Build Your Own World From Home! (2020)
Let us imagine that the matrix is not a dystopic simulation of the future looming above our better reality. The matrix is imagination itself, plugged into a digital network. A universe of abstractions; of mental worlds in continuous relation. The intervals between imaginations, the space in which we explore reality, is increasingly filled and mediated by interactions with the digital world. Healthy natural mental processes, when integrated into an ever-connected network of digital worlds, puts one’s world in a position where it is always challenged, penetrated by the digital products of others; by the mental worlds of others. This bio-digital network creates a mesh that separates consciousness from the material biological reality. A mesh whose fibres are intermeshed with the fabric of reality, whose holes are constantly shrinking making the real and with it the body, the source of consciousness less and less accessible.
The absurdity of the present is that we live in such a matrix voluntarily, and the decision to stop being more invested in imaginary worlds than in the material one is an extremely subtle one. Because of its subtlety, it’s one of the few remaining choices we are still free to make which contradicts the system that enslaves us and undermines it without increasing its power. The choice, translated to the binary language of the late capitalist world boils down to the following duality: A–do you want to live in the real, in the material biological world, in nature, on earth, the spec of dirt floating in its relations to the stuff of the universe. B–Do you want to live in worlds as real as the material one, but produced by corporations and governments where reality itself is commodified, monitored and manipulated for the benefit of the few.