Darknet

Facebook is the cruelest content generator, linking
Pageload activity out of simulated twitter feeds, trending
Search engines with the attention economy, streaming
Keyword addresses with hypertext protocol.
Data kept us warm, following
Spoilers in encrypted cookies, geotagging
A little spam with login approvals.
Tumblr surprised us, processing pixel tags over Instagram.
With a mention of a domain, we favorited the instant personalization,
And bookmarked the password into more shareworthy
And browsed Buzzfeed firmware, full-screen chatting about hyperspace identity.

Unreal comment feed.
My iPhone battery is empty,
And no one liked my recent Facebook status update.
With my perfect 0% rating on Rotten tomatoes,
I had to buy all of my Instagram followers.
The NSA does not even track or record the sites I visit.

All of human interaction now is downloadable public relations,
The marketing of the insufficiently famous and their family photos
For the profit of Jesse Eisenberg's simulacrum of Mark Zuckerberg.
Let me take a selfie.
(Stand beside me as I take this selfie.)
Can you smile for this selfie?
And I will show you something more than your
MacBook Pro booting up in the morning,
Or your MacBook Pro logging off at night.
I will show you starvation for attention in a handful of pixels.

Unreal teaser trailer.
I did not know than an epic fail had undone so many.
They said California is the place you ought to be.
Everybody's working for the weekend.
Everybody needs a new romance,
'Til the one day when the lady met this fellow,
The tiny ship was tossed,
And they knew that it was much more than a hunch,
If not for the courage of the fearless crew,
Oil that is, black gold, peak Texas tea,
The Minnow would be lost,
The Minnow would be lost.

Oh Lord, I am not worthy,
But text the word only
And Google will auto-correct it in Silicon Valley.

Do you have no followers, no incoming traffic?
When you scroll around, do you track nothing?
Do you post nothing? What do you post?

"I think we are in MySpace where the virtual dead have allowed their passwords to lapse."

People become brands and brands become logos,
Which become defaced graffiti,
Their links and grievances quickly forgotten in the prevailing white noise
Of trolls, GIFs, cat videos, avatars, and reality shows,
Insofar as anyone can sustain attention towards anything
Before they recheck their cell phone for hours and months of empty time,
(Just a sec, let me just check, hold on a minute),
Occupying a perpetual present, suspended, waiting
For a reaction from a Twitterbot
Or a text reply that never arrives.

Comments

Richard Bellamy said…
I love this post - I love "The Waste Land." Coincidentally enough, I teach it to my A.P. English class and they write poems about 21st century culture and technology, imitating sections from Eliot's poem.
Thanks, Hokahey. I've done similar works as yours, and, as much as I like The Waste Land, I found it a tougher sell to students in comparison to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." One can talk of everything being a remix, contemporary sampling. I like the way Eliot raises questions about how much of one's identity may be formed from what reverberates in one's literary inheritance. If that's not so much the case now, what is our cultural inheritance today? Grand Theft Auto? Mad Men? It leaves me wondering if a Twitter feed will one day be canonized as an important part of contemporary literature.