…and half of the Internet’s landmass exists only in our heads.

Before the creation of mass media, the only parasocial relationship was between the individual and their chosen god, barring an emperor or two, of course. Gutenberg came and changed all that, for the literate elites at first, then with the increase of literacy, the lower classes began to gain access to information about people they didn’t know, had never met, and in the case of printed fiction, were not even real.

Later, radio implanted more familiar strangers into the heads of the masses, with television and cinema soon adding glowing faces to disembodied voices, further solidifying the realness of these unreal connections. People became devoted to Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, then James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, and Joan Blondell. McQueen, Wayne, Brando, Monroe, Loren, and Bardot.

As the era of Stallone and Schwarzenegger, Pfeiffer and Basinger hit its peak, so the internet quietly arrived to expand this psychic geography a million times over.

2026: any one of us can have countless online personas saying countless contradictory statements, most of which are lies. Some lies are the kind we tell on our resume, polished truths and enhanced representations. Other lies are the sort the devil told in the Bible, total falsehoods about lives and worlds that do not exist.

We are hardwired from birth to judge books by their covers, but most of us feel compelled to read what’s inside, altering our judgements according to new information. In the case of bidirectional digital media, such verification is not possible, and we are left to infer and extrapolate in whatever way our imagination sees fit.

Solipsism insists nothing is real but ourselves, and even that is up for debate. What does a mind do when it is equipped to deal only with a world where everyone is reachable within a days walk, but is then thrust into a world where all people are accessible by way of a grand, ethereal cloud, a misty world in which truth is obscured and meaning is based largely on personal inference?

Refute the We of the so-called Global Village, and refute every I that populates it. All we find here are the emperor’s new clothes walking about with no bodies inside them.

No matter how much we wish it so, we cannot know the whole world, and to try is to distract ourselves from a far more important pursuit, the knowing of ourselves.