The Stygian Wholesto

To not “friend” someone in a social network space in 2010, when both parties are cognizant that these digital identities occupy the same virtual space, has become a deplorable act bound with a frenzied social-electric current that is ten-fold worse than any party-snub involving real contact. In sum, digital space becomes the hyper-real, a false-reality superseded by an impetus that reinforces and doubles social regulation and conformity. Today, you can know someone and never contact them by any means. You can know them and see them on a regular basis. You can know them, see them in a social space, and pay them no attention, and that’s fine. But, on no grounds, can you know them, even on a regular, informed basis, and not be attached to them in the virtual public space. Even if you communicate with a person for eighty-percent of your real, inferential time, you must also be interconnected in the world of make-believe with them or your real association may become strained via the unreal and unrealized association. We can draw upon the NY schools to really sense this derivable, overextended, monopolistic woe which homesteads on the nature of virtual reality. Postwar massification taught us that from our education circles we cannot abandon any cooption which does not render less enthusiastic reductions of resistance. There is no widespread reduction that forms a signified truth that bends around American “intelligentsia.” To prod a little longer with old theory for a moment, we learn that our own identities at an early age are not from the Lockean empiricisms that gesture us as neither associated sensory data nor the Kantian active consciousnesses. We realize we are subject and object and are mutually implicated as an emergent & shifting consciousness devoid of categorizing. The virtual space suspends the shifting consciousness of the real, bankrupts the credit that dwells within the intersubjectivity of intimacy. It becomes relationship in the monolithic form, which then, hardens its monolithic values back onto the real. It’s the one place where a real-world friendship can be severed without any change to the inherent friendship by merely shifting reality spheres. The real friendship with an imperceptible governing body that is always subjective, like the real personalities from which they emanate, become cold, analytical, (monolithic), and ultimately tyrannical.