It’s high noon and a veil of snow has slumped the surrounding pines into their roots. As I descend the mountain on my horse, patches of soil rupture through the once enveloping swathe of blinding white. We’ve been heading west for a while now. The horse’s hoofs a quickened pulse as it pounds the trodden earth below. Leaves reappear on the exposed branches of barren trees; the land lays itself flat as if it were preparing to offer itself to me; a fawn springs into the landscape’s shadows. The ridges outlining the horizon begin to swell and the rolling hills have morphed into a craggy mass. With the sun surrendering its grip on the day, the fissures and peaks of the mountains ahead fade into an inky black. I will stay here and rest for some time.
This place where I have decided to rest isn’t real, not in the sense that it’s tangible or tactile. I don’t feel the viscid heat clinging to the hairs on my skin; my hands aren’t calloused by my unyielding grip on the horse’s reins; the air doesn’t smell of early morning’s petrichor; there is no dirt under my nails. This place is West Elizabeth in the online version of Rockstar’s 2018 action-adventure game, Red Dead Redemption 2, and it’s where I go when I can’t temper the crippling symptoms of a now daily anxiety which crescendoed with my increased consumption of social media over the last few years.
As the dominant social media apps accumulated on my homescreen, my free time became allocated to curating my multiple feeds, numbly flicking my thumb across the surface of my phone and unconsciously digesting hours of images, videos, and 280-character blurbs. My only perception of the real was a filtered simulacrum. At first my anxiety manifested in the corporeal: breathing became something I had to tend to and my palms were always sticky with sweat. Tasks then became increasingly difficult to fulfill, my attention chaotic and frenzied. Soon enough I had psychically sunk into myself. Messages from friends went unread for months, invitations to dinners were politely declined, and eventually I had withdrawn completely from the social arena.
This year alone, 65 thousand photos were posted on Instagram, Tik Tok users watched 167 million videos, and 575 thousand tweets were shared per minute[1]. As cyberspace expands infinitely, we are confronted with the physical, emotional, and affective thresholds of our bodies. To subject ourselves to a complete absorption of this surplus of digital information is to undergo a permanent electrocution via overstimulation[2]. This acceleration of information exchange is leaving its psychopathic mark on the collective mind by instilling anxiety into the masses. We glitch, we twitch, we spasm. While the symptoms of a bloated digital age are felt on a communal scale, capitalism has successfully pathologized anxiety as a deficiency on the individual level. We are prescribed pills which alter our brain’s chemical composition; referred to therapists we can’t afford; are given self-help books and told to download meditation apps which promise better sleep, lower stress, and less anxiety. The digital roots of our psychological distress have been conveniently bypassed in favor of privatized persecution.
Last month I ambled through Tate Britain’s Clore Gallery, dedicated to showcasing the oil paintings, sketches, and watercolors of J.M.W. Turner. I had never given much thought to Turner’s oeuvre—surely this highly praised white male painter could do with one less admirer—but my hours spent wandering the digitized topography of Red Dead Redemption had softened me to his romantic landscapes. It surprised me how easy it was to be lost in his work—to settle into the painting’s wrinkles, the fine lines and cracks which have emerged with age; to be arrested by the muddle of browns and greens as rocky mountains merge into luscious forests; to be still in the foggy radiance of a sun which lies just beyond the painting’s borders. In that moment my mind stopped racing, my breathing eased, and my heartrate slowed. I could sense that the other visitors felt it, too: the overwhelming somatic silence that accompanies absolute tranquility. Turner’s paintings were a numinous presence which promised an escape.
Before my visit to Tate Britain, I had gone over a year without seeing an artwork in person. The digital realm of Red Dead Redemption had become my refuge—the pixelated dirt paths my daily constitutional. But what Turner’s work made apparent to me was how badly I craved a return to the spaces where the public sphere can thrive outside of the trappings of the digital. Unfortunately, these continue to be destroyed. Each year brings with it new austerity measures; public grounds are sold off to the highest bidder and converted into private gardens; galleries which exhibited sculptures and paintings have remodeled the white cube into a backdrop for digital experiences primed for social media likes and shares. It is no wonder so many of us suffer from psychic distress: cyberspace has hypersaturated our attention and time with an onslaught of information and there is nowhere to physically retreat. To recall the words of the late Mark Fisher, “what we urgently need is a new politics of mental health organized around the problem of public space.”[3]
I have now deleted most of my social media apps but still maintain my practice of self-medication through Red Dead Redemption. As I slalom through tumbling brooks and jutting branches, the faint melody of a guitar bubbles to the surface in plucks, strums, and squeaks. I wait, patiently, for my breath to steady. But finding refuge in this digitized bucolic landscape when it is the digital I am fleeing from proved to be a folly attempt to soothe my psychic malaise. The only thing I desired in that moment was to be plunged into Turner’s richly textured canvas and to be surrounded, once again, by the public spaces that psychic welfare flourishes on. But before I could motion to turn off my gaming console, the sinister realities of the digital materialized once again, and I was killed just as the moon peered over the land.
[1] Data Never Sleeps 9.0 (2021) Domo. Available at: https://www.domo.com/learn/infographic/data-never-sleeps-9 (Accessed: October 20, 2021).
[2] Berardi, F. (2010) Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation. New York: Autonomedia.
[3] Fisher, M. (2011) “The Privatization of Stress,” Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 48, pp. 123–133.