Where does your internet end? When do you close your laptop or put down your phone? After you've scrolled through your Facebook feed? Once you've watched all the story streams across SnapChat, Instagram, and elsewhere?
Do you still read Twitter? Do you mix it up on Reddit?
Do you actually watch TV or choose a Netflix alternative?
Where does your internet end though? It's a simple question future cavemen will etch into the mutated whale bones as the falling satellites pinball into debris. It's a question a great number of us ask ourselves a moment before we put out the light.
When do you figure you've had enough of the world, the internet, and the totality of this planet's existence each day?
Look, a cell phone plan is cheaper than a car. It's cheaper than a bar tab, too. It's the cheapest, most versatile form of non-thought entertainment. It's a vanilla emotion-shot. Why cut through the clown-car that is western culture, urban or otherwise, when you can open or close a portal to this planet with your iPhone's fingerprint reader? An online life is remarkably appealing.
How do you figure you've finished up with touching the planet?
Conscious or not, you've likely never made a goal of spending as little time jagging around with your phone, please refer back up to the prior paragraph for reasons why. Why? Because that'd require processing a momentary feeling toward what you've seen or done. You'd have to honor a feeling, either positive or negative, as a cut-off point, and that feeling would betray a digital existence's key advantage: you get to see, but it's a great deal easier to avoid feeling if you don't want to.
Where does your internet end then? Is it when you feel elation? When you feel hurt? When you've capably hurt somebody else?
In either case, how do you process it, react to it, act on it? Or do you go to bed and repeat the osmosis tomorrow? When do you execute on the brain-dump? The lessons, the feelings, the object of observation through the infinite window: when do you get to live?
After viewing the fiftieth YouTube stunt, when do you decide you want to do a stunt of your own?
After the thousandth hour of watching a Twitch streamer, when do you decide to play that game yourself?
How many of those recipes gathered on Pinterest do you cook?
What's in it for you? Have you calculated a tiny, private personality of curated content in your social feeds? To what end?
Where does your internet end?
Hey, I'll float a theory: assembling that digital persona is certainly more convenient than manifesting the assemblage IRL. That'd require a pound of flesh though, and as one body, you cannot make the world march to the beat of your drum. Digitally though, you're a being of immeasurable power and invincible ego. You have endless life and infinite lives.
But you'll never wield the omniscience fit for godhood, even if you can sway an audience or tailor your feeds to fit your interests. At best, it's an incomprehensible clusterfuck of info you cannot properly internalize, and at worst, you'll come to hate your audience, as all tyrants do.
And now the question is: what ought the end of your internet look like? Shoot, I dunno. Sure as shit, it'll begin with you noticing it needs a finish line.
