So much of what we see and react to through the screens in our hands and on our desks is based on the Real World — like, the place your feet touch the ground and everything. So, let’s talk about that. Coyotes’ feet are (again) touching the ground in the real world of New York City, believe it or not. It’s funny, the hysterics people exhibit when faced with the possibility of a — gasp! — coyote in their city. This really is the city built as a sanctuary from the real (read: natural) world, I guess.
While we spend hours on the Internet, we don’t want to feel as if we’ve lost connection with the physical world, and so we’ve taken to exercising ourselves, physically, while we complete our digital work. Exercising while working? Leave it to Slate to combine two things everybody hates.
To fully rebel against the digital world is to cosign one’s own irrelevance, especially when things like the digital black market Silk Road are able to establish such a foothold in effecting the way the real world works, providing avenues for criminals (or the otherwise needy) to traffic goods that, if offered up in the real, palpable world, would not be able to be trafficked. The Wired article linked above is a lengthy, moving thing, its woeful tale not so much one of caution, but one of possibility.
Possibility, or potential, defines most of what we’re all doing. Even Guns ‘N Roses were once a bundle of potential and nothing more. We now know how they came to prominence, thanks to that linked video and its testimonial from a former A&R guy who just really loves GnR. The story of callers nearly melting MTV’s phone lines with their excitement for Axl Rose is a real time capsule, yeah? But, then again, that’s often the case with music, especially with Waxahatchee, an artist who both in song and verse is capable of willing the past into being, even if only momentarily.
Try tallying up all the time you’ve spent on the Internet, and I bet you’ll get something close to what the writer of this article did. As long as your time is used wisely, and maybe even to do some good for the world — as these people are doing for Bruce Jenner and the trans community — then all is well enough. Even Shakespeare is getting the digital treatment in a way that isn’t awful.
Just make the most of everything, good or bad, because at the end of it all is one big 404 Error. If you’re lucky it’ll be half as cool as Bloomberg Bussiness‘.