We Are the Show People

We live at the tail end of more than a century of mass production. Look up from these pages and take a glance around your room, or even outside. Almost all the human artifacts you see have been mass produced. Books, furniture, electronics, clothing, automobiles, mailboxes, the airplanes flying overhead, the asphalt used to pave the streets — all of it came from a factory. One-of-a-kind things, like the ceramic dish an elementary school child makes for his mother in art class, are exceedingly rare. In a way that has made the relationship between the creature and the Creator ambiguous and unstable, human beings stole fire from God. What we stole was not the fire of birth, not the power to create ex nihilo, but the fire of the forge, the power to fudge real creation by stamping out reproductions ad infinitum.

There’s one more thing to add to the list of mass-produced items: us. Not the flesh-and-bones, body-and-soul us but the everywhere-in-cyberspace us, the avatars with which we have filled the ubiquitous electronic mind. If anything, the latter seem to have overshadowed the former. Our bodies and souls have become staging grounds for the social-media plays we put on about our imagined selves. These performances use the power of mass production, the effortless and endless reproduction of image and voice, to obscure their origins in favor of the seemingly much more interesting Me, Myself & I Revue always spooling out somewhere online.

As with all mass production, however, when the human person is subjected to the same basic make-more-and-more mindset that has clogged landfills with throw pillows and Model Ts, there are marginal costs, big ones. Factories, it turns out, wreck the natural environment. The marginal cost of convenience is a world full of poison. The marginal costs of mass producing the human form in digital format are even higher. God made each of us a singular being in His own image and likeness. When we mass reproduce that image and likeness, we not only make cheap imitations, we cheapen our divine origins by the very act of reproduction. Our online avatar is not so much a sound-and-image snapshot of ourselves as it is a parasite feeding off our lifeforce to sustain an infinite array of Doppelgängers in cyberspace. The more photos and videos of ourselves we upload, the more our bodies distort and our minds darken. It is not free to post selfies to Instagram. The mediating screen really does steal God’s fire from the soul. We semi-Prometheans face payback for our theft.

Some people create online personas with toned muscles and perfect hair. Some perform online as binge eaters or thrill seekers, stuffing themselves full of food or hanging by one hand from radio towers atop skyscrapers. Some, in the throes of transgenderism, show off the scars on their chests where their breasts had once been, or the plastic breasts a doctor implanted where once there had been pectoral muscles. Many people jump off bridges or in front of trains when they realize the avatar they created has an insatiable desire for more and more of the real person. Many more try to cut a deal with the devil they’ve unleashed, lashing out at other avatars or posting more and more images and videos, flak-like, camouflage-like, so those other avatars will never see the real person.