Consider that screen. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever meet, every human who ever went online, lived out their lives.
The aggregated of all of our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident movements, calls to action, fundraisers, likes and dislikes, every influencer and follower, every troll and meme lord, every creator and patron, every young couple in love, every app founder’s legacy, every youtube video, every masterclass teacher, every fitness instructor, every twitter celebrity, everything uploaded in the history of our species lived there - on a screen, suspended in our palm.
The screen is a very small interface in the vast richness of our 3D reality called Life. Think of the billions of hours spent by all those teenagers on social media so that in a chance occurrence they could become momentary celebrities for a fleeting moment on that tiny screen. Think of the endless cruelties enabled by large tech companies in order to maximize profit. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to monetize each of us, rewarded by the public stock market, how fervent our greed.
The artifice, the imagined importance of these screens, the delusion that they deserve our attention 24/7 for some strange desire to superficially connect with humans we are not with, while forsaking loved ones right next to us at the dinner table, are challenged when one looks up from the screen.
To my mind, there is perhaps no better symbol that represents our desperate need to create a new paradigm for human connection. To me, the screen is an incredible technology that served a very valuable purpose in the evolution of communication and underscores that progress requires forward movement and to cherish the screen, while building the next interfaces, boldly.
-Sly Spencer Lee, on a large screen August 30, 2022
An homage to the great Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. Not a perfect analogy but I felt inspired by sitting on a late night flight back home, seeing everyone on their phones. A reminder of the insignificance of what we do on our tiny screens. Look up