Community?

Loss is a funny thing. Like death it can be an equaliser, perhaps not the great one that death is, but an equaliser none the less. Loss should be looked upon pragmatically, the more significant the loss, the more we learn. It all depends on context and relativity too. Sometimes the loss of a dream can feel like the loss of a limb. That cold snap, as you regain consciousness and catch a glimpse of the ghost of your dream, whose face you will never fully recall again. We often judge peoples character by how much they have lost or gained, have or have not, rich or poor. More often measured in pounds, and by pounds I do not mean L.B. It could just as easily be dollars, Yen or euros.

At this juncture, you should be asking yourself what, if any, relevance this all has to community. Our judgmental impressions of the modern world’s communities are almost entirely based upon these arbitrary differences. We often hear the drone of the evening news informing our willing ears, before describing a certain set of circumstances, of the type of community the unfolding events have taken place in. This gives us a reference point, a rock of context from which to cast our opinions and real in our own version of the truth.

We live in an age of false networks and imagined town centres. Unknown spaces with perforated edges, pre-packaged ideals and transplantable associations. The human condition is digitised, fired across space in bite sized chunks for our polluted minds to assimilate and relegate to distant memory as quickly as inhumanly possible. We’ve wandered into indefinable territory, adrift in the internet fogs and chat room mists of the machine age. We call the beast a global community, but we forget that community is a human ideal.

We’re constantly traversing this void under assumed names. To be recognised as your human self is to admit that you exist in the human realm. This is not in accordance with the great plan ‘they’ have for us. Those self appointed internet guru prophets who have it in their best interest to keep us simultaneously plugged in and cut off. Praising them for allowing us to continue to live out our lives in their virtual kingdoms, motivated by a carefully cultivated fear of slipping free of the loop around our virtual neck pipes.

My point, if I’m pushed to make one, is to draw attention to the irony of the state of our community. By attempting to create an all encompassing, globally motivated, internet based community; we have destroyed any real sense of community spirit. It’s also fair to say that the online replacement is a dystopian affair devoid of any of the essential qualities that make a community good. Of course the guru prophets will forever insist that the knit is closer than ever. That the weave just gets tighter, when in fact we’re becoming a loosely strung together shit curtain drawn over the window of reality.

Words: Sam Griffiths; Illustration: Holly Dicker