Perfluxity

“The whool of the whaal in the wheel 

of the whorl...”

- James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

        Our response to technology is a lot like swimming. 

        It looks smooth from a distance but up close it is just a series of attempts to stop sinking.  Not very graceful but it seems to have worked.

        Our problem now is that the cloud computing revolution has swelled the ocean bigtime with instant news and new instances, updates and downloads, a blither of information about the latest innovations, styles, hot spots and cool tools.  All this has jacked up the pace of change to a degree that it makes previous revolutions look downright glacial.

          We can respond to this with amusement, surprise, shock, or distress, depending on our sense of tragicomedy.  Most of us react with an odd mixture of all of these at once, a unique form of dizziness due to the warpspeed of change and the overwhelming amount of new stuff.  You know the feeling; you get it every time you google and get 12 million hits.  Or try to decide which new phone to buy.  Or struggle to keep up with the latest software upgrade.

          This desperate attempt to stay afloat leads to unique kind of nausea we might call perfluxity.  It is that familiar feeling of being uploaded and downsized, inputted and outsourced, undermined and overwhelmed all at the same time

          Perfluxity is where perplexity meets the flux of change.  It is disorientation from too much of anything…information, products, choices, changes.  To be perfluxed in the modern world is to be dunked into the sea of things we have made and feel it swirling.  You get a taste of it whenever you dip into the datastream, a double dip when you have to make a choice about anything, and a near drowning from the waves of feedback.

          Take the phone for example.

          It is hard to imagine, but there was once a single phone in the world; it belonged to Alexander Graham Bell.  By 1900 there were hundreds of thousands but they were all the same model.  Now there are as many different kinds of phones as there were total phones at the turn of the last century.  And you can find out more about any one of them on the Web than most humans could find out about everything in their entire lives throughout most of history.

          Feeling tizzy? 

     Welcome to perfluxity, a natural response to the made world.

          People since the Industrial Revolution and the age of mass production have no doubt felt this way.  Recipe for a made world...mix together equal parts of logic and vertigo; add dashes of planning and madness to taste, beat together with order and pandemonium and toss in an obsessive need to remake things.  Heat. 

          Voila...the human adventure.

          What is new now is not the recipe itself but the temperature.  The Web, the computer revolution, the digital conversion, and mobile access have cranked everything up to the boiling point and cooked our neurons in the process.   We go around permanently perfluxed but still adjusting to one revolution – one new magical gizmo –after another

          Yet perfluxity can also be a good thing because it can stabilize us.  If we paid no attention to it we might never get beyond a third-grade approach to life…that is, spin until we throw up.  Loads of fun but not exactly a strategy for living.

          So on the up side perfluxity is a kind of attempt to stay afloat.  Like a castaway bobbing in the ocean but studying the logic of the waves and hoping for an insight, perfluxity is a balance we strike between swimming and drowning.  It is similar to the sensation one might get from a whorling wheel, to borrow Joyce’s imagery.  Or a wheeling whorl for that matter.  Disarray and confusion as myriad forces batter us every whichway but perhaps a hint too at the stately rules of complexity behind it all. 

          To accept perfluxity as a way of life is to deal with change on the most human level.  In other words…don’t be upset about feeling confused and deranged as the world spins and whirls.  We are meant to feel this way.  This is a good thing; an aspect of our humanity that keeps us from actually becoming machines.

          Meanwhile, keep swimming.