a surreal descent into wikipedia: rachael gilbert

Has technology ever inconvenienced you or hurt you? Maybe technology got in your way, slowed you down or even literally hurt you? Have you seen technology have a negative impact on society.

i have accepted that if i lived in any century other than the twenty-first i would be dead. there is no question. i feel this is mostly due to my complete lack of general necessary skills (who really needs to know how to start a fire or administer first aid or pay your taxes when you can just look it up on google?). i have traded my common sense for tumblr memes and youtube videos and i have absolutely no regrets (ironic #yolo?). that is, of course, with the exception of a single night/early morning my freshman year of high school.

            there is a point at which you have been on the internet for such an extended period that stuff starts to get weird (a slightly off topic tangent; there is a youtube channel i discovered on one of my late-night escapades called “washing machine lovers” that literally just plays hours of washing machines running. i’m unsure of what niche they’re catering to but the channel has over 100,000 subscribers.) this occurs to me quite often, mostly when i’ve been on wikipedia for more than two hours. on this particular occasion i found myself researching “the midnight zone” in the ocean at four in the morning, four hours before i was scheduled to take my first ap exam.

            the ocean is terrifying. i mean, i knew that before (like when you vacation to the beach you’re really just paying to relax in a pleasant warm bath of sharks that can (and will) eat your entire face.) but the midnight zone is a special kind of terrifying. it wasn’t so much the creatures that lurk 10, 000 feet below that water, it’s that we really don’t know anything about that region of the ocean at all (the article stated that we knew more about mars that our own ocean. i’m not really sure how definitive a source wikipedia is so take that as you may). for some reason this struck a very deep, very emotional chord inside my sleep deprived mind; the inner dialogue resembling something like this:

            what do you mean we don’t know anything about the ocean? we know about dolphins right? they live in the ocean. and whales and those really weird spiky things that are literally the reincarnation of lucifer himself-

            but if we don’t know anything about the ocean then what else do we not know about? what if i don’t know anything about myself or who i am or what the hell my brain is even doing. how can i even function? what if…

and so on. existential crisis’s are disgusting but they’re especially terrible when you’re supposed to be studying for an exam. i mean, how am i meant to care about marbury v. madison when my very existence is in question?

            needless to say the exam didn’t go well (i had no idea what i was doing, nor do i really remember actually taking that test. i do remember crying at some point). so while i do love the internet, its ever presence is both a blessing and a curse. while i love that i have access to the literal library of congress on my phone, i hate that it often wastes so much of my time and results in so many existential crisis’s. (fyi i don’t actually access the library of congress on the regular, i mainly use that “wealth of information” to watch cat videos. i find that a little horrifying, actually. that we as a society have the ability to access so much knowledge but we arguably waste it. but that’s another debate for another day and i really don’t need to get into another existential crisis while discussing a previous one.)

            when i got my results back in july i was sure that at most i’d gotten a three (besides the fact that i was only semi-lucid during that test i also hated the class with a passion. i mainly used that hour to do math homework). i was amazed to discover; however that i’d gotten a five. to this day i am convinced that there’s some kid named “rachael e. gilbert” out there whose scores mine got switched with. that or the scorer had less of an understanding of u.s. government than i did.