Every man now an island

Express Tribune

20-07-2025

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The tragic deaths of two showbiz celebrities, Ayesha Khan and Humaira Asghar, gone unnoticed for days in one case and months in the other, have exposed the ugly face of our connectivity and sociability in the virtual world. Contrary to John Donne's No Man Is an Island, social media has paradoxically turned man into an island. Our virtual relationships are just a mirage whose pursuit, however, cannot replace our craving for human connection.
Among more than 700 thousand Humaira Asghar's Instagram followers, there must have been her friends, close ones, and relatives. Nobody noticed the deafening silence of a human being so active on the virtual platforms. Our insularity bordering on apathy has rendered us hollow like the stuffed men of TS Eliot. Screen tears drain real concern and care.
It seems the more we are connected to the so-called virtual world, the less we are lassoed to our inner world. Without enjoying the bliss of our inner world, we will exhibit no empathy in the outer world. Albert Camus says, "And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world."
The inner moorings guarantee mindfulness — an endangered species in a world infested with FOMO. We are so overconnected to the flashy and fleeting virtual landscape that we don't notice who goes out of our frame temporarily or permanently.
Henry Barthes, the lead character as a substitute teacher in the Adrien Brody starrer movie Detachment (2011), scrawls three words on the chalkboard: assimilate, ubiquitous and doublethink. He interacts with his class to ascertain the meaning of assimilation and ubiquitous: "Always absorbing everything everywhere, all the time." Consciousness is being treated as corporate landfill. Gen Z knows brand logos more than civic rights, courtesy of algorithmic predation. This is a resounding victory of "ubiquitous assimilation".
He intends to disillusion his students hypnotised by "modern consciousness" when he explains the meanings of doublethink: "To deliberately believe in lies while knowing they are false. Examples of this in everyday life: 'Oh, I need to be pretty to be happy. I need surgery to be pretty. I need to be thin, famous, fashionable.'" Then, he utters the seismic indictment, venting his anguish and concern for his students: "This is a marketing holocaust. Twenty-four hours a day for the rest of our lives, the powers that be are hard at work dumbing us to death."
Almost after fourteen years, these words have evolved from a cinematic dialogue to a cultural autopsy report, diagnosing how centrifugal are the corporate and algorithmic forces hellbent upon wiping our authentic human imagination — the last bastion of human autonomy. "How are you to imagine anything if the images are always provided for you?" Barthes questions his students' neural colonisation.
"We all need something to distract us from complexity and reality," exclaims Barthes in a soliloquy. That 'something' contextually is human affinity, and "complexity and reality" is of detachment of humans from humans and from their own inner selves. The attachments stand depleted and severed by virtual realities - the glossy facades displayed on virtual fora.
Stressing the social role of community, Barthes says: "We have such a responsibility to guide our young so that they don't end up falling apart, falling by the wayside, becoming insignificant." Media literacy has become as life-saving as CPR. Algorithms must be regulated like public utilities. Just as the Allies dismantled IG Farben — world's largest chemical cartel, which set up a plant at Auschwitz and conducted drug experiments on live inmates during the WWII — "to render impossible any future threat ... to world peace", we must shake off Big Tech's monopoly on our consciousness to save our inner peace.
It's high time that we dismantled the infrastructure of the attention economy. To salvage the reattachment underlines shutting off our always-on staring screens that feed us nothing but lies. Like Martin Luther King Jr, let's have a dream of rebuilding our worlds where imagination isn't addicted to the opium of algorithms.
Khuda hum ko aesi khudaii na dey
Ke apnay sivaa kuchh dikhaii na dey