System Reset?

I'm playing infinite-scroll roulette on my Twitter feed. I swipe, and watch the posts flip past at warp speed, blurring like the stars outside the windows of the SS Enterprise. Where will it come to a stop?

* An ad for a food show

* Coronavirus politics

* Clever German psychobabble

* People openly advocating drug use

* Earth Day

* Pets wearing clothes?

It occurs to me that everything's changed but many people don't even realise it, because nothing's changed on Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Instagram. Or CNN, BBC, Reuters, etc. 

All of the mass media templates are holding patterns for a mentality that's optimised for panic. Outrage. Fear. They hang on to those emotions rabidly, regardless of what actually happens in the real world. Caging our adaptability.

"Nonapocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to [disaster capitalism's] ambitions,” writes Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine. Our disaster-fuelled media seems unable to adapt to this quietened world quickly enough to show us anything honest about it. 

So far, lockdown reality has been better captured in chat rooms, pixel art, watercolours, relationship talks or walks in the park.  In healthy eating and exercise. Never-ending tea breaks where you can stare out of the window for ages. 

Out there, everyone's playing guitar, reading, making music in backyards and parks, communing with nature, having sex... 

It's got a hippyish vibe, this pandemic. There's something very pre-Raphaelite to it - at least here in Germany there is. 

While the system's on hold, for all intents and purposes, some people are still intent on living as if it's sweeping them over the edge.

Of course, the system isn't really on hold 100% of the time: for example, the supermarket staff and delivery people aren't allowed to stop. But somehow, I doubt they're the ones filling social media with apocalyptic wailing about trivialities. I imagine the essential workers are too exhausted to lift a finger at the end of each day. 

(Is a couple of people breaking quarantine to go to the park really the biggest problem America is facing, right now? Irrespective of the colour and/or political stripe of the offenders? Isn't, oh I dunno, the complete lack of nationalised health care or an organised pandemic response a bigger issue? Or am I just being crazy?)

I think we all want input on our own stuff right now. This is a golden opportunity for all of that input to overflow and burst the boundaries of our social media templates, replacing them with something optimised for us to inhabit, fully.

People call this a 'reset'. My body feels in sync with the world, every cell flexing and rebounding in direct contact with it...

In this under-distracted state I notice how everything complements everything else. Like, that "Obi" sign over there looks like it was designed to flatter the sunset in the absence of any hurried shoppers, grudgingly stomping toward it.

I wonder how much else of the surroundings would change, adjust to our awareness by coming together, offering profound truths we had thought lost forever, if it was just left this way?

I go walking with Plom and he does a riff on the people who are saying, 'It's too early to cancel the quarantine, the virus might come back and kill more people' etc. 

"It's too early to cancel the virus," he intones drily. "It hasn't yet achieved all of its goals yet.

There is still too much risk that the economy will reboot. If the system recovers, there more people may end up dying from capitalism. 

If the virus ends now, it will all have been for nothing. Not spreading the virus could be murder!!"

He's being completely tongue in cheek, of course, but he's got a point. So much inadvertent good has been done, so much real progress has come out as a side effect of this whole thing, but it's been mostly overshadowed by trivialities. Blown out of proportion by a media primed for horror, however miniaturised it may be. 

The golden age was never ended,

it was just postponed by the infinite scroll.