[https://bananapeel.substack.com/p/japan-ile-ife-and-technological-nationalism]

Not to mix similes involving ancient civilizations, but I wonder if the greatest legacy of America’s apogee as an imperial power won’t be, as it was with Rome, the entrenchment of a religion that it adopted fairly late in its lifetime: cyber-gnosticism.

From the cyber-gnostic perspective, the unmediated world of people and things is gross, dissatisfying, and too frequently indifferent to the feelings and wants of the individual—and therefore it is more sensible to value digital artifacts, entities, and experiences over their physical analogues. Owing to this, cyber-gnosticism holds that one’s online persona (or personae) is one’s true self (or selves), and that the release of dopamine in and of itself matters more than the activities that actuate it (so that flirting with a potential mate over dinner and conversing with a virtual boy-/girlfriend are fungible experiences, provided the one feels as rewarding as the other).

Our alien visitors might well conclude that at some point in the early twenty-first century, for some inexplicable reason, we completely lost interest in our world and in each other.