Exiled From the Internet
Today’s midweek blog post comes from Athena Obioma, a high school student who participated in the Digital Civics Club introduced in our last blog entry.
Athena Obioma is a junior in high school in Austin, TX with a passion for storytelling. She hopes to issue this thought-provoking piece of writing that causes readers to question their views on the internet and its morality.
As this is her first publication in hopefully a long career as a writer, Athena requests audience feedback and commentary that responds to her ideas and form. Please consider leaving your response in the comment box at the bottom of the page, or sending it to the Civics of Tech leadership through our Contact page to forward to her.
Exiled From the Internet
By Athena Obioma
“The internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.” - Andrew Brown
Double-Edged Sword
My name is Swae. I live in New Tech–where the blue somber shadows of waves crash on the coast, and the warm, burnt orange sunset bedazzles everything in its view. Where the rain pitter-patters and rides down the window in reflectance of all the hues outdoors, and the sun shines desperately through each drop to make itself known by rainbow–as if its bright burning warm presence isn’t enough. It isn’t enough for everyone anymore. Nature catches less gazes now, beat out by another phenomenon dubbed Blue Light. So much to admire, but so little urgency to see. The internet is a double-edged sword. The light of applications shine on our faces, burn through our eyes, and waltz through our minds in times that are meant for reflection. Oh, the duality of the internet–to serve as the helping hand in the time of mystery, or the fragile bandage of bondage between people that span across the ages and the globe–to the final hand that lets go, causing one to fall swift and fast, down to the depths of addiction or anxiety that stays hidden in one’s gaze. Today I walk down those streets, eyes alert, purse clutched, fast-paced, with an intention to get somewhere hastily, as an attempt to avoid all of the influences.
I’ve never lived in a place so radical, where the utterance of one wrong word or the donning of the wrong facade can spell ruin to anything you’ve ever made for yourself. Oftentimes, I drift away mentally. I knew the world had begun its course to social destruction once I saw how quickly opinions flipped the crowd’s path. I remember one day, I visited the town square with Ho-seok. We sat and watched the big screens flip through the galleries of people who smiled so sourly and posed so numb–as if their very soul only lived to be popular. The word popular leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I remember he’d turn to me with a smile, placing his hand on mine, saying: “Of all the people I could be spending my life with, I’m glad it’s you, Swae.” I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen a smile so genuine, so regular. The next day we went back, I was startled to see posters plastered everywhere of the girl who smiled the widest and posed quite interestingly–her picture tainted in hate and tattoo’d by blemishes, the real her, defiled because she no longer believed body positivity and the endorsement of unhealthy weight were the same thing. How painful was it, to beg on the streets of the big city–the internet–for a second chance? For very humanity–once adorned in the jewels of influence, grace, and the sense of perfect humanity? She now trudges on the outskirts, ridden by withdrawals, the big city internet was home no more. Do you think, maybe one day she’ll gaze at the blue skies and feel it’s more fulfilling than that of blue light? Be caught by the breeze, and admire the crash of the waves by the sunset just as I do? I hope she one day will. As my father once told me, the world and everything in it is passing away before our eyes. I'd always wondered what it would look like, as the days began. I didn’t believe it would be a wired, soulless, idle death. Today, people gain and lose influence like a life-long gamble of a couple years. There’s cancellation, re-acceptance, digging for dirt, and ostracization. Either make a home in the shadows of the big city, or you stay on your feet in the spotlight down the sidewalks, and pray nobody finds out you’re human. Else, you’d become an exile of the internet. Daily does the town hall look for a new victim to pin their ever-fueling hate upon. Nobody wins.
Enemy Internet
I have always been a dreamer, since I was a child. The main dish of peak literature, embellished with the sides of fine visual arts, and music always emitted the savory aroma my heart desired with passion. The emotional words of another as a piercing to the heart always called to me, caused my pen to move–but now it calls with a hint of derivative nature, a whisper of deception, a woo of wired static that fills me with deep woe. Artificial Intelligence–AI now its street name–rules the village unchecked, piecing together the works of unconsented creators who pour their hearts on pages and canvases distorted into an eerie image or generated statement in an impersonation to be someone. Some people think it's good, and some people don’t see it, but I myself don’t see the glint in the eye that calls a character to life. The product is simply a mesmerizing corpse, pieced together from once-alive beauties, human or being only in figure. The music that flows through my ears, and through to my heart, filled with the grit and the love and the humanity of emotions never deserved the system-generated mass-impersonating music that AI ever put out. A mass deprivation of originality floods the streets and sweeps up anyone so eager to find out where it hides. The experience shared from person to person through music, literature or art, that helps people to cope, to stay afloat, has been sunken and riddled by encryption–and now what will they do? Where will they go? A drowning person saves none, and the life jacket only pins to the ceiling, as a mass blockage to the original islands that covered the seas of humanity’s creativity.
You honestly could bite, and scratch, and punch at the great internet for all the losses it bore to you, but truly—does the fault lie in the wires? Does the grief seep through the hardware and shudder in the software? Does the addiction, the pain, the joy, the fame, does that critique seem to be a fault of the Internet? To me, it is in the personification of the Internet. It is in the people behind the Internet.
People Are Behind It
It was the dawn of 2020 when the disease Covid 19 creeped into the world and made itself known to the masses, keeping so many shaking behind closed doors. The longing for relationships that were cut by Covid, and the continuous hypnotization by screen had become our lives. What else were we meant to do? You can only blame the internet so much. Being stuck inside, your residence and your mind, as you watch others live a life you could only dream over a screen, especially in such a time—could mean no good. You long for relationships that are unrealistic, or get a rush for something thinking it's the best you can get– it damages a person. It isn’t so much the screen, but the facade behind it that causes one to long for things that aren’t even real. The internet is now the people—a disease that has grown past the software. It causes some to grow up too fast, and some to stay too young, and the impoverishment of human relationships that can’t be computed on the internet as a person. There’s a lack of the sense of humanity.
