a short manifesto on digital health
The Internet has brought us knowledge without wisdom.
-Gregory “Jreg” Guevara
Authors note - I have written previously on digital health and internet art here on Monoskop.
There are worms in your phone that get into your brain through your nose and fingertips. This fact is widely studied and reported on, however, we accept that it is a part of life, like the metals in our drinking-water. We cannot choose to drink water or not drink water, but this hot ourobours in our pockets 1. Invents its own purpose, 2. Is self-consuming, and 3. Is parasitic, and you are the host. It is too late for us to recover the degenerated tissue. Surgery is the only option.
A meditation exercise: Connect yourself in, and notice how your body feels. We are animals with reactive nervous systems, with a powerful fight-or-flight mechanism. When super-dosing the internet through your phone, does your blood course, or does it lilt? Do you dread? When scrolling, you feel the heavy presence of doom? Do you feel energised? Or emptily aroused? Put names to those feelings, write them down, not on your phone. When I open my phone to see the small circular images of humans I love but cannot touch, and I feel dead.
Do not masturbate to the phone screen, or if you choose to, do not then be surprised upon falling in love with it. It is quite natural that your heart beats faster and your pupils dilate, that you feel fed and nourished, all love in the world exists as waves butting up against that dark mirror that in the singularity reflects only your hardened face. But you have an anxious attachment with a thing you cannot satisfy and cannot satisfy you. No love songs will be written about this intimacy.
A virus is a non-living entity that needs a host to reproduce. A virus makes you feel different - reduced, exhausted, unable to do the things you once loved. Proximity to a virus makes you susceptible to deeper sicknesses - an ailing immune system appearing like a web of ills, which at the centre you find one tick that lodged itself in you quite simply, quite easily, as if you invited it.
Patient Symptom Record: Struggling to sleep, headaches, anxiety and overwhelm. Radical worldviews, Isolation, Physical Illness, an argumentative soul that can never settle, dysmorphia, a reliance on the material and the unhealthily immaterial, falling out of love, forgetting to eat, complains of being on her phone even while on the toilet, seeing her friends differently, not seeing her friends at all…
To treat the initial infection, stop dosing yourself at such high levels with this poison - the knot can be untied once you recognise this illness is an inverted pyramid, and at its core is rather thin. A point balanced on black glass. We are on our deathbeds, sluicing the immaterial about our veins, staring at our wasting bodies in the glass of a darkened window.
The great experiment of algorithmic population control is falling apart. Teenagers are ditching their smart phones for brick phones, a major UN report has recommended schools ban them, Silicon Valley billionaires all reach consensus on no screen time for kids, in 2021 the social media usage of younger generations fell across almost every major app… Join us!
Learn to recongise pain. It can become so omnipresent that we no longer see its face, just antlers and a storm-cloud so dark it presses upon the head. The eye-ache, the miserable pit in your stomach, the flashing images, the colours and women, the empty feeling when your phone clicks to lock, the low-battery, the panic when it’s heaviness is not in your pocket. What do you know that definitely does not make you feel like this? For me it is walking with nothing in my pockets. I know that does not feel like pain. When you start to put a name to it, that pain gets louder and leaves a bad taste in your mouth - like when you wake up after drinking hard and couldn’t believe that sick dizzy drunk feeling was even worth it.
In liminal moments, do not run from the space. The pleasant stroke of distraction in this endless haunting landscape wasn’t born from the earth - there was a time where it was not there. There are fifteen minutes for you to sit on the bus. There are three minutes where your friend goes silent. There are thirty seconds before you feel you can sleep. What do you fear? Hearing your guts squish against eachother, or the nervous exhale of the man lying next to you? The first five minutes will hurt, but the next ten, you may find yourself seeing fleeting visions of a space above you that we used to call thinking-space. Breathe into it and let it chase the wasps from your head.