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March 28, 2019

Is The Internet Destroying Society? Yes—And No.

Brokenness is wandering range-free through the global mind.

I have a brain that compartmentalizes trauma. There are hidden chambers with terrible secrets. The mainframe—where I operate the mouth—is not always aware of things that have happened or are happening to me. This is also the case with my emotions. While I manage the “to-do” list, a more primal experience is going on in the background. Occasionally this is felt as a skirmish of emotions and reactions. Anger and grief, fierce rage and melancholy, a tango between combatants who don’t understand why they are on the dance floor together.

I use my brain as a reference point for this question about the internet and the dance that’s swirling in the black void that connects us—one comment at a time. Before this computer link, most harm flew beneath the check-behavior radar or was intentionally hidden to enable predators. With social media, people find it nearly impossible to escape the horrors that were occurring long before we became a click away from knowing. And knowing means knowing. To illustrate this point further, please follow the link to my video on this topic in regards to witnessing trauma and healing The Choice Sucks.

And now, brokenness wanders range-free through the global mind.

The MeToo movement, kids in cages, child sex-trafficking, money laundering, backroom deals with oligarchs, international subterfuge, abuses of refugees, and family secrets no one ever wanted made public are unfenced and untagged. Muzzles and leashes, don’t tells and threats are less deterrence when walls are obsolete. The faster the internet moves, the more frantic those who hold power—be they governments, institutions, or families—are to create distance and distraction. Connected, visibly-open communities have the ability to see who is doing what to whom and formulate the understanding of why it matters.

With this unrestricted movement toward witnessing, the internet is destroying previous incarnations of societies, and it is building versions that are still undefined. Similarly, dormant synapses in my brain have begun to stretch into compartments that have been blocked for decades. The tango between fury and woe is only a few steps from presenting itself and I have no idea what that will mean. Certainly, it’ll incite a global-mind change, as the internet continues to do with our world view. Both these situations have the option of being seen as neither good nor bad, but hovering somewhere in the middle depending on the day.

Perhaps it is time to stop donating the precious minutes of our lives and the planet to unwitnessed and unresolved trauma.

It is my intention to aim my brain and nudge the world toward awareness with the reminder that knowing the full-story enables us to feel, right wrongs, and accept that life is both harsh and lovely.

In the end that simply is all there is.

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