It was late. I went to brush my teeth.
As the paste tracked along the bristles, a speck flicked into my right eye. It closed in sharp pain. This was toothpaste. What business had it to sting my eye so badly? Then came the thought: I could find out on the internet. And I felt depressed.
Now, having such a thought might be the stuff of which modern day man is made, but as I stood at the basin, an image from a comic book of my youth filled my mind: the hero lies within a dungeon; suddenly he becomes aware of a low, grinding sound, looks up and, to all horror, sees the stone ceiling inching slowly downwards.
I live in a time when my head is overarched not by stone but the internet. I can find out all there is to know: it is a case of asking the right questions, accessing the right information and enlightenment is guaranteed. Such freedom is within reach. Why then my unhappiness at the thought of accessing the answer?
In most relationships of power, a two-way street exists. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown is a reminder that the serf held at the end of the reins also has a capacity for power, and will seize it if conditions allow. Both sides of the relationship know this, but because he is being denied power, the serf feels oppressed.
But I felt depressed because the knowledge which I could access once my eye had been doused with water and restored to its unblinking best would be lowering that ceiling another fraction. The more I sought the answers from the networks of knowledge, the more my mind would lose its freedom to think beyond their horizon. But, unlike the relationships of power between human beings, what lay at the other end of this connection had neither accountability nor identity. It was amorphous, protean in its forms and answerable to no one.
COVID-19 has steered us in this direction. This global pandemic has all its citizens attuned to what they are hearing via the media. It makes no difference that there may be as many theories as there are outlets: what matters is that people come to accept what is on their screens or in their ears as the source of all that there is to know. Even if they doubt it, this is because of what they have read or heard from some other search on the internet.
This acceptance that all there is to know is to be found via the screen plays itself out in other ways. The humorous scenario of a customer discovering that the outlet where he wants to place his pizza order has access to his medical, financial and social security records proved popular on social media where it is recognised that privacy and confidentiality are not only endangered but possibly on the way to extinction. Big Brother Pizza is just a block away.
When my eye closed in pain, my reaction – go to the internet – brought the feeling of a descending ceiling. Could I escape from it as my comic book hero had? Was there a space I could squeeze through? No answer from the internet because it only deals with questions for which there are answers. But there lay my escape route! A space where words are not the sole currency of understanding, a space where answers exist for questions we do not ask, a space without tunnel vision.
I live in hope. I do not understand how physicists such as Galileo, Newton and Einstein came to understand the forces which govern our planet and the beyond, but I do understand that they conceived of a different reality from that of their contemporaries. They looked through the ceiling which covered their world and our reality now is different because of them. The internet may not be made of stone, but its ceiling needs to be looked through: there is a beyond.
