The “flatness” of relationships is inseparable from the commodification of experiences online. Images are removed from their context and virtually transformed into another message, and, as such, we willingly desensitize ourselves from violence, we cut the bond that links us to one another. It materializes in our constant search for universality, for the perfect ideology, the flat, the glabrous, the sanitized - we no longer see the man attacked by a mob, instead, the image becomes a template, the subject becomes “me” and each assailant the recipient for a joke: “2016,” “2017,” “2018,” in a desperate attempt to sell our sadness to the relief of onscreen approval. Do you think about this man, whose trauma has been shared thousands of times, as a joke? He who has been universalized into an empty image, much like any micro-post, ridiculed and then shared by a faceless crowd which chooses to forget that someone is at the receiving end of this mass of interactions. In return, it is easy to demand from someone to formulate their exact demands in 150 signs or less, to “include,” because it is done in a short moment in time, it materializes an unmovable truth, the pleasant and dangerous cushion of fixed ideology. And it takes less effort than to admit that alliances have to be formed by solidarity and love, and not by utilitarianism, because, sometimes, we just don’t have anything in common; I am not you, and yet I will help you because we want to understand each other.
ellievsbear
prguitarman
izzy806
andulkaphoto
amandla
tangentwithtanner
