Turntable

I was spinning on turntable.fm in a 3am ambient set. After an hour I noticed that none of the skins in the crowd were moving or commenting. That’s when I realized I was staring in to the dead eyes of vacant avatars. In the real world their flesh and blood counterparts were sleeping while their lifeless cartoon eyes were fixed on me. I’ve been online since I was ten years old, but until this point I never fully visualized the concept of virtual reality and how separate, yet connected, it is from the physical world. The bedroom is intimate. I can’t even get to sleep around good friends in a motel, yet here I was looming over the sleeping bodies of strangers as an animated glyph — in real time! The proximity was uncomfortable. For that brief instant I looked beyond the singularity. I leaped forward to a shameless, naked, garden of eden and recoiled in fear. I need to write about it.