What started as a personal journey towards profound transformation led to a critical introspection on how I have imbued digital technology in every aspect of my life, specifically my social realm. The conflation of key elements—the technological, digital, and social—as either part and parcel of each other or even as interchangeable facets in the discussion of information, engagement, and connectivity can be a source of serious critique in this technologically- and digitally-driven status quo. I started to question how this translated to piecing together my own life through the affordances provided by technologies and digital connections. This also led to realizing how wanting to get out of the confines of this digital and social box I built led to the discovery of new layers of sadness, grief, and loss in the midst of a promised “connectedness” in this networked society. There are even instances when it has become challenging to tease out how disconnecting digitally does not mean socially as well.

As many have seemingly let an avid welcoming of varying degrees of AI (mostly generative AI or genAI) in our lives, I note that we may have also began to let constant grief and loss in beyond our own expectations: the loss of our memory, our identities, and our sense of belonging. The continuous push for genAI capacities seems to brings us to overwhelming levels of unconsciousness and now even the degradation of critical thinking. In the context of media cultures and exposures to them, the needs being addressed through our own making-sense of life through media have inevitably evolved, or frighteningly, on the verge of being homogenized.

This is not to discount or to have any animosity towards what generative AI can offer to aid incapacities or disabilities—to offer a voice when there could seemingly be none. This is to underscore how using varying forms of genAI at critical moments of creating memories, or finding your own voice, or carving your own space, or building relationships and communities can alter an experience so integral in our humanity that we forget the beauty, the surprising joy and pleasure, and the warmth of human lives intersecting at different points in time. And of course, to clearly understand that as demand of genAI increases, so as its material and environmental consequences.

Instead of finding ourselves through dynamics of sociality and natural exploration, we are being offered false premises under the pretense of omnipresence and omniscience. And primarily, of speed and efficiency. This is in the core of Paul Virilio’s critique with media in the modern and postmodern societies, as thoroughly explained by Armitage. In our continuing obsession with speed, by merely abandoning the living in favor of the void of rapidity, we are losing fragments of our lives and have not been able to catch falling into moments of unconsciousness—in mindless scrolling, in skipping music and videos, in relentless consumption of content.

I have been assisted by digital technology in my own memory work for a long while now and it has made me some sort of a recluse to my own life without even trying, making me feel like I have not been present for some time. To somehow recover, I have gone back to analog journaling and I found myself hearing my own voice back. In my head, I hear myself retelling stories about both the big and little details and ideas. Things that I would go back to in order to remember how I felt like, how I thought of it, what I thought was a good response or a good way to think things through. Writing can be an experience so intimate, visceral, and contemplative. It makes one remember how someone felt with the way you spoke, understand the impact that you have to any or all people, navigate messy and inconsistent emotions, and lead you to a retrospection so integral in self-awareness and empathy. If people are starting to just make and refer to a product of a prompt to respond to a grieving friend or a difficult partner or an unwilling coworker, how do we feel anymore? What are we letting stick to us for us to stick together?

But can I—can we—really disengage at the height of shared social struggles, political upheavals, and cultural malformations? I have come to realize that having an impetus to disconnect or disengage is a privilege on its own given the context I am in and the realities I am adjacent to. Given the enforcement of digitality, this situation amplifies the discourse of opting out not as a basic right but as a difficult decision. That to hope for all of individual motives and practices to translate into collective call to action and expression of social justice will be a long shot, and can even be a perilous journey without any policy or institutional safeguards or support.

We are in a liminal space and time now with digitality and algorithms, and the way the world moves and works. In this context, what rings through in our postmodern settings is that speed always comes before the accident. But at the moment, there is a lingering feeling that we are not cautious enough of the unknown, of whatever accidents—as Virilio posits—these new technologies introduce and the enforcement of digitality that ensues. For instance, we deal with this sinister paradox: of people documenting and sharing their journey towards “going analog,” which basically just goes to show that over-consumption of the digital leads to the consumption of digital disengagement, which contributes back in to the digital sphere for more consumption and prosumption.

At a time when the use of these groundbreaking digital technologies such as genAI now become a catalyst for even the most mediocre to lead, to make decisions, and to believe they deserve to have power, we can find hope in the slow and steady rhythm of our social realm: the communities that hold us and be with us as we lament the state of nations and the seeming loss of hope, the families who see to it we have enough to eat and move forward, and the people who understand how we have chosen each other to create a space where we can be safe and free. To lose sight of these and just let what we have felt as an extension of ourselves decide on how we become human is a paradox we cannot afford to allow to take over.