It was Nietzsche that rightly said: ‘If you look long enough into the void, the void begins to look back into you.’ He is of course right, as he is about many things, and yet I think we can expand the thrust of that quote into a larger arena—namely, we need to admit that whatever it is we are spending time with, it is not just us having an effect on it, but it is also having its effect on us. When we travel and stay someplace other than our homeland, our accent slowly mutates and changes; when we make new friends, we take on their hobbies, ways of being, and more; when we spend time under the sun, we become a little brighter, a little warmer, a little happier ourselves.
We know to be careful about this—we know to not make friends with just anybody, to not live just anywhere, for the sake of it, nor to be capricious about what we eat, how long we spend indoors or outdoors, and the rest of it. And yet: do we take this to be true with the media we ingest? It would seem, in conversation with others, and in self-reflection, that this isn’t natural to us. We let ourselves be washed away in the tide of the algorithm, and lost in the habits that then populate like the return of the wave to the shore. Is this how one ought to live? As an effect, and not a cause; or, more precisely, as a thing upon the waters with no sails of its own? Anyone who has been reading this publication for long enough might be able to guess the answer that will follow.
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