ἑαυτοῦ ἐπιμελεῖσθαι [but 0101010101010101] [Olivia Long, Lonely City]

“What did I want?  What was I looking for?   What was I doing there, hour after hour?   Contradictory things.  I wanted to know what was going on.  I wanted to be stimulated.  I wanted to be in contact and I wanted to retain my privacy, my private space.  I wanted to click and click and click until my synapses exploded, until I was flooded by superfluity.  I wanted to hypnotics myself with data, with coloured pixels, to become vacant, to overwhelm any creeping anxious sense of who I actually was, to annihilate my feelings.   At the same time I wanted to wake up, to be politically and socially engaged.  And then again I wanted to declare my presence, to list my interests and objections, to notify the world that I was still there, thinking with my fingers, even if I’d almost lost the art of speech.  I wanted to look and I wanted to be seen, and somehow it was easier to do both via the mediating screen.”

[Lonely City]