Recently, I downloaded Instagram again after having deleted it for quite some time, and the immediate effects of scrolling were somewhat dizzying and nausea-inducing. After so much time away, the application had lost its sense of my interests and what I prefer to engage with, and I was shown a disjointed mishmash of culture that gave me the general impression of vertigo. 

Contrasting over-generalizations combatted one another, each offering a new and equally bleak picture of reality. The common theme was that each showcased a contrasting worldview that was incomplete, bias-laden, yet presented as truth. Sorting through the garbage felt impossible, and the disjointed accumulation of media seemed less to say “this is reality” than to ask me “What would you like reality to be?”

What I was left with was not a clear picture, but a pile of mismatched puzzle pieces waiting to be assembled. 

I was struck with a notion that the world, at the level of abstraction and generalization that it is usually presented to us as online, simply does not exist. It is not worth attempting to uncover from beneath the information sludge because it is impossible. The idea itself is the sludge. 

Over the next couple of days, as the algorithm took note of my preferences, the experience became more comfortable. I settled down into a deadened buzz of film clips, absurd comedy, and other short form video clips not long enough to nurture or sustain any form of narrative. Before I knew it, hours had gone past, and when I put down my phone to try and recollect any of what exactly I had spent my evening doing, there wasn’t much for me to grasp. After that, I re-deleted the app, and for the most part it stayed deleted. 

Now that the world is available to us at our fingertips, documented at lengths previously unimaginable, it is surprisingly and disorientingly incongruent. In fact, the more I consume and try to scrape away from the surface in order to dig deeper and uncover some semblance of actuality waiting underneath to be rescued, the more lost in the fog I become. 

Anyone who has tried to follow news from a multitude of outlets with the goal of seeing an issue from all angles knows how impossible this is to do. There are very rarely multiple angles of the same shape—only completely different shapes altogether. The cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable if not unbearable and impossible to hold.

This constant and algorithmically mediated connectedness seems as if it has been around much longer than it has. In fact, William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer, only coined the term “cyberspace” in the year 1982, and imagined a future of networked computers long before it became our everyday reality. 

I am fascinated by the ways that speculative fiction operates as a pool of ideas that help to influence our reality. There are many companies and technologies I can name off the top of my head with roots or inspiration from science fiction: Meta, Palantir, Grok, and the list goes on. The imagination can be used as a tool to usher in the future not only in spite of constraints, but sometimes in a way that relies on them. 

In a recent interview, Gibson told The Guardian that he was able to write this novel not because he knew a lot about computers, or in spite of the fact that he did not, but because he did not. Given the content of his novels, one would assume he had some sort of technical background in computer science or a related field, but that is not true. “I was actually able to write Neuromancer because I didn’t know anything about computers,” he says. “I knew literally nothing.”

In another interview with Discover Magazine, he writes that some of the people he was surrounded by with more technical knowledge actually had this hinder them in their imaginations of the future. When Gibson would envision and describe a future where everybody had personal computers that were all connected to each other, they would exclaim: “but there’s not enough bandwidth!” 

And now, only one of those visions from the future holds up, and it was the one that was able to imagine past the constraints of the current time. Where it is generally accepted that the goal of human intelligence is to perceive reality as it is accurately, the ability to envision is what drives the human project into the future. 

If a caveman were to assess reality around himself he would see rocks, plants, dirt, water, and nothing more. Now, imagine if he were to see the same materials but imagine them as tools waiting to be put together, or the ingredients in a meal. In the end, hours later, the second view of reality becomes more valuable and overall more accurate than the first. The ability to “accurately” assess material reality and nothing else would have hindered him greatly. 

Going back a few centuries to another William, the 18th century poet and artist William Blake was a visionary genius who disagreed with the focus on rationality and the physical world that was so popular in his time. As Daniel David Wallace notes in his essay ‘Transform your artistic life with William Blake,’ Blake often depicts imagination as a tool to overcome illusion and access the true form of reality. 

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake writes, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” 

Reading this, I can’t help but think of the way that we consume information online as the narrow chinks in the cavern. We form an extremely limited view of reality, and then assume that the world we dream of must abide by its rules. How can imagination help us see beyond this, and access truth? 

Of course, there is a shared world that we inhabit together, and one shouldn’t live completely in a fantasy. But to accept that reality as all that there is narrows human consciousness and our ability to imagine and envision. 

Northrop Frye, in his book on William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, observes that “[this] is why Blake is so full of aphorisms like ‘if the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.’ Such wisdom is based on the fact that imagination creates reality, and as desire is a part of imagination, the world we desire is more real than the world we passively accept.” 

Algorithmically mediated over-generalizations of reality plunge us into a state of mind strikingly reminiscent of the one that William Blake called Ulro. As Daniel David Wallace explains, Blake’s concept of Ulro describes a lower, limited world in which perception is constrained by pre-existing beliefs rather than imagination. 

In navigating the world without a vision of what it could be, instead of seeing things exactly as they are like one might hope, one is more likely to see the world around them as a reflection of their pre-existing beliefs. Before existing in the world, one exists in one’s own mind and perceptions. Following Wallace’s interpretation, to exist in Ulro is to inhabit a lesser world where reality scatters into abstraction, is imprisoned by appearances, and constrained by material limitations. 

When abstracted enough, everything in the world appears as inevitable. The ability to choose and create disappears. Every fact is viewed as the fulfillment of a pre-held prejudice, belief, or assumed as necessary. This seems multiplied when our vision of reality is served to us by algorithms trained to identify these proclivities, and to reiterate and deepen them. In Ulro, life is abstracted and generalized, and these abstractions are accepted as the truth of what reality is. I can’t imagine a more perfect example of this mental state than the one somebody is thrust into after scrolling through a social media feed or short form video content. 

Sweeping statements are made that generalize complexities into banal and bleak visions of reality. Approaching this “cyberspace” with our various preconceptions and prejudices, our worldview is affirmed no matter what we bring to the table. These representations bring us further away from truth, wearing the guise of the infallible mediums of photo and video to assert sweeping generalizations and sometimes outright falsities as truths that cannot be questioned. 

Our imaginations (and sometimes delusions) are what drive the car forwards. The narrative is nearly impossible to grab, no matter how many parts it is broken down into. What if instead, we broke through the fog to view this scattered picture of reality, in all of its contradictions, as materials in which to build the future? As a ripe tree of ideas? 

If we have been forcibly plunged into a world whose algorithmic hall of mirrors seems impossible to navigate, is it not possible to lean into these constraints as a tool to aid our creation? There is an opportunity to break through the digital mirror, and to transform it into a window of what could be. 

Collective imagination provides a pool of ideas for the future to be created from, and it is our virtue that must be the guidepost that leads us there. Culture, and seemingly reality itself, are so hopelessly fragmented that the idea of seeing reality clearly for what it is seems obscured beyond belief, blotted out by its own over-documentation, and rendered inevitable through its abstraction. 

Maybe the question stops being “What is reality?” and instead, “What could reality be?”