No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Internet Poisoning

That the internet is primarily a purveyor of trivia is obvious to anyone. The big revelation is that human life is nothing but trivia. Our access to the trivial lives of others overwhelms the not-trivial which also therefore becomes trivial. We’ve all been swallowed by the big hippo. We live in a world of gossip. It’s been abuilding for some time before anyone noticed how strange it all is.

According to Yuval Harari (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), it started with the great Cognitive Revolution of the species Homo Sapiens, in which we discovered language and its promotion of speculative thought: "There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings." Gossip clearly has its uses.

But according to Thomas Ligotti (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ), gossip exists only to distract us from the reality of our existence as “hunks of spoiling flesh on deteriorating bones.” We tell each other stories that we claim reveal, explain or define reality. It is the stories that become our habitat in which the prevailing misery and horror of the world is diluted, mitigated, or otherwise explained away. From that place of delusional safety we impose enormous destruction upon the rest of the world as well as ourselves. Gossip kills.

So it turns out that the thing that evolved to protect us, language, has always been our greatest threat (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Now that language has become as pervasive, as confusing, as oppressive as the reality it replaced, we become aware of the threat. We are aware of too much suffering; too many wrongs; too many opinions, arguments, conclusions and nonsense. We are perplexed. Whatever we say contributes to the problem. Saying nothing is unthinkable. Silence means loss of identity. Gossip is a drug and we are addicted to it:

“In contrast with her generation, which had spent most of its time online learning to code so that it could add crude butterfly animations to the backgrounds of its weblogs, the generation immediately following had spent most of its time online making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis.”

The portal of language is everywhere, more enticing than a group session at a halfway house for coke heads. Mind isn’t that thing inside our heads; mind is out there. Not in other people’s heads but in the traces of what is written and said. These convince us we’re OK. Who is willing to lose his/her/their mind by abdicating one’s role in this collective mind? But there is hope. The contents of the collective mind has become primarily gossip about gossip. I mean c’mon, who believes this stuff? Who cares about any of it for more than a week or two?

“The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.”

So autism is on the rise. Only the autistic understand reality. They know language is untrustworthy. Only the non-verbal has real significance. The ethical has nothing to do with ethics, just kind behaviour. High function autism has become a necessary life skill. Survival depends on not listening, not reading but only pretending to. As language is progressively degraded (by promoting itself), it is being exposed as noxious, arbitrary, and completely unreal. It’s worse than the reality it substitutes for. Gossip is poisoning itself:

“We took the things we found in the portal as much for granted as if they had grown there, gathered them as God’s own flowers. When we learned that they had been planted there on purpose by people who understood them to be poisonous, who were pointing their poison at us…”

Then reality strikes with a vengeance and gossip is seen for what it is.

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