Clawing around in a dark room, I reach out. There’s a voice. I follow it. I wave my hand. Was it a ghost? A disembodied voice.Â
What is a ghost? A memory? Ectoplasmic spasms locked in the jaws of a rift between time-consciousness and the ultimate, inevitable Void from which all matter begins and ends? A vocal snag perhaps. Does this room have walls? If so, an echo. Trapped echo. The walls absorb nothing, frictionless, perfection, no loss of energy, I’m suspended here, I am a sound wave, locked in step with the voice of a ghost, here in the darkness, alone.
The New Way, the Ghost Era. Before it was just a self-selected group of workers. Now more of us have been locked away in guest rooms, basements and living room mini-offices. It’s been over three years. Microcosms have been built around headspaces. The world exists in relation to each worker’s own perspective, bundled up with strong opinions, emotions, a dose of groupthink, all working in tandem to shape a new existence centered upon the self. This isn’t new. It’s part of our collective trajectory. The Pandemic just gave it a boost.
Until recently there was the tyranny of the social handshake. There were social repercussions for flaking. Person A reaches out to connect. Person B accepts connection. Then Person B disappears. Person A is socially wronged, and, pending any major social faux pas as a precipitating factor, Person B is implicitly met with a hit to their social reputation. In-person interactions, phone connections, any sort of direct interaction of this sort laid the basis for human connection, the central nerve that encapsulates society, business and just about every other sector of the human project.
Then came texting. No longer did Person B need to follow up on the initial connection. It could easily just…drop. And the repercussions seemed to just vanish. Phone calls no longer had to be answered, in fact were actively discouraged. The convenience of SMS became the priority, throwing a veil over the underlying humanity of that connection. No human. No repercussions. This reached its clearest encapsulation in the public arena with communication-based services like online dating. The Ghost crawled its way into the digital-cultural zeitgeist. Try out a conversation with a potential partner. No longer interested? Don’t respond. Go on a date or two. Person B reaches back out. No response. The human on the other end becomes less human. The social repercussions become nonexistent, no longer a bug but a feature. No longer even a feature but a comparative advantage of The New Way.
Back to The Pandemic. Microcosms built around headspaces. The New Way — freed from the shackles of social repercussions, released from the tyrannical grip of the social handshake — expands like a blast wave. It goes beyond texting and online dating. It becomes part of everyday social interactions, no longer an insult but an expected norm between strangers, friends, families and businesses. We send our messages to others, but we all know that we’re tossing into the ether, skipping stones across the surface of a pixelated lake. If we get a response, wonderful, though we’re always primed for silence.
Ok. But what is the connection between the remote worker and the new mode of being brought about by The Pandemic? It’s this: those outside our perceptions have ceased to exist. We’ve internalized the world, downloaded its parameters like an artificial neural network devouring the experienced world. Everything is encountered through the twin middlemen of the internet and perception. All is subjective. Our operating system is Idealism®. How might you feel guilt or remorse for ghosting someone if they’re no longer an actually-existing being with agency?
With a communal culture, a shared reality, comes accountability. However, eternal choice fuels the Idealistic approach, built upon a framework of solitude-driven networks. With a purely subjective reality comes the choice to engage or not on a whim, without social repercussions. We all become The Ghost when it is most convenient.
As The Ghost, there’s no risk of being ostracized because you don’t need to be part of the community of established society in the first place. The precursors began with texting and online dating, but the tone is most on display in YouTube comments and message boards, where, anonymous or not, there are clearly no more repercussions to our interpersonal behavior. The interpersonal has become intrapersonal. Twitter, as we all know, is an ostensibly organic community of digital denizens completely lacking in social repercussions beyond group dogpiling and periodic outrage, a proxy for a world that now resides completely inside our idealist heads. As we all know and seem to repeat as scripture, the internet is not at all reflective of how people would actually speak to each other in person.Â
So, when faced with the shock of real connection, we become The Ghost. We hide. We deny existence. We recede from the tangible and take our place in the nebulous outskirts, far from the Real of The Void. We repress not just the shadow of our selves, but we repress connection with others.
There is no longer the genuine embrace and support of a loving community, or the watchful eyes looking out for you if you, say, drink too much, which is surely met with communal shaming, but it is generally meant as a way to better the community as a whole. A rising tide lifts all boats. There’s a reason fentanyl use is a symptom locked in the real world. You can’t experience the escapist bliss of opiates in an MMORPG. It’s simply the other side of a dopamine see-saw. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The high point of the see-saw may reside in our minds, but the low point is experienced in a reality that is ultimately inescapable, whether through drugs, VR goggles or any of the medley of screens we set our minds upon.Â
Ghosting is easy. Perhaps it’s overthinking to graft it onto a metanarrative tracking the evolution of digital communication. But it’s easy on a foundational level. It’s built into the system. It’s now a valid choice. We’re all locked in a dark room. We’re all looking for a hand to hold. We’re all hurtling toward The Void. The Ghost knows this because it was there once. And it never wants you to experience what it saw on the other side.Â
Films
Moon Garden (2023) directed by Ryan Stevens Harris (my review here)
Mission: Impossible -Â Fallout (2018, rewatch) directed by Christopher McQuarrie
The Century of the Self (2002) directed by Adam Curtis
Vertigo (1958, rewatch) directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Faust (1926) directed by F. W. Murnau
Blue Velvet (1986, rewatch) directed by David Lynch
La Notte (1961, rewatch) directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
This is fantastic, thanks for writing it. Did you read about Paul Kingsnorths virtual self negation? I’ve also obviously seen similar themes in Freddie deboers writing.