All The Lights We Cannot See

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Focusing on our aural capacity, this near universally-known saying works as a metaphor for the communication of an idea as being effective or not based on the required presence and perception of an objective listener - which feels quaint and outmoded in an era where most communication now happens visually.

Light is the viral meme of physics - it travels far and it travels fast, but it is also easy to blot out.

And as a medium for the metaphor of how ideas are communicated or not communicated today, light serves us better than sound.

Each of the following hypotheticals represents how our modern digital media ecosystem works, where light represents the communication of an idea within that ecosystem.

Hypothetical 1

You are in a pitch black room and can’t see a thing.

You sit calmly and ponder. How have you arrived in this room and why is it so dark?

Have you committed some gravely immoral act at some point in the distant and forgotten past which has resulted in you being trapped in a SAW game?

Are you going to be forced to pull off your toenails with your own teeth to survive?

As you sit calmly, pondering these very normal thoughts you start to see faint patterns of color appear.

At first you think that perhaps you are a Buddhist monk high atop the Himalayan mountains, deep in transcendent meditation. Perhaps you are ascending to the highest plane of consciousness.

But then you remember that time you got high on ketamine in a sensory deprivation tank and that you’re just experiencing phosphene perception, or “dark noise,” the phenomenon where our over-active neurological system is just trying to process something even in the absence of anything.

So you are seeing things. Kind of. But you are still in the dark.

Suddenly, a light turns on and everything is illuminated.

It turns out you were just hiding under the covers.

Hypothetical 2

You are in a pitch black room with hundreds other people. None of you can see.

Everyone is shouting and pushing and presumes that they are most definitely trapped in a SAW game and are going to have to murder all the hundreds of other people in the room with their Crocs in order to get out alive.

Suddenly, someone flicks on a flashlight and illuminates their face.

Everyone stops and stares at them in expectant silence.

The person with the flashlight nervously farts and turns off the light.

Hypothetical 3

Now let’s say you find yourself floating in free in the black void of space just past the gravitational barriers of the Earth.

How you got there doesn’t matter but you are there and you’re kind of cold, and you want to go back to the ground because it’s Friday and you don’t want to miss the latest episode of Severance and you aren’t sure if the Apple TV app works in space.

Then you remember your Cub Scout training. You know Morse Code!

You turn on your iPhone flashlight and start waving your hand in front of it methodically signaling:

S-O-S

I-N-E-E-D-T-O-S-E-E-S-E-V-E-R-A-N-C-E-T-O-N-I-G-H-T

Sadly, no one sees your plea for help. You are just another twinkling light in the vastness of the starry night sky.

Hypothetical 4

Occasionally but not often, you will be floating in space, minding your own business like the fetus at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when someone randomly and abruptly floats up to you with a camera and a microphone tethered to a satellite broadcasting down to the entire planet and asks you how to drive a man wild in bed.

In reply, you make a spitting sound (which no one can hear because, space) and you imitate giving fellatio by repeatedly poking your tongue into your cheek while simultaneously gesticulating with your fist in tandem, back and forth.

This random encounter and obscene gesture causes you to be rescued from space, but you subsequently end up on the wrong end of a memecoin scam. C’este la vie.

Hypothetical 5

Finally (I promise) you are the world’s wealthiest man.

You aren’t in the dark at all, except for that cavernous pit at the core of your being from which emanates a persistent echoing voice that screams, “YOUR FATHER DIDN’T LOVE YOU.”

You find this unnerving to the point of maddening insecurity and it makes you endlessly crave the attention your daddy never gave you so you use the unfathomable vastness of your wealth to purchase the most powerful light that money can buy, and shine it upon your disgusting pale visage and undulating gelatinous corpus for all to see, proclaiming loudly, “MY FATHER DIDN’T LOVE ME BUT AREN’T NAZIS COOL?”

We live in an enforced caste hierarchy of attention where whether or not an idea is effectively communicated is based almost entirely on how much you already have or don’t have, how much you are willing to spend, how lucky you are, or to what extremes you are willing to go in order to possibly rise to a higher caste of the attention economy.

Hypothetical 1 represents the passivity of most people, sitting in the metaphorical dark, alone and aimlessly scrolling the feeds waiting for a light to go on and illuminate the dark noise around us, giving sense to the nonsense of the world - endlessly searching for truth and meaningful ideas which are obscured by whatever abstract black box algorithms find compelling enough to promote and feed us.

Occasionally a light will come on and reveal some novel idea that shows us the truth we are seeking, but we have to sit in the dark for a long time waiting for that light to go on.

And it’s much easier for us to just sit there in the dark than it is to fumble around searching for a light switch; to put in the hard work to actually find an idea that is illuminating to our consciousness.

Hypothetical 2 represents the slightly less passive activity of those of us who sit in that same metaphorical blackness, aware that there are many others crowded around us with whom we want to share the light of our ideas with - literature, a music recommendation, a podcast, our art, or simply sharing a photo of the chicken nugget you found shaped like the snake baby from David Lynch’s Eraserhead.

We turn on our flashlight and fart so someone will notice us, because we think that’s a pretty solid way to get attention in such a crowded space, which is to say we do something provocative so that we are seen.

We might seen, but at the cost of our idea being masked by our provocative means of communication, which leaves us too embarrassed to turn our light on more often and share it’s warmth (ew) with others.

Hypothetical 3 represents those of us float in the metaphorical vastness of internet space, frantically begging for the attention we will never get and help we will never receive.

Those of us who postpostpost are "active" to be sure, but active with meaninglessness that borders on nothingness.

No one else notices because they are all too busy frantically blinking their own SOS in the same direction that you are.

Hypothetical 4 represents the few of us are chosen at random by others or the deus ex machina, as if by fate, to shine our light.

We take our shot. We shine.

Our light is bright and we are seen by a grateful planet who wants to hear what we have to say, even if it’s only for entertainment.

Sometimes this works, as randomness and luck would dictate, but sometimes we try to turn our light up far too brightly and it burns out as quickly as it turned on.

Hypothetical 5 represents the fewest amongst us are privileged enough to use financial capital and cultural capital previously accrued by either luck, birth, fortune, or theft, but rarely talent in order to make damn well sure that they are seen, even if no one wants to see them.

They blot out the very sun with the attention-enforcing all consuming light that only those like them can ever hope to wield or afford.

In a year when good ideas and otherwise general positivity are both few and far between, and the light of compassionate knowledge and effective intentional action seems to have gone out entirely, we can know that the light is actually out there somewhere even if we can’t see it or have been prevented from seeing it.

Taking the light as a memetic function, how fast an idea can go, and whether or not it can ever even attain memetic light speed is effectively pre-determined by the digital media ecosystems we have found ourselves bound within and within which we have been so bound.

Our ideas are distributed or not distributed, de-platformed or shadow-banned, algorithmically elevated or down-ranked, deleted or paywalled, based almost entirely upon only how much we are willing to sacrifice - dignity, money, or time we will never get back - in order to hopefully gain the attention a truly bright idea needs and deserves to flourish within the confines of attention-driven platforms owned and controlled by those amongst us who already have the biggest and brightest lights which will always, always, outshine our own.

In the coming days, weeks, and years, search for the lights even though they may be hard to see.

And if you see someone else turn on their light, don’t just wait expectantly for them to fart for your attention.

Witness their light. Truly see it.

And as a benevolent mirror, reflect their own light back at them and even further out into the world, so that they, and we all, may bask in it’s radiance.

Because if a light goes on in the darkness, and your eyes are closed, you will still be blind to it.