April 25, 2014

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I've spent the past year, four (3+1) and seven (6+1) per day, in fact, trying realize an important goal: to follow every account on Twitter. I created 330,000 accounts filled to the brim with followed accounts, 2000 followed accounts per account, and then another 165 accounts to follow those. Those accounts were absorbed by an additional account. Every day, I have to spend the early morning hours creating 68 new accounts to follow the new accounts created in the previous 24 hours, and those accounts are again, absorbed into a new account that begins the Following Day's bucket-filling.

I aggregated all of my accounts into one continuous feed. Every second I'm bombarded with thousands of tweets: questions, answers, epithets, prayers, quotes, platitudes, retrojections, declarations, explanations, assertions, retractions, fallacies, syllogisms and threats, links to videos, to songs, to articles, to ebooks and to products and intermingled, the torrent of positive and negative affirmations: retweets.

How does one track thousands of tweets per second? How can any human mind process that stream of information? These questions miss the mark. Comprehension of content was never my goal. The endless stream of expression evokes an understanding I've never had in a church. Millions claw toward ideological dominance in an unfettered marketplace of ideas, but when compiled, when I sit at once entangled and tangential to perceive the totality, it is utterly, divinely unintelligible.

And, God, there is power there.

If we could only compile everything and stand outside of it. Compile the biosphere and float away, watch it shrink before our eyes until it glows very far away, a quaint twinkle in the void. We've imagined this before, prompted by reverant narration over slideshows of images of the earth seen from the moon, seen from the edge of the solar system, "this tiny blip of light" and so on. From millions of miles away, I could encircle the earth with index finger and thumb, feel that surge of divine understanding: so small our concerns are, so small our conflicts.

So small it all is, because I have made it so.