It’s contents are aggregated. The unique yet somehow familiar fingerprints are only so until they’re bucketed and sold to curators of cultural identification.
The things that engage us are collected, chopped and categorized, and we collectively become a deep well of data. We become distilled statistics to be pored over by bespeckled analysts seeking truth in numbers.
And it comes around full circle. The originality we’re so eager to share with others, our clever, well-groomed and spotless identities are not owned by us. They’re fed to us. What we’re so eager to share is picked up with equal amounts of vigor for the sake of understanding how to construct a social relevance and therefore sell us more of it.
The waving flag is meandering and commonplace, the manifest a generic prescription for belonging.
The gun rang out years ago to commence the never ending and cyclical popularity contest, the slow burn of self-actualization, the self-aggrandizing addiction of junkyard thoughts and intentional moments of being.
We grasp and quickly dismiss advertising, no longer insulted by it’s targeting. We don’t mind conspicuous marketing ploys so long as it allows us to write in blood on the internet and perhaps enjoy an open bar.