The plot thins.
Or so said my very first facebook status (remember when we did that?) back in 2012 after I made a brand new account, scrapping the old one. I’ve always been super down for a tabula rasa moment - in fact, with this ‘unbranding’ I’m doing now, I’m in one again and I’m relishing every moment. I know I’m a broken record, but wiping the slate clean and having a phoenix experience is essential now and again to clear the psychic plumbing of grit, gobs of congealed hair, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, a viral song, and whatever else gets caught in these pipes.
A good tabula rasa lets loose creatures within that have hibernated, gotten stuck in the freeze response, given up the notion of feasting, spun in endless circles in captivity, or have growled viciously to try and assert boundaries, to no avail. All of these soft, palpable animals finally can move how they need to, unconstrained by the limitations that sameness and rigid identity place on their bodies.
Someone once told their IG audience that we consume more information in one single day in our modern world than we did in an entire lifetime in the middle ages. I don’t know how you can quantify such a thing, or if that piece of info is true, but in rural communities I don’t disbelieve that gossip and 'world news' would reach one’s ears once ever few weeks, if that.
Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher who discussed the physical implications of technology by saying that, “All technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed.” As examples: the wheel extends our feet, the phone extends our voice, television extends our eyes and ears, the computer extends our brain, and electronic media, in general, extends our central nervous system.1
When I came across this perspective just before the pandemic, in the rapid growth of my online audience and marriage to social media, it resonated to my core. Yes, I thought, electronic media and computers are extensions of our nervous systems. The whole shebang, from twitchy toe to fluttering eyelid. It reflected what I was feeling at the time - as I discussed in my two-parter series on parasociality - an enduring rattle in my nerves that wouldn’t go away and seemed to be tethered almost entirely to goddamn app.
In my parasociality articles (pt 1, pt 2) I touched upon how an online audience isn’t invited into the creator’s living room, and so they should stop behaving as if they have been. But what I didn’t mention there and is important to discuss now, is that for the creator / influencer / public figure, their body has a tough time differentiating between tens of thousands of people being at a great distance or right smack dab in the middle of their sofa. The body knows no difference. If technology is an extension of the nervous system, one may imagine tendrils of nerve ropes - both thick and thin - like vines pushing past the limits of the skin and out into the ether. And the larger and more diverse our network is, the longer the tendrils, and the more intertwined they become with what they touch.
duetramonti
The internet is nothing but tendrils - invisible ones - that invade every mote of dust floating in space. We do not have to be technically cyborg - human and machine hybrid - in order to find our nervous systems entangled with the tendrils of the digital. The internet has become as passively insidious as inhaling a pathogen, or a spore, on your morning walk. Smell is actually minute particles of matter entering the nose. Tiny particles of the internet are always in us. That, and microplastics, these days.
The very nature of being a living, breathing animal is to constantly seek out one’s surroundings and curiously poke into unknown spaces. The realm of the digital holds a new kind of curiosity for us as a species, one that allows us to behold all of the glory and hideousness of the world simultaneously, with no warning on either end of the spectrum. But this communion is not strictly physical, so we may feel that it bypasses a vital alarm system. For example, if we were to physically be in a war zone, rubble all around us, bombs going off - we’d be severely traumatized, afraid and deep in survival mode. However, when we view this same zone on a screen, it affects our limbic system and nervous system in a similar way, but it is ‘once removed’ from our present reality, so therefore the flight mode it provokes gets internalized and does not serve the same purpose as it would if we were actually there.
Before I go on, I must dally at ‘serve a purpose’ because this, in my opinion, is the crux of the nervous system / tech issue that is making us all sick.
I’m not a full nervous system + somatics expert, but I do know quite a bit. And I know from doing somatics work that the body wishes to express itself in full, all the time. It knows how to do this - it is us who get in the way of that expression. Sometimes this is because we’re actually stuck in the freeze response, sometimes it is due to trauma, and other times we just don’t trust our body’s natural movements or we find them socially unacceptable.
When my partner lost his father in January, I was unable to attend the funeral in The Netherlands, but I watched a livestream of it. After he gave his eulogy, my partner’s body, still standing at the podium, convulsed and shook. He wasn’t crying, it was just an involuntary reaction. In that moment it reminded me of what I’ve seen my dog, Grover, do a thousand times - shake it out. If he met another dog he didn’t like, or was overwhelmed, he’d shake. That’s exactly what my partner’s body did too. Animals do this constantly, and we are animals. But this kind of relationship with the body is fundamentally what becomes splintered and fragmented - especially when we are tethered by invisible tendrils to upsetting, inundating exposure to the world at large all day, every day. When I consider this, I do think of what a person’s nervous system from the middle ages would be like. This is why we find candlelight and gardening so relaxing. Life was slower and smaller, so our nervous systems were too.
My point is, the body is always attempting to fully express the emotional waves that undulate. An emotion has a spark, a pathway and a dissolution. In cruder, less poetic terms, a beginning, middle and end. When trauma gets ‘stuck’ in the body, and ‘the body keeps the score’ it is because the middle keeps happening on a loop. It may not be as simple as shaking it out one time, but there’s something missing from the full expression.
Our tendril-y intertwinement with the internet, all the exposure and inundation that occurs there, and the way that it bypasses the alarm system that would tell us to punt our phone into the ocean - all of this leads to tons of tension gumming up the works. The body ends up holding far too much information, far too much trauma from perfect strangers, far too many opinions, far too many random acts of senseless vitriol, and really - just far too many voices, period. It ends up feeling much like this:
Walter Oltmann, "Bleeder," 2007, ink on paper
And is this healthy? I think not.
Thinning the plot…shrinking oneself
It is yet to be seen if the internet / social media has done irrevocable damage to our brains and bodies and the way that we seek information, connection and entertainment. Even when taking stock of the harm it has caused me, I obviously have a hard time getting away from it. I see those of us who have been burned by places like Instagram migrating to much more sensitive, soft feeling platforms such as this - but even Substack is becoming more like social media all the time and its focus is on readership growth, not necessarily readership quality.
The questions I have been asking myself a lot lately:
Is it possible to be a well-known artist / writer, but not have my nervous system extend to all corners of the earth?
Is it possible to go back to the days pre-internet, where information overload and a sea of voices are not constant bedfellows that one has to deliberately build a shelter away from?
Is it possible to decolonize my mind and body from the capitalist urge to grow ever more?
I believe all are possible, but one thing must be championed above and beyond everything else: the body, the nervous system. So no matter the consequences: whether this means not ever having a massive platform and the opportunities that come with it, saying ‘no’ in abundance, moving at the pace of the body, not the algorithm - this must be first priority. I have to admit, there’s a bit of grief here, and FOMO. These uncomfortable emotions are, of course, why we push ourselves into the spotlight time and again.
But I think we have to really ask ourselves, what sort of garden do we wish to grow within? Do we want to be colonized by tech and by the push to be and do more ad infinitum, more for the sake of more, more to no avail, more to the point of breakdown, ill health, insanity? Or do we wish to grow only what we can eat, tending to each and every bit of nourishment mindfully and with gratitude?
Until next time, love and wolves.
D xx
P.S. My KICKSTARTER for the second edition of Celestial Bodies Astrology and Numerology Oracle was funded in 5 days! Thank you to anyone and everyone who contributed. If you missed the first two announcements and wish to pledge, there are still a few left to go on the campaign!
P.P.S. In case you missed the big announcement, I landed a publishing deal for my decks and they will be available exclusively through Tarot Stack in the coming months. More details forthcoming <3
P.P.P.S. If you can swing it, since my small biz is shut down becoming a paid subscriber to my Substack would mean a lot to me!
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