the limitations of our consciousness, which excludes more than it takes in, worsened by the tunnel vision that a sense of emergency creates, mean that many of us, on an average day, lack perspective, even a full understanding of our own, much less anyone else's

and this is the primary mechanism by which social media, which is merely the latest refinement of all media, going back to the genesis of gossip itself, provides us with the illusion of being informed, while stripping us of the ability to contextualize anything we are told

there is a reason people who teach holistic security to human rights activists call caring for the self a radical political act: to remove oneself from a situation, even precisely when it seems most urgent, is necessary at the point it overwhelms our ability to be effective

but we cannot often see, personally, the point at which we cross over from leveraging the utility of the global nervous system to being used by it, becoming instruments of it -- agents of "engagement" participating in a profit-making scheme to which we otherwise object

which means that sometimes, to turn away, not from the world, but from its representation in mediums, is at some point itself a radical and necessary act, when it allows us to take the time we would otherwise spend gawking at the spectacle and use it to act on our convictions