Chapter Ten
When all about this digital episode of human adventure would
have been told through the lives of characters like Aliya, Richard,
Bram, Emily, Sara, Ahmad, Hamza, and Salika, words of Milan
Kundera—“Insignificance, my friends, is the essence of existence”—
will resonate louder. Yet the downside of the Internet-incited social
media reflected in the school shootings in the USA, the hate crimes all
over, and the worries of parents and the poor are hardly insignificant
for the living today.
The historians of a later century will perhaps call this digital
interlude an episode, brief and incandescent, in the long human story.
They will narrate it not through treaties or wars, but through the
intimate archives of ordinary lives: a teenager refreshing a screen at
midnight, an aging father counting his worth in unseen approvals, a
mother scrolling past catastrophes while stirring a pot that has grown
cold. When all this is finally told, Kundera’s last, almost playful,
sentence will echo with an irony he himself might have savored. For
what appeared trivial in form proved heavy in consequence.
Social media entered human life like a promise whispered
rather than proclaimed. It claimed to abolish solitude and dethrone
gatekeepers, to give everyone a voice and no one a final word. In
its early days, it seemed almost innocent: photographs of meals,
jokes exchanged across continents, a rediscovered classmate smiling
from the past. The gesture was light, the cost negligible. A click, a
like, a fleeting recognition. Insignificance appeared not as a threat
but as a liberation—one could speak without the burden of being
monumental.
Insignificance, repeated at scale, acquires a strange density. The
platforms taught their users a new metaphysics: That existence itself
could be measured, counted, ranked. To be seen was to be, and to be
unseen was a small rehearsal for nonexistence……..
If you agree, and particularly when you disagree, read the whole thing.