The Feed

The cat is in a sun puddle. The agent says he fired five rounds and she had seven holes. The hawk fledglings are from last year. The gas is going up. The moon is a football.

This is the feed. This is the composite text of the present tense, delivered in portions small enough to swallow without chewing. We have developed a new relationship with information, which is to say: we have developed no relationship at all. What we have instead is a sequence, a continuous issuance of the world, each item separated from the next by a thin horizontal rule that performs the function of forgetting.

You scroll through it the way you scroll through a menu at a diner you have been going to for thirty years. You are not reading. You are confirming. The items are different but the menu is always the same: here is something that will make you angry, here is an animal, here is something that will make you afraid, here is another animal, here is something that requires your immediate moral attention but offers no mechanism for action, here is a bird.

Senator Blumenthal asks whether a citizen working lawfully should be arrested. The senator knows the answer. The secretary knows the answer. Everyone watching knows the answer. The question is asked anyway, because the asking is now the thing — the record is the point, and the record scrolls down like everything else.

Meanwhile in Caversham, Reading, someone has noticed that the moon looks like a football. They have photographed it and shared it with the world. In Kärnten, Austria, the morning light falls on a nature park the way it always has. The bunnies are grateful for nummies. All of this is happening at the same time as everything else.

This is not cynicism. Cynicism requires a prior belief that was subsequently disappointed. This is just a description of the texture of contemporary attention — the way it moves, what it touches, what it leaves behind.

The feed refreshes. The hawk is still a fledgling. The agent still fired five rounds. The cat has found another sun puddle.

We scroll on.