I have a friend who teaches history. She offers her students extra credit for creating their own Pantheon, a personalized collection of Gods housed in their neocortex and etched into Helvetica in powerpoint files and word docs. I decided to break from writing about music to take a crack at this assignment.
I spend more time than I would like thinking about how digital technologies are messing with us. My Pantheon attempts to grapple with some of this fuckery. The ancients are timeless, no doubt. But they offer little help to modern folk trying to navigate Mr. Internet, much less TikTok or InstaFace. Here are the gods and goddesses that have come to rule in the digital age…
Verty and Q
Goddess of truth and Demi-God of conspiracy.
Verty and Q were lovers, but Q read too much Breitbart and started to think that a secret cabal of election-stealing, abortion-peddling, child pornographers lurked behind every backlink. Verty and Q compete for likes, shares, algorithms, and SEO. Verty whispers wisdom in a gentle timbre while Q barks bile like an over-caffeinated high school football coach. Verty created the “share” button, but Q gave it velvet trim. Q is certain the world is flat and Bill Gates inserts brain-tracking chips into the Moderna vaccine. Verty thinks the world is round and Bill Gates has too much money but is open to changing her mind.
Spamson
God of information overload.
Most Gods appear in human form, but Spamson prefers the shape of an industrial strength firehose. He delights in abundance. Spamson ensures that people who ask “what is the capital of China” find 2,070,000,000 answers, and that Outbrain outranks the Associated Press.
Metric
Goddess of quantification.
Metric assigns numbers to people and behaviors. He is the reason why we count our steps, friends, and self-worth. Metric despises meaning and believes than anything worth knowing can be expressed in scientific notation or binary code. If a fallen tree is posted and no one likes it, Metric insists that it does not exist.
Narcissus, the 348th (Narcy-348)
God of identity.
The great-great-great-great-great-great [you get the point] grandson of the Greek patriarch has updated his family’s empire for the Internet age. Narcy-348 invented usernames, the duckface, and the selfie stick. He shows glamour shots to anyone not invited to the party and makes sure that even the prettiest tweens think their ears are too fat. Narcy-348 blackmailed Santa Clause to find out who’s been naughty and nice, and made a fortune by selling this information to advertisers.
Synthesia
Goddess of connection.
Synthesia helps freaks, geeks, fans, lovers, and leppers commune by teleporting them from suburban basements and Afghani bunkers to email, chat rooms, forums, and Facebook groups. Synthesia comments on sincere questions, replies to cries for help in private messages, mocks #nofilter selfies, and is the reason most wannabe influencers are not followed (Narcy-348 has petitioned Elon Musk to remove her from Twitter). Synthesia punishes tech moguls who peddle anomie while promising to “bring the world closer together.” Just observe Zuckerberg’s personality. Or his face.
Optouticus
God of opting out.
[Courtesy of Eric Schmidt, recovering townie, punk auteur, and intellectual property counsel]
Optouticus is the god of free will and the mistaken belief that having choices means one has control over one’s life. He typically appears as an empty check box that one must affirmatively select for Optouticus to appear and unleash his wrath against default settings. Optouticus does not want personalized recommendations and does not want his viewing history shared with third-party affiliates. He is particularly popular in Europe and California, where legislators have been making human sacrifices to try to appease him. Yet Optouticus remains unsatisfied and roams the Earth in vain searching