Mute

Seven thousand words in, and I realize that I'm overdoing this paper. I might get an A, but it's pointless. The marks don't indicate anything beyond "I was here."

And even then, what's the point of proving knowledge? Two steps away, there is a throng of people, hundreds easily. A good majority of them are arguing inane day-to-day facts, precipitated through a process of profound and enforced ignorance. It's dangerous to be too smart. It's dangerous to be even a little bit smart. But grab just a grain of truth, and tie it to an emotional message, and you have the kernel of a revolutionary idea.

This is a dangerous science, mostly because it doesn't follow the rules of causality. Imagine a scientist in a lab coat, trying very hard to catalyze a reaction. On one morning, his assembled experiment fizzles, and the outcome is failure. The next morning, his ingredients and his assemblage is exactly the same, but this time the experiment takes off, rapidly producing the desired outcome. According to science, there would be a so-called "hidden" or unaccounted-for variable that the scientist missed, and the race would be on for him to try and discover this hidden condition for the experiment to succeed. This is also the approach sociologists and communications experts attempt when dealing with the success or failure of media adoption.

But there's a secret. There is no variable. The scientist's experiment succeeded simply because it was done the next day, and not the first. But even then, the day on which it happened is irrelevant to the experiment - it cannot be accounted to produce the desired result consistently. So it goes with the masses; introduce the ingredients, and its entirely up to the environment to produce the desired results. There is no quantifying it, and it's completely arbitrary. Even a successful introduction, for example, the Kony 2012 campaign, is subject to the whim and conversional nature of the fickle public. It appeared the desired result was achieved, but once the communities got hold of the message, it was torn apart, reassembled, compared and ultimately discarded.

The message went viral, but strangely, the body of the public reacted to it. Became immune to it. This is a new trend, that highly-connected individuals work as mast cells, binding to ideas, comparing them - analyzing them, rather than just blindly passing them on. The results are still highly arbitrary, but this demonstrates a huge change in how viral media works. Now there are elements of fast-acting immunity: skepticism, critical analysis, and a desire to discuss rather than to enforce. The pushback against questioning adoption is huge. Our case with the Kony Campaign illustrated the vehemence with which people defended a campaign which they knew very little about. It was an emotional stake - people want to believe in something, to belong in something. Regardless of the reality imposed by a rational look at the situation, those who supported the Kony 2012 campaign created their own reality, which isn't all that surprising when you consider the lifestyles imposed on North Americans.

Our lives are rife with incongruities and double-standards. Moral and ethical ambiguity isn't just present, it permeates every level of society. We can never really be sure who we are, or that what we are doing is good. The toolkit we're given when we're young is composed largely of enforced indifference, of apathy. Given the chance to join, or create, a good cause, the average person won't balk, and they'll defend to the death the ideal they've created for his or herself.

There's just no reasonable way of predicting or anticipating when, where, or how people will adopt these ideals, en masse. And now, more than ever, we should be wary of this.

Aden

There's a cold war in bed. Fidget and I aren't talking for a bit, and she throws the blankets in frustration. I just curl over and try to sleep, before the allergies kick in again and I have to get up. It's about two hours before air stops reaching my lungs, and I get up to rectify the situation with some pharmaceutical magic.

Her frustration momentarily forgotten, she asks "Are you okay?" The next five minutes will tell me. Thankfully, pseudo-ephedrine hasn't lost it's punch, and within ten minutes, I'm able to breathe again. Senseless cats and burning weed be damned, I needed fresh air. Foggy weather and no moon out, it's just me and the midnight traffic.

I'm small, fading to insignificance, dragging this whole sordid arrangement with me. Politics, social engineering, it's a can of pre-fab contradictions, and I wish I could just put it down. But even if I try, I can always feel the fingers on spine, the whisper in my ear. Like a Rorschach blot, once you see the image, it never goes away no matter how many times to blink or rub your eyes, look away, shake your head.

Fidget's roommate can't sleep, but his obsession is observation, scientific pursuit. He's out on the telescope most nights. Not tonight though, too foggy.

I go back to bed, curl up. Fidget curls up next to me, argument forgotten, the cold war over.

The miracle of technology, it's said, brings people together. If anything, I've seen, it tears us apart. It exposes us, again and again, to our own personal anathemas. People and ideas we'd rather didn't exist, or at the very least, never spoke to us. No firm ground, no rarefied air.

I wonder if you still read this. I know, I've said it before that I'm getting ready to be rid of this thing. This... leftover from my old years, when I was a different person, in a different place, a different time. But that's just it, isn't it? I was still looking back then. I was still trying to figure things out, finding my place in the world one bit at a time. There was something intimately sexual about a person, blind to humanity, fumbling about in the dark. You could just... interpose yourself, and my hands would find you. Because, quite simply, you wanted to be found. Again and again.

I wonder if it's still that way for you. Whereas I was just trying to keep my head above water, you were trying your hardest to stay in the pool. Our ideas for morality had never landed at your shores, and it made everything you did seem strange, almost chaotic, in a beautiful, almost erotic, kind of way.

I wonder if you still read this, because I'm not the seeker I used to be. I'm not blindly groping, but rather traveling with one eye open. I found bits and pieces of myself, spread about from one crises to the next, but you left no footprints. I can close my eyes and catch a half-remember scent or witty comment, but there were no footprints and no paper trails. You were a ghost in the world presented to me. You didn't want to be found here, where you could be judged.

I'm an author now. I was before, but never like this. Completely free to produce whatever I wished. I've finished a story. That's something I never thought I would do - finish what I started. That's destination talk, when you were always more interested in the journey, in the experience. I'm going to publish my first story soon, as my own publisher. It's a pretty mature story, but I think you'd like it. It's believable because it's not the world I grew up in, dictated by morals and rules. It's believable because as I was writing it, I thought about you and the others, how you would all behave in a room together. It's believable because morality isn't something that can be laid out in a sentence, or even a book.

It's difficult being a lover again, not because I don't know what to do, but rather because I know what's going to happen in the future. You told me yourself, being out of it was like freedom, not because you didn't love the person, but because their paths determined where you could, and couldn't go. You taught me to have fun in the present, and I wonder if you still do. So much has changed. I wonder if you've forgotten?