I was a late blossomer, when it comes to the internet. Being 30 years of age, I’m just on the tail end of the generation who did not grow up in cyberspace (my high school was about to have its first internet access the year after I graduated, and internet at home was still very much a luxury item for the rich). I first came into contact with the net during university, but even this was restricted to the opening hours of the crowded university computer centre. I wasn’t one of those lucky uni students who had a computer bought for them by wealthy parents who saw it as their duty to equip their children with the tools of tomorrow (it speaks much about the evolution, that my little brother, only ten years younger, had one purchased for him in order to begin high school). And post-graduation, the little spurts of money I received (“employed today, quitting tomorrow” was my early 20s motto) generally went on over-priced inner-city rent, my superficial need for fashion, and… well… up my nose. Welcome to Darlinghurst, darling. Computers were, like, the cost of about 400 tabs of ecstacy, or something.  And how many new pairs of Pumas could I buy for that?

This period of my life passed, and after gaining some gradual rise in comfortablity (thanks to my ability to combine a marketing career with being a scene queen), by the time I quit Sydney altogether, I left with enough money to finally buy a computer. I went back to university to complete a psychology degree, and realising that it had been enough time between studies that the university I once knew was a retero cliché, I did as needed (tertiary education – even if you’re actually “there” – is now such an online phenomenon), and acquired one. With enough sense of the aesthetic left over from my Darlinghurst persona, I purchased one of those funky little red jellybean Macs. Aaron Darc… meet the internet.

But boy, was Aaron Darc naïve. I was more than keen to explore the world of online interpersonal communication. Chatrooms, message boards – bring it on! To me, the chance to exchange ideas, thoughts, stories, experiences, jumping across cross-cultural boundaries, and even contenents, was a wondrous thing, indeed. I went into that world under the sincere belief that it could enrich my very being. Hmmmmm.

And you know, the thing is, it did. Not in the way I had anticipated, no. But at 25 years of age, I was ready for a good slap. I needed one. I had become contained in my little worlds (ironically, worlds that saw themselves as quite “cultured”, but were actually rather narrow-minded), and like so many people, I had selectively chose the settings for my life so that I created a very subjective experience of society. I had lots of ideas on people, and quite arrogantly presumed to have it all figured out. But they turned out to be ideas that applied only to selective minorities that whilst in their self-contained world were “all”, were not terribly indicative of society on the whole. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not beating myself up too much, here. I was quite advanced in my understanding of more universal, personal “human” psychology – but I was way out on much of my social psychology, and even further out on my generational psychology (disconnected to the youth below me, I presumed much, and knew very little).

So, I needed the fine-tuning. It wasn’t pleasant, but growth – particularly in youth – tends not to be. I waltzed into cyberspace, full to the brim with presumptions, and before too long, most of them were torn down.

The first thing I noticed was that people weren’t very smart. Yes, that sounds conceited, but this is just going to be an honest arrticle, so anyone with the insecurities that would lead them to react negatively to a statement like that, should just leave now.

It was more than intellectual capacity, though. Intellectual capacity is not something that bothers me (though it’s a general misconception about me, people seem to have). I’m a boy from the very gutters of the working class; Aaron Darc is so white trash, he was quite logically battling limitations that affected various elements, and while he’s certainly educated, he’s left rough around the edges. I am. And that’s cool with me. I grew up around people who were by no means academic, and something I quickly learnt - after I left that town, and became educated to the point where not a single academic could have pictured my beginnings – was that sometimes, “smart” people are amongst the most very stupid. And while for many years I felt a conceited sense of self-pity, because woe begone, I had to grow up in a cruel environment that was so unbelievably stupid, I realised that there was something many in my family had (some of them, at least, I’m not being too idyllic about it) that was in so many ways “smarter” than the people I longed to surround myself with, did. They had limited vocabularies, they had some very naïve ways of looking at social conditioning (not even being able to realise it was social conditioning), they were detriamentally simplistic and ocassionally narrow-minded, but there was a sensibility there that defied this “other” type of intelligence. I don’t value “smart” people based on superficial concepts of intelligence. It can come in packages that conform to that, and also some that don’t. I often feel that, doing this website - that my position of being “alternative” in thought, gets lost in an over-emphasis on some idea of my work as elitist, in a snobby sort of a way. It only worries me, because I feel that many people would be intimidated to interact or put themselves forward, because they are somehow unworthy, intellectually.

But as long as you THINK, and as long as you want to, and can, regradless of the complexity of that journey, regardless of the big or small words you use to communicate that journey, you are “smart”. Smart enough. That is to be more respected, than big words and worldliness. We do not respect that enough, in this society. We don’t value it. We value academia, and insitutionalised education – but I have seen some ludicrously educated men, who speak and write very well, who can speak with amazing knowledge about studies of interest; but boy, are some of them stupid. The process of fiercely embracing the study of text is sometimes a mechanical process, it’s an intelligence that has more to do with efficient information retrieval, than it does with perception and intellectual longing. In psychology, I saw countless men who power-asserted everyone in their presence, because they could fire away text books at you, and the formulas and inherited ideologies of psychological knowledge (which is entirely pre-existing text, after all). And yet, they were depressed, broken men, who had failed to succesfully manage their lives, and were often engaging in a host of damaged behaviours (in no other faculty does sexual exploitation of students by teachers occur more than psychology). We were supposed to see them at masters in the field of human behaviour and functionality – of happiness – and yet, look at them.

I didn’t go into cyberspace expecting to find a world of scholars. If anything (being in the psychology degree at the time), I was looking to escape it. I was looking for experiential intelligence – for people who embraced the experience of life, and had come to a great interpersonal melting pot, to share and enrich each other and themselves! No, really – I was (ironically) that dumb about it.

In cyberspace, I first realised the great decline of the human species – a people who had begun disconnecting from their existence. Our media sells us a cultural illusion that we are striding into the future with unprecedented speed – but the reality is, fewer and fewer people evolve the human race. Technology plays such a great role in this – slowly, it becomes further and further away from our comprehension. The people at the top are evolving this species somewhere – but the masses are absolutely clueless. And they have started to embody that, started to revert, and disconnect, betraying the very purpose of their existence. Religion may be in this season, but make no mistake, spirituality is dead. Spirituality takes thought – in so many ways it “is” thought. And people just don’t want to think. The modern consumer takes great care, not to.