When I and my family vacation at the beach, we sometimes get the opportunity to observe this reality at work. Pods of bottlenosed dolphins prowl up and down the shoreline after daybreak, delighting the countless hairless bipeds who dawdle in the sands. But unlike the homo sapiens sapiens who watch them, these cetaceans aren't vacationing. They are, as a tribe, on the hunt.
You can see this when a patch of water starts to boil and churn, as a school of small fish is forced into a tightly knit ball. The dolphin work together to herd them into a place from which there is no escape, where every possible path has been cut off. The fish can't flee to the depths, because there are no depths. Right above them, sky. Below them, sand. And pressed against the crashing waves of an unforgiving shore, there's nowhere to go but into shimmer in a tight trapped churning mass, moving as one. From there, the tribe that hunts them can take what they want at their leisure.
Shallow water is a dangerous place if you're a fish.
But the shallows are no less dangerous for human beings.
We human beings have been induced to gather virtually, now, in the tightly controlled confines of the shallowest of mediums. Our every social exchange, managed and moderated and sorted by algorithms designed to "serve" us in the same way that the towering alien Kanamits "served man" in that old classic Twilight Zone episode. We are encouraged to burp out short fragments of thought, or regurgitate prefabricated memetic sentiment, devoid of depth and complexity, designed to maximize immediate emotive engagement and stir the greatest reaction in those around us.
Those synthetic social exchanges shorten our attention spans, making even the most basic of concepts TLDR, stirring blind reactivity to our most immediate context. We don't think long term, or even beyond whatever reaction has been triggered by the fish around us. We flit and dart en mass and on impulse, driven into a place where our every connection is seen and known, and our every movement predictable and tightly constrained.
The shallows are a dangerous place for a soul.
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