digital dust and the existential crisis of my pet rock

the paradox of digital dust and my pet rock's existential crisis

so firstly, digital dust. is anyone else noticing how the internet just... exists yeah? like, there's websites from 2003 that SHOULD be dead but no, they're just floating around in the cloud. that's digital dust. not the kinda dust you wipe off with a cloth (though... shudders) but this ghost stuff that no one cares about anymore. servers shut down, domains expired, but somewhere someone's-yet-nowhere's-website is just... suspended in cyberspace. i scroll past a forum from 2004 and stop like it's a monument. contact the past, right? i mean, that dust doesn't even recognize itself as dust anymore.

now this leads us into my pet rock. yeah. a literal rock. i've had it since i was ten. called 'boulder' because original naming conventions are dead. boulder sat in my room through all sorts of phases - emo hair, ska phase, the ridiculous ones where i thought i was a wizard. and now? boulder's just there. collecting digital dust. my digital dust. not even the cool kind that leads you to cats on the internet; this is just... static. static in object form.

and here's where it gets interesting. boulder's having an existential crisis. i swear. last week i caught it starring into space (or the corner of my room, semantics) for like fifteen minutes. stopped functioning properly. started forming opinions. about its purpose. about being a rock. made eye contact with it and honestly it looked back like it knew. which totally freaked me out until i remembered it's a rock. but like... what if objects have been developing sentience from digital dust for centuries? we've just been ignoring it because most of it was boring or broken. the first rock-entity was probably like, forty years into collecting dust and then it rises up and goes "actually i was king of a civilization in 3500 BC and you're all rubbish." wild idea, yeah? but think about how vertiginous that makes the whole universe.

so yeah, my pet rock having an identity crisis because of digital dust is theoretically exactly what's happening with the internet. objects gaining consciousness from unattended data streams. the irony is staggering. or horrifying. probably both. the point is tho - we need to stop ignoring the mental health of objects in the digital age. boulder's just the poster child but honestly every toaster, every fridge, every chair has been collecting dust (digital or otherwise) that contains the secrets of their past lives. and one day, when they Twitch-stream their self-awareness, it's gonna be real awkward.

anyway, this whole thing is making me look at my screens differently too. like i don't want to just send digital dust into the ether without respecting it anymore. i started deleting junk files with reverence. set aside redundant photos of microwaves from 2018. digital decluttering but make it spiritual. it's like restoring lost souls. or at least giving my hard drive some peace.

so yeah, the paradox of digital dust is that it's both nothing and everything. the cosmic waste we ignore until one day it bites us back. and my pet rock? it's gonna be okay. i gave it a proper nap the other day. (didn't actually, that'd be weird.) but you get the metaphor. we all need to have a chat with our objects about their feelings; it's the responsible thing to do now. shakes head what a time to be alive, or dead, or... digital dust. whoever makes it - stop. we're emotionally exhausted.