We live in the digital age, and life in the metropolis is its big accomplice. Very much like a daily prayer, we say our ‘Rest World’ before falling asleep and a ‘Hail World’ as soon as we open our eyes, our digital talisman in our hands, like a rosary.
As we wake up we check if there is any new message from family and friends abroad on Whatsapp, then we check the AQI pm 2.5 level in the city to know if we are allowed to open the windows. Breakfast is press review time: while our kid finds his morning joy in rediscovering his blocks, magnets, books, animal figures, my wife and I read and comment headlines from google news, baidu news, sina news and the scandals of the day on social media.
We buy everything online: toilet paper, clothing, Christmas gifts, fresh moss, frozen fish, photo gear, HEPA filters, milk and many other things. The spiral of price comparing spreads over yihaodian, taobao, jindong, amazon: multiple accounts, profiles, passwords, VIP deals and virtual coupons. Just buying milk for the week hardly takes less than ten minutes.
In a few years, withdrawing from an ATM, carrying a wallet, touching notes and coins have become obsolete.
We just swipe our mobile, just a seamless transaction between screens: no pain of seeing money slipping out of our hands, no bacteria, no hassle of any extra burden nor loss of time.
Our life is a data cloud getting bigger and bigger, like the cardboard of packages delivered daily to our home with a click, piling up on the front door. If we kept it all, probably by now we could build a five stories house out of it.
I really don’t know why I do it, but since six years I have been keeping the used capsules of all the espressos I’ve been drinking here.
Convenience and practicality sometimes
have an odd aftertaste.
Millions of people live like us, they produce an equal amount of data and trash.
A Chinese classical post-reform tale is the trash collector who becomes a tycoon, although the gold=feces analogy is an ancient one.
A gigantic bulk of trash can actually produce a wealth which goes much higher than its toxic fumes, but data from 1.4 billions of people are the foundations of higher skills: algorithmic clairvoyance, precognition, social engineering, consent manufacturing and many other witchcraft tricks fancily rebranded by two centuries of sci-fi culture.
We all produce data daily: where we eat, what we buy, how we get informed, who we trust, how we spend our free time, how we pick our holiday destinations and so on. We float in the illusion of self-determination, we stress the importance of our personal choices, we iterate the mantra ‘It is my opinion, my idea’ but the more we get fascinated by artificial intelligence, the clearer it gets that our life is mostly made by an un-unique set of repeating and controllable variables. Smart digital intelligence - offspring of our daily activities - first gather information on the food we like, and one second later they’re able to shape our taste, not without a wink at our ego.
Our identities are ultimately fictional as the masks in a bianlian performance,
there’s no inner consistency.
China and the megacity are very good at amplifying all that: who I am? where do I come from? what are my roots? Is there such a thing as roots?
Questions you ask yourself when you cross eight-lanes arteries every day, when the crowd swallows you up, when the noise of cheering malls, honking cars and flashing screens numb your senses.