The lockdown is spiritual

The time is out of joint.

A while ago, I wrote that we were living through decades in a day, that history had cracked open.

That was an under-statement.

Hamlet says, when he meets his father’s ghost, and learns of the rottenness in Denmark: “The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, that ever I was born to set it right.”

Thus begins two hours of madness and death and mayhem and surveillance in one of the masterworks of all literature, as Hamlet slips into, and away from, the dust of this earth.

Our time is not simply out of joint.

It is free-floating in some murky radioactive swamp.

Incredibly, these past few months have seen, in lightning fast succession, the US President being impeached, a new Middle Eastern war in Iran only just averted, virtually the entire world go into an historically unprecedented lockdown in the midst of a pandemic-scare, and then that seemingly century-defining event being eclipsed in the media and in our minds by protest action which began in the US less than two weeks ago.

Each event has taken over from the prior. Each event has ratcheted up the intensity and urgency of one’s sense of public engagement, one’s sense of one’s identity being defined by how we live online.

These issues have seized the public’s imagination in such a way that families and societies have divided themselves into enemy camps concerning them, that taking a position online is seen as essential, and as something akin to a religious statement.

I doubt whether people living in times of global war felt this kind of intensity, this kind of fervour about public events.

Social media is no longer a medium - it is reality. We live in it. We form tribes inside of it. The videos we watch and the things we read online are not passing to us through some neutral space. Our primary relationship in these times of global news stories is not with the events, but with the medium.

It has been roundly established that social media and smartphones are addictive. They give you a hit like heroin does. Social media’s hit is largely created by the collective sense of being a part of something, of presenting a public persona, in a setting digitally made limitless in terms of time and space.

And so we all take heroin together, and our minds, which are always formed by relating to other minds, are now being plasticized and melted in a communal frenzy. To get the same hit, we make the same statements, we view the same things, we re-affirm our membership of the tribe, over and over again.

We find our thoughts being pre-empted by what we read. Things we did not even yet realise we wanted to buy are somehow advertised in our faces by means of our screens, whilst we lie in bed or sit on the toilet. You feel your phone vibrating in your pocket before it even starts. You wonder whether your phone can listen to your conversations, maybe even your thoughts. Maybe your phone is even forming your thoughts.

Social media posting and arguing are, in terms of their chemical effect, basically online orgies and online lynchings. They are religious services, but on drugs. (I wonder if closing churches and pushing everybody indoors and online have had something to do with this massive shift in energy, this nervous breakdown.)

I know the world has always been in crisis. I know wars and violence have always loomed far too large in history.

But I feel like something new has occurred this year. There is a sense of chaos in the world I have never felt before. Is this what possession feels like?

I wonder if the events that happen in the physical world are now simply only happening because they are about to make their way onto social media. This might sound nonsensical, but this is exactly how quantum physics works. Particles behave according to if and how they are observed.

But we no longer observe things physically - we observe within a world created by ourselves, or, rather, by corporations and business interests, who immerse us in a drugged-up digital product awash with free floating images and text that leave us both high and hungover.

We have all heard people say, we are living in the end times. Most of the time we dismiss these people as crackpots.

For the first time, I’m starting to believe these people.

Whilst we wait, it’s time to unplug the demon.

Go outside. Build a space rocket like Elon Musk. Have a pint with a friend. Read a book. Reach for the sky.

Stop reading this. I’ll stop writing.

Hamlet’s last words - “The rest is silence.”