Connor Greenwell - The Age of Earthquakes and the Post-Analog Condition

The Age of Earthquakes and the Post-Analog Condition:

Connor Greenwell
Hendricks 4B

"Analogophobia"

          The Age of Earthquakes is a shocking and vital exploration of humanity’s increasingly digital identity. As technology loses its physical extension, the synthesized world replaces reality, and anything that is not digital becomes undefined. Love, capitalism, localized ethnicity, and humanity itself—in all its prismatic complexity—become meaningless to the binary truths of the digital world. There are only 0’s and 1’s, and nothing exists between them. This dualism, however, poses a threat to organic phenomena such as us humans. We’ve been wired for a world of spectra, of maybes, and of the spaces in-between 0s and 1s. We can’t conform to a digital reality without losing something quintessential about ourselves and our humanity, but what exactly is that?

This is the main conflict examined in the text. Within its post-analog condition, information seems to be an ever-incomplete sample of the real world, like a curve rendered by increasingly small rectangles. This reality, however, presents an interesting metaphysical struggle because it reflects its own broader images as the searches for self-actualization, purpose, and satisfaction. The text posits this poststructuralist metaphysic in which digital synthesis deconstructs the physical world’s inherent significance and temporality. In such a realm, digitally abstracted spacetime siphons meaningful experience away from the individual, resulting in what the authors call ‘denarration’. As society becomes ever-more digital, that sense of particularity in things, people, places, and systems is lost. What remains is confusion about what is truly real, what seems close enough to suffice, and whether one is really better than the other. In a fully synthesized existence, the physical extension of reality becomes meaningless in the euphoria of digital replication, and our perceptions of time, space, and life become part of that commanding, digital domain in which our ‘only memories might be getting up to grab a Coke.’