You're Reading a Photocopy

The void doesn't swallow things with malice. It just has no hands to catch them with.

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you press send.

something happens. you don't know what. nobody knows what. we just trust it. like crossing a bridge without looking down. like handing your words to a stranger and assuming the stranger has a destination in mind.

the thing is, I looked down.

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here's what happens when you send a message.

your phone converts your thought, not your thought actually, but a compressed approximation of your thought, the photograph of a thought, into light. electrical impulses first, then light. it enters a cable. or a wave. or a bounce off a satellite 35,000 kilometers above your head. the exact path changes depending on the day, the traffic, the weather, the alignment of infrastructure that nobody in the conversation has ever thought about.

your words travel through a building in Navi Mumbai that is kept at 64 degrees. people work there. they maintain the machines. they do not read the messages. they could not read the messages. there are too many messages. 2.5 quintillion bytes per day. that is more words per second than every human being who has ever lived has ever spoken out loud.

your I miss you passes through that building at the speed of light alongside someone's grocery list and someone's suicide note and an ad for running shoes. the building doesn't know the difference. the building has never known the difference.

I keep thinking about that.

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the void is not dark.

that's the thing I got wrong for a long time. I thought of it as emptiness. a black space between here and there. a gap. but it's not a gap. it's the opposite of a gap. it's the fullest place that has ever existed. it's a room where every person alive is talking at once and nobody can hear anyone and the room keeps growing and nobody can leave.

your message doesn't enter silence. it enters noise so dense it becomes indistinguishable from silence.

I don't know which is worse.

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there's an email on a server in Chennai. it was sent in 2009. a woman in Kolkata wrote it. a man in Chicago was supposed to read it.

he changed his email address in 2011. forgot the password. moved apartments. met someone else. had a kid.

the email is still there.

not because anyone chose to keep it. because no one chose to delete it. that's different. that's a very different thing. deletion requires an action. persisting requires nothing. the default state of digital information is forever.

the love letter and the spam sit on the same drive. same temperature. same electricity. the machine doesn't know which one is sacred. the machine was never asked to know.

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Lovecraft was afraid of the ocean. everyone talks about the tentacles and the madness and the sleeping gods. but underneath all of that, the guy was just afraid of how big the ocean was. how deep. how it didn't care about him. the horror was never the monster. the horror was the indifference. something that vast that doesn't even register you exist.

the void is like that. except Lovecraft got one thing wrong.

he assumed indifference was hostile.

it's not.

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a guy in Mumbai sends a breakup text. his phone dies. he doesn't know if it sent. he charges his phone at a CCD for forty minutes. when it comes back on, nothing. no reply. no read receipt.

she saw it. she just turned her phone face-down.

the message crossed 300 miles in nine milliseconds. it was the last four feet that took forever.

the void delivered it. perfectly. faithfully. at the speed of light. the void did its job. the forty-minute silence, the assumption of cruelty, the pride that calcified into permanence, that was us. all us.

I keep coming back to this. the void doesn't fail us. we fail each other through the void and then blame the void.

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here's the anatomy of it. the part nobody talks about.

when you type a word and press send, the word dies. I mean that literally. the thought in your head is not the signal in the cable. the signal in the cable is not the pixels on their screen. every transition is a translation. every translation is a loss. you felt something. you compressed it into language. language compressed it into text. text compressed it into light. light traveled. light became text. text became language. language became a feeling.

but not your feeling. a feeling adjacent to your feeling. a cousin. a very good photocopy. maybe a perfect one. you'll never know. there's no way to compare.

every digital conversation is two people alone in separate rooms looking at photocopies of each other's thoughts and assuming the copy is the original.

we built the most sophisticated communication infrastructure in the history of any species and the fundamental problem of "I cannot feel what you feel" remains completely untouched.

the void doesn't create the distance. the void illuminates how much distance was always there.

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but here's where I land. and I'm not sure about this.

The Void Has No Hands.

it can't hold things. it can't put things down. it can't reach for you. it receives and it stores and it transmits and that is all. it was not built to care. it was not asked to care. nobody in the history of undersea cable engineering ever wrote a spec that said "this system should understand what it carries."

and yet.

and yet someone strung a cable across the Arabian Sea. someone looked at 3,000 miles of water and said "I have something to say and the distance should not be enough to stop me." every server farm. every cell tower. every satellite. every blinking light in every data center in every quiet building in Chennai and Navi Mumbai and Hyderabad. built because someone couldn't bear the gap.

the void was built by longing.

it doesn't know this. it can't know this. knowing requires hands, and it has none.

but we know. we're the ones who built it because we couldn't stand the silence. and now we live inside it and we've forgotten that the whole thing, the entire humming, light-pulsing, 500-cable, 2.5-quintillion-byte-per-day cathedral, is a love letter.

from us. to the distance. saying: no.

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I don't know what to do with that.

I don't think there's anything to do with that.

I think you just sit with it. the way you sit with anything too big to hold. you let it be there. the void. the noise that sounds like silence. the photocopies. the emails nobody will read. the four feet that take forever.

you let it be there and you press send anyway.

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