The internet, for all its bluster about connection, is a land of empty signifiers – a million flashing neon signs advertising a product you don’t need and an experience you can never truly have.
The internet’s a goddamn circus of flickering signs, a kaleidoscope of data vomit that paints a picture as real as a three-dollar’s MAGA diamond. It bombards you with words, sure, but words ain’t experience, they’re the flimsy paper cuts on your soul after wrestling with the real. You can chase “comfy orbital habitats” all damn day online, curated realities that soothe your fragmented ego, but that’s just like snorting sugar and calling it breakfast. It’s a dopamine drip-feed, a curated reality show playing on loop in your frontal lobe.
Books, bless their dusty spines, offer a more focused fix, a chance to delve into someone else’s trip, but they’re still stuck in the muck of the Symbolic Order, that fancy academic term for the prison of language itself. They can’t capture the raw, animal howl of experience, the stuff that makes your hair stand on end and your gut clench. You can stack ’em high, these cathedrals of words, but they’ll never reach the jagged peak of the Real.
This endless pursuit of “MOAR words” online or some pre-packaged narrative in a book – and let’s be honest, books are just another capitalist hustle, a prettier way to sell you someone else’s trip – it’s all a distraction, a smoke screen to avoid the fundamental truth: language itself is fractured, a cracked mirror reflecting a shattered world. Maybe that yearning for wholeness, for some lost unity, is a primal scream against the very act of trying to pin experience down with words.
The real innovation, the goddamn Holy Grail we should be chasing, lies in confronting these limitations head-on. We gotta find ways to express the unsymbolizable, the stuff that language can only dance around like a drunk at a wedding. Music, film, art – these are the bastard children of language, the ones that break free from the chains of grammar and logic. They speak in tongues, in colors, in rhythms that bypass the intellect and resonate straight with the soul. That’s where the true journey lies, in the messy, beautiful chaos beyond the tyranny of words.