In the virtual sphere, twitch streamers debate with academics, comedians converse with the president, adult film stars do stand up, every single sphere has converged into a single point. There are no longer the categories of comedy, political, advertisement, pornography, etc. Everything has collapsed into one point, a simultaneous and continuous consumption of the virtual. Effectively zero distance, it has all converged into your phone screen. All at the same time, GTA 5 gameplay, a Reddit text-to-speech video, a factory accident in China, a podcast clip, a Wendy’s commercial, a girl dancing in tight yoga pants, news about the election, a recipe for a triple wagyu smashburger. All these occur simultaneously in the same space.
I recently watched Adam Friedland’s interview with the twitch streamer, Destiny. Absolutely disgusting. But what struck me was that when asked why Destiny has attempted to become a political persona as a videogame streamer, his response was that everything in life has become political. In the real, this is obviously not the case. It’s fairly easy to avoid the political in the real, to interface the political in the real requires personal effort. You must spend time and effort and forgo alternative productive endeavors. Resources and time must be expended to go to a polling station, or meet with politicians, or organize in a community. The only place where Destiny is right in his claim is the place where he functionally lives, the virtual. In the virtual, everything has saturated everything else. The political is virtually accessible through your computer screen, and so is everything else. It must be noted, as Friedland points out in the course of the interview, that without streaming Destiny would have been a college dropout who couldn’t hold a job as a fry cook. Only through the virtual can someone as intellectually limited as Destiny have a claim to sit among actual scholars in a debate on a topic as contentious as the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Only in the virtual can Joe Rogan, former MMA commentator and crass standup comedian, host the largest podcast on the internet, where he interviews presidents, academics, scam artists, celebrities, comedians, adult film stars, and conspiracy theorists.
The focal point of this spatial collapse occurs within social media. Through social media platforms, all of these streams converge into one, in the social plane. You are then invited to interact with advertisements, pornography, political propaganda, journalism, entertainment, and anything else as you would interact with others. Your social connections exist within the same space, zero spacial distance between them, all mixed in the same bucket. The genius in this is that as you interact with the virtual social space, you yourself create content. Even if you don’t produce your own content, by liking, sharing, viewing, or replying to content, you increase the capital value of it, spurring further consumption of the same content. Social media accounts are traded on the open market, with their cash values dependent on the volume and quality of their metrics. And thus in this sense production and consumption become simultaneous, collapsed into a single action.
It must be noted that the virtual does not only collapse into a single point spatially, but also temporally. What is produced in the virtual does not decay, the rate of depreciation is zero. What is produced in the virtual can be consumed at any moment, infinitely many times, with every single consumption exactly the same as the last. Any film can be downloaded and watched at any moment, and the content will be exactly the same as if it had just been produced yesterday. Film and literature was formerly limited by the necessity of storing it on a real medium such as tape, CD, or print, which necessarily, being real things, degraded over time. Real resources must be spent to produce copies of a film or to reprint old books so that the content would not be lost, but with the virtual all exists simultaneously, perfectly preserved in pristine condition. Even content which has begun to undergo the progress of degradation has been frozen in time through virtualization, cryogenically digitized, their defects preserved with them. The virtual is a continuously growing museum, every exhibit unaging and completely sterile of context. Time does not pass within the virtual, its contents simply accumulate. A Crusonia plant, except that no level of consumption could ever inhibit endless growth.
This destruction of temporal distance has also both destroyed and amplified nostalgia. When faced with material which does not age, we are also faced with the fact that we do. Nostalgia for virtual content is nonsensical, as the same content consumed ten years ago can be consumed now and at any point in-between. Furthermore, being virtual, this content can be consumed without limit, without fear of depletion. On the other hand, nostalgia for the lived experience, which is within the realm of the real, is amplified as we realize that the difference in the experience of consumption is solely due to a real difference in ourselves, imparted by the forces of time. We realize that while the content has not aged, we have. In an attempt to quell this realization, the industry of the “remaster” has arisen. Using real resources, old content is reproduced today. What is particularly jarring is that the original and the remaster exist in the same temporal space, both being virtual products. The original can be presented at any moment with no blemishes, pristine, as if just made yesterday. The remake of the original was, in reality, made yesterday. Real resources are now employed in a cyclical process of making what already exists. Ultimately, the aim of the “remaster” is not to recreate the experience of consuming the original content, but to destroy all memory of that experience through its simulation. The remaster itself is almost always considered a failure by those who enjoyed the original, but in doing so, the original is brought back into the social consciousness venerated and renewed.
The question becomes will the virtual destroy the real? In some instances it already has. Not only does it destroy the real, but it destroys all previous simulacra of the same sort. Just as television killed radio, the internet kills television. Advertisement was one of the first movers into the realm of the virtual, colonizing much of the internet at breakneck speed. Now advertisement is pervasive in the internet, both overt and clandestine. At the same time, advertisement in the real has become obsolete. Billboards, flyers, and posters are all seen as archaic means, relegated to novelty. In fact, advertisements in the real are seemingly only produced to be replicated in the virtual. Pictures of billboards are posted online, whether by the firms which themselves put up the advertisement or by users of social media hoping to spur engagement on their profiles. The Times Square advertisement, a ritual of American consumer culture, now only exists to be posted on social media as a virtual representation of the advertisement in the real. In fact, there are multiple websites which provide continuous 24/7 live-streams of the billboards in Times Square. Today, any firm pursuing advertisement through billboards likely knows that more people will see their billboards through phone screens than in person. The consumption of the billboard does not occur in the real, but in the virtual through the consumption of virtual images.
We are currently witnessing the process of destruction in other senses, as more and more things are incorporated into the virtual their real components begin to be dismantled. Uber with the taxi industry, Microsoft Teams with traditional corporate office culture, Blackboard and Moodle with education, Tinder with the romantic pursuit, in all these instances what once existed in the realm of the real has been incorporated into the virtual. The social itself has been increasingly virtualized through social media, and less and less of what makes up the social occurs in the real. What formerly involved movement across real space and time and the exhaustion of real resources and effort has now been concentrated to an input/output interface which does not exceed a distance of two meters from ourselves at any moment. Life, which was formerly transient and temporal, has, through increasing virtualization, become immediate and eternal, memorialized, everything eternally archived and available to be recalled at any moment.
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