We Are What We Are

Describe the internet.

No seriously, turn to your roommate or classmate or fellow employee or family member right now (someone willing to play along), pretend that they’re from 20 or so years ago, and try to describe the concept of the internet to them. Don’t you dare cheat by trying to show it to them or use a dictionary to come up with a formal description. I can wait for a few minutes; I have a bit of other work anyway.

…

Are you back?

Good.

How did you do?

…

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

The internet, like many things, is a common abstract, something so prevalent in our lives that we just assume everyone knows what it is, how it works, and what it’s used for. Yet we forget that people in 1991 would believe that by “web” you meant the one woven by spiders. This challenge was actually issued to me back in high school by my Sci-Fi Literature teacher, in which I desperately described the tangles of connections between all sorts of people all over the world, from a range of simple private chats to entire corporations and world news using these networks as their medium. My teacher was the type to challenge whatever you said for the sake of argument, so he complained that he didn’t want communication, he wanted instant gratification. In desperation to get my answer completely right, I nearly shouted: “Well… there’s Porn!”

Little did my teacher know, or maybe to his knowledge, he gave the class another example of a common abstract: the desire for personal gain. He explicitly said he wanted some sort of immediate and self-serving purpose for this foreign “internet”, that was the painfully obvious version. Yet it took me months, in fact sparked by the beginning of writing this assignment, that I gave the more concealed example. I didn’t want to be wrong and overlooked like the three students who tried before me, I wanted to prove my teacher incorrect and correctly answer a question that he told all of us beforehand was impossible to answer in full. Thinking back, he used that a lot as a motivator, claiming day in and day out that only 3 of the students in class would get to college so everyone would work hard to make it and prove him wrong.

Now you could turn to someone in your building and just say “we are self-pleasing creatures, naturally we only seek to make ourselves contented”. People may look at you as if you’re crazy, or immediately rebut with the sheer amounts of community service they’ve done and how there’s no way they could be selfish. What they don’t understand is that “self-pleasing” doesn’t translate into the modern definition of “selfish”. Society sees “Selfish” as a vice, a greed for attention and affluence that slaughters virtues. “Self-pleasing”, however, is making sure one is happy in our world, a push against discontents that come our way. The chronic volunteer is self-pleasing. Maybe they want the addictive feeling of knowing you brought happiness to someone else, maybe they want to be recognized by the world as a good person. People like Oprah, Brad Pitt and Angeline Jolie, Bono, and Lance Armstrong could fit into that category. Would anyone initially think they were just trying to please themselves with their actions? Probably not. They’d think they were people using their affluence to do good, not that they were helping their little “I”s in the back of their heads.

People can’t see the “I”s in business, in school, in the household, everywhere. Let’s face it, we’re all the heroes of our own tv shows or movies. I’ll be the first to admit that I have come to dream in movie, seeing myself act in my unconscious mind like an Oscar nominee. A distinct border comes with understanding that maybe you’re the sidekick or possibly villain in other peoples’ autobiographical films in their heads, in their universes. Of course, this means there are 6,775,235,700 intersecting universes on one planet, as of 2009. We may be self-pleasing, but in all honesty, that’s what makes the world go round and what makes us all us, even in the earliest mentions of time. With at least vague comprehension, it can actually be a positive thing. But how could one go into detail and explain that inherit form of self-love in full? It would be like describing the Internet to my old sci-fi teacher, oxygen to an extraterrestrial, or water to a couple of young fish.

Of course, if you mention it to my teacher, the porn part does help with gaining interest.