The Internet Removed Spatial Safeguards
Maybe our safeguard was Space, and the Internet removed it. The Internet united what Space had made separate and separated what Space brought together. Now people devote their energy to gather sympathies online instead of where it matters. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, the Internet has become a permanent invitation to disengage with our surroundings.
Nullifying Space
The Internet has a crushing unifying force, bringing everything together, bypassing the very thing that separates everything… space.
Space is there for a reason. Not everything belongs together. The logic of space prevents things from happening in the same place, giving every aspect of Reality a place to happen. The Internet nullifies these protections, denaturing our relationship with space. Now our mind is everywhere instead of where it belongs — right here right now, with our families, friends, communities.
The Internet makes faraway problems our problems and local problems nobody's. It gives proximity to the foreign and estranges us from the familiar. It separates the constituents of the local sphere – that which happens in spatial proximity – by allowing and inviting engagement with remote happenings. The Internet invites harmonization with the remote at the expense of the local.
As an inviting force, the Internet unweaves people from their natural communities and weaves them back into artificially emergent dynamics built atop privately-owned digital environments. Social dynamics are now mediated by the ether of the cloud rather than by the social medium given to us by Reality, space.
✎ Connection to
Key / The History of the Internet