The Year Butt | 2022
by Candi Bartlett | December 29, 2022
Once upon a time, the world was disconnected. Humans shared very little about themselves in modern, civilized society (whatever the hell that is), and the human experience, the true breadth of the human spectrum, was dimmed and quiet. “Normalcy” ruled. Normalcy, an ever changing definition of how to exist. Then, the humans started talking, like, really talking.
It started with travelling orators, spreading information to ever-growing groups of people. Then writing, human hands tediously making copies and forever fucking up pretty cool stuff with misinterpretation and biased expectation. The printing press helped - copies were actual copies and words spread from shore to shore, not just door to door.
The telephone meant one call could tell you what is happening right now across the globe. People left home because it became easier to leave. Easier to spread the knowledge of one small world bubble to another, very different world bubble thousands of miles away. All those bubbles, bumping into each other. Everyone looking in at cultures and life experiences they’d never seen before. Television told the human story in news, images from everywhere of war, happiness, and other humans doing the same things you are. Grocery shopping, holding a baby, speaking maybe in a language you cannot understand but with eyes of sadness or glee, which you can understand - deep in your cells. With fiction, T.V. offered a way to show varied life experiences through characters who became family, sharing your living room every week.
Then, the internet. The freaking internet. Ideas never flew so fast. Information never knew how good it looked until it raced along the shiny super highway. From eyeball to eyeball, in a blink. The humans keep talking. All of the scholars that have ever been, every bit of information the humans have learned and shared, play out right now and at all times. We share not just our thoughts but how we think. The humans are in a place of great understanding. Understanding barriers to communication that come from misunderstanding not the information but how we process it. We make images in our head, or make none at all. Some of us count our steps when we walk. We are overstimulated and non-verbal, under stimulated and filled with endless energy. We move with legs and wheels and great feats of innovation. Some have access to top-of-the-line education, some have access to outdated, biased textbooks. We see differently, interpret reality differently, but seem to all want the same thing. Connection. Community. To share space with others.
The humans are finally unafraid to share how they think. Has the internet become a human operations manual? Maybe. For sure, normalcy has no place in the time of information. The great human spectrum is showing itself in all of its brilliancy. It’s like, the fanciest of the technicolor dream coats.
It almost feels like we are on the edge of evolution, if we could just stop being buttholes for five minutes.
Cheers, fellow humans! Here's to being the least of the buttholes in the new year.
<3
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