.
you press send.
something happens. you don't know what. nobody really knows what. we just trust it, the way you cross a bridge without looking down, or hand your words to a stranger and assume the stranger has somewhere to take them.
the thing is, I looked down.
.
your phone takes your thought, or not your thought exactly, a compressed approximation of it, the photograph of a thought, and turns it into electrical impulses and then into light. the light goes into a cable, or a radio wave, or bounces off a satellite 35,000 kilometres above your head. the path changes with the day, the traffic, the weather, the arrangement of infrastructure that nobody in the conversation has ever thought about.
your words pass through a building in Navi Mumbai that is kept at eighteen degrees. people work there. they look after the machines. they don't read the messages. they couldn't if they tried. WhatsApp alone carries more than a hundred billion messages a day.
your I miss you goes through that building alongside someone's grocery list and someone's suicide note and an ad for running shoes. the building doesn't know the difference. it never has.
I keep thinking about that.
.
the void is not dark.
I got that wrong for a long time. I pictured it as emptiness, a black gap between here and there. it's closer to the fullest place that has ever existed: a room where everyone alive is talking at once, nobody can hear anyone, the room keeps growing, and no one can leave.
your message doesn't enter silence. it enters noise so dense it might as well be silence.
.
there's an email on a server in Chennai. it was sent in 2009. a woman in Kolkata wrote it. a man in Chicago was supposed to read it.
he changed his email address in 2011, forgot the password, moved apartments, met someone else, had a kid.
the email is still there. nobody chose to keep it; nobody chose to delete it either. deleting takes an action. staying takes nothing. left alone, digital things last forever.
the love letter and the spam sit on the same drive, at the same temperature, on the same electricity. the machine doesn't know which one is sacred. nobody ever asked it to.
.
Lovecraft was afraid of the ocean. people remember the tentacles and the madness and the sleeping gods, but under all of that the man was scared of how big the sea was, how deep, how little it cared about him. what frightened him was something that vast not even registering that he existed.
the void is like that, with one correction. Lovecraft assumed that kind of indifference was hostile. I don't think it is.
.
a guy in Mumbai sends a breakup text. his phone dies before he sees if it went. he charges it at a CCD for forty minutes. when it comes back on: nothing. no reply, no read receipt.
she saw it. she'd just turned her phone face-down.
the message crossed 300 miles in nine milliseconds. it was the last four feet that took forever.
the void delivered it perfectly, at the speed of light. the forty minutes, the assumption of cruelty, the pride that set into something permanent, that was all us.
we fail each other through the void and then blame the void.
.
when you type a word and press send, the word dies a little at every step. the thought in your head isn't the signal in the cable, and the signal isn't the pixels on their screen. you felt something. you squeezed it into language. language became text, text became light, light travelled, light became text again, text became language, and language became a feeling on the other end.
a feeling near yours. a cousin of it. a very good photocopy, maybe a perfect one. you'll never know, because there's nothing to hold it up against.
every digital conversation is two people alone in separate rooms, reading photocopies of each other's thoughts and assuming they're the originals.
we built the most sophisticated communication system any species has ever had, and "I cannot feel what you feel" is exactly as true as it was before.
the void didn't make that distance. it just lit it up.
.
The Void Has No Hands.
it can't hold anything, or put anything down, or reach for you. it receives and stores and transmits and that is all. nobody in the history of undersea cable engineering wrote a spec that said this system should understand what it carries.
and yet someone strung a cable across the Arabian Sea. someone looked at thousands of kilometres of water and said, I have something to say and this distance isn't going to stop me. every server farm, every cell tower, every blinking light in every quiet building in Chennai and Navi Mumbai and Hyderabad was built because someone couldn't bear the gap.
the void was built by longing.
it can't know that. knowing needs hands.
but we know. we built it because we couldn't stand the silence, and now we live inside it and have forgotten that the whole humming, light-pulsing cathedral of five hundred-odd cables is a love letter. from us, to the distance, saying no.
.
I don't know what to do with that. I'm not sure there's anything to do with it.
you sit with it, the way you sit with anything too big to hold. the noise that sounds like silence. the photocopies. the emails nobody will read. the four feet that take forever.
you let it be there, and you press send anyway.
.