There’s a duality of man: You never know who you’re talking to. Let that be an old man encased in a 17 year old’s account, or an Instagram profile you thought was your friend? Thought is not enough these days. So many people are crushed under the pressure of the texts they receive over the internet’s minions–ones of false love, greedy need, or a threat of death. Not even only by physical hands or audible words these days, do people meet the end of their peace, effort, happiness, or life. The same thing brings birth to new love, connections, grand informations and accessibility. Who are you, internet? Though so many people struggle so much by its wired hands, the internet is just a facilitator of corruption’s agenda–and corruption doesn’t ache for poor souls. What about the mother or the father who cries every night after trying their best, after one child’s outburst who weighed their heart just too low–a dent caused by the burn of the internet, where mindless people who live to hate make untamed claims? To say moms like her shouldn’t have ever cursed their children with their birth? Dads like him need to boss up? What of those who speak insensitively about what is right for children of all, yet never stop to consider the restraints faced with poverty, trauma, or pure circumstance? But the internet knows best, right? Because their families are star citizens, right? Or so it seems? The family, who sits silently at the table, phone in hand, with no desire to look or speak to their people, because others rule their minds from an angle untouched? What of the boys and girls who stare into the enticing blue light of their screens, fingers typing ‘hi’s and ‘bye’s to the other kid they think sits across the display–just to be truly talking to a 62 year old with young-sounding remarks and ulterior motives? So many minors are victims of pedophilia brought to light, dragged away from childhood to grow up oh, so early. What about the 6th grade girl caught up in home by Covid who’d come to first contemplate the thought of suicide after being told over the internet to shoot herself by the person who was supposed to be her old best friend, split apart mutually? To cry night and day until she thought she couldn’t breathe, simply by a message displayed over a screen without much thought? To think it would shape her life’s outlook for the next 3 years? Two words? What about the people that span across the globe that can’t fathom speaking up for themselves, or confronting people ever again because the corrupt keys of the keyboard told her the world didn’t care because of who they were? The people whose lives were cut short by the waves of sorrow brought to them by words across the internet–those whose blood lies on the hands of a person they'd never met face to face. So easy is it to idolize the industry of celebrities as perfect people in trade and beauty–but so hard is it to imagine they exist outside of that spotlight with normal emotion and thought a lot of the time, sometimes too normal to the point that cancel culture knocks on the door of their career. Mass connection to mass loathing as the generations carry on, and the program of these applications aren’t to blame. Don’t you dare tell me those people and their careless words that move from monitor to monitor in seconds aren’t the reason. A powerful tool, the internet. A misused tool, the internet.
Who Are You?
Funny enough, my name isn’t even Swae. New Tech doesn’t exist in the slightest. Ho-seok is nobody, and Swae is simply a vessel of thought. The land here, however, does shine with orange or blue hues, and the waves sometimes crash against the land in such a way, just not where I stay. Here, the 0s and 1s mesh together close as a tango to yield this message I send to you. All of it stuck in the void of my mind. It seems that I, too, have assumed an identity on this internet. Does that make me like them? I’m no activist, but some high school sophomore with a heart disposition to shine light on something so normalized. We take upon ourselves all these identities on the internet, exposed to wolves in sheep's clothing–hiding behind the fake wired facade of a profile picture, text, or video. You felt it, no? The feeling of revolt, understanding, like-mindedness, or confusion, or more? This that I send to you behind this facade? Does this make what I say any less true? This is no narrative, I and that 6th grader are one in the same, a mind warped through the internet so much so it affects me today. Someone finds an identity in those wretched situations alluded to earlier, and it’s so obscure that over the tapping of screens people’s lives are ruined, people’s lives are made, and people’s hearts are changed. Logging in feels like a grand self-sabotage of man, and people run about dawning multiple faces like some ever-lasting game of identity fraud. What other things have you stolen, or lied about? Dignity? Respect? Innocence? The will to live? Soon, our body just houses a vessel of the internet, a soul programmed to unoriginality and sentenced to spoil, thoughts that aren’t even you in your own mind. A soul away from what it was meant to be. A soul departed from humanity. Does that not spark fear in one’s mind? Truly, we crave something more than humanity to fix our brokenness–because nobody is perfect, and our imperfection chips away at the efforts of others. Yet, nobody is meant to be perfect, that's why Jesus ever went to the cross. I mean seriously, he was battered and bruised, killed even, just to show us we are meant to find our completeness in his perfection. To show us we could love one another, despite anything–over anything, and confer with respect. Understand it takes an overflowing amount of love to undergo that intense suffering for people who may not ever come home. So how does he feel, as he gazes upon the battlefield of this big internet where people’s lives, his very own breath, end in fame, apathy, joy, or nooses. Where some spread misinformation of his motives, or defend their evil by his affectionate word. Watching, as his children take others to the grave in depression, wanting so desperately to end this violence, because that chat you sent, you thought it wouldn’t hurt a fly. That fly lays dead and buried, taken from its family, and to arrive home early. Truly, do you not see humans—as a whole—lie in the center of the problem, their judgement? Their motive?
People say the internet is corrupt, just as they say nature is cruel, but humans can become far worse–the ones who breathe life into these harmful things. The internet just stands as the facilitator, a mediator, of these life-changing events–let it be good, or bad. Responsible for the much more global human interconnectedness and a vastly accessed mode of creativity is the internet–not to be condemned for doing its job. Its tasks programmed by us are responsible for the state of now: modern society is depleting humanity.