not an ingrained part of our lives that we needed to use for everything. my dad can't even properly go to the bank anymore because everything needs apps. he just needs a phone for facebook, maybe watching a few reels, and to contact his family, friends, and coworkers. does technology really need to be anything more than that?

i admit i might have an uneducated take, once again just due to lack of knowledge. i concede that not all of what makes technology work or function in our society is just what we see. banks, with finance being essentially the transfer of money as a numerical value, is easy to quantify and calculate using a computer. if that's the case, and technology develops further to where everyone has a computer, why not allow the bank to be in your phone? it's "common sense", perhaps. less people need to take care of the finances and inventory now, replaced with a few engineers and system managers who can take care of all the digital money we have, and of course the executives and maybe a few physical tellers for those that don't understand or don't have access to a portable phone computer.

it "just makes sense", doesn't it?

i disagree, personally, even though i can see the sense in the argument. i think we've reached a point where banks, music, and perhaps even human connection have become so enwrapped in technology, our "magical devices" that we tend to look at what's on our screen as gospel, rather than acknowledging the fundamental core—that all of these creations we survive in and use as western societies are human-made creations. that isn't to say that a return to primitive society will enhance our "relationship to the world" or to others, but more to say that we have become beholden to the system, or perhaps made simultaneously more aware of the encroachment of the online "metaverse" or "matrix" as it takes more human lives, time, and attention away. what happened to our independence, our technological independence? maybe it was never there at all, and technology has developed enough for us to look at all the information of the world, even the systems underneath that it knows but we don't. and now, that it's "intelligent" or algorithmically strong enough to do that, it's become a vessel for us to interact with the world. a vessel, might i add, that most people use for tiktok and instagram (and, though i say that, i am guilty of that too).

isn't that unfortunate? has technology become a "god-like" device that shows us what's wrong, what's there, what's not, what everything is and isn't, yet still, because it originates from that technological "hole" or "window", how do we know that what it calculates is true? how are so many people locked into this system?

i don't know. i wish we could return to a time where technology and advanced technology was accessible. we're past that point now, i think, much more than before. perhaps we're more secure, with how far computing has gone, but is this kind of technological dystopia the kind of world we want our world to be?

again, i don't know. but i have an answer, found in a strange connection i had with a film by Loundraw and Hirotaka Adachi, "Summer Ghost".

though it is a story about death and living one's best life against our inevitable death, i found something interesting, perhaps a connection i made myself because i was stoned. spoilers ahead. i do recommend watching it, but i don't think my plot details i'll discuss are too particularly plot relevant. if you care though, watch it, and read my insights after.

i don't smoke much, having needing to really put a cap on how much i engage with nicotine and thc in a vaporized/smoke intake with asthma and it's recently flare-ups, but i was getting a bit buzzed while watching this short animated film. i found it interesting how the method to summon the summer ghost is to light fireworks in an abandoned airfield, but even more interesting, is when aoi is taken up to the sky with the summer ghost ayane, leaving his body and seeing the sky. he became a ghost for that small period of time, out of his body, exploring the world, against everyone's knowledge.

as a young person, i did that a lot, actually. i would get blazed in parks and benches at 1am since you couldn't use cannabis in my student housing building, and i would explore as a sort of ghost. but that specific visual image and idea, of leaving ones body by lighting something up, i felt connected to. and, because it was a movie i was watching on my screen, it made me think:

"is technology the way we fly? the way we become ghosts, using the modern fireworks of screenlights, not dissimilar from that of lighting up leaves?"

because, in a sense, technology has become our drug. it has become what we turn to when we are sad, when we are happy, when we want to experience something new or something that we know and like, or that we don't know but want to experience for the first time. i was high, sure, and maybe these are stoner thoughts, but that movie did change a bit of how i interact with my own substance use and technology use.

because, to return to our use of technology, i think people use it to escape (kind of obviously), but that it has become much easier to escape into unreality as it is the real physical world. like a good book can escape us into a new world through its story and fantastical elements, to go somewhere and allow us to imagine a world different from ours. smoking did that for me, but technology does that now, and a lot easier, even. sure, drugs will kill you faster than technology will, and they also have the added benefit of being a full-body experience that isn't just interacting with the eyes and ears, but, really, because the human eyes and ears are so sensitive and capable of perception, you really can do a lot with them. the window of glass, whether filled with lights or transparent to the world, shows what's on the other side, but is still a barrier. it filters through, frames things, and shows us something. but it's just glass, a canvas. and a canvas is infinite. just like how a second can be split up into so many infinitesimally small units to make up an infinity greater than the seconds than exist in a human lifetime, but still, an infinity nonetheless. when bounded, the possibilities are endless. aoi was helped through having a single goal in his contacts with the summer ghost ayane, but what if he didn't have that? what if he was just like me, smoking it up, or lighting fireworks, and ghosting around the world with no goal in sight? would he have been satisfied with his life choices? would he chase death, suicide, or a life that may as well be that empty plane ayane shows as death?

again, who knows? we're now theorizing about characters that only exist in this one narrative. to think of their lives beyond that can be kind of pointless. maybe it all is, kind of.

i think the thing to take away from all of this is that technology, now that it has all coalesced into smartphones and even "smarter" computers, is that we've reached a point of no-point, of endless possibilities. social media isn't necessarily dead, but the posts we make, the images we post and things we say, become kind of dead once we say them. we can still think of author intentions and comment and engage with messages, but once that enter button is pressed, our statements are made kind of "dead". unchanging, hard to edit. social media isn't dead in the sense that humans don't use it, but, i think, it is filled with so much of it, of so much unchanging imagery or moving imagery that can only do what it's told. even games are like that. they're all beholden to the computer.

if that's the case, then perhaps having a goal in mind for oneself is a good thing, even one that is ridiculous or impossible. the path will reveal itself if you know what it is you want, and maybe you won't reach the exact successes you desire, but you'll have gone far enough into reaching for something that, hopefully, you'll know how to reach too.

but maybe you knew that already.

...

ah well!

some manifestos are written only for the writer, and maybe a few of the curious souls who will see it.

live well, my friend, if you've made it this far. you deserve it <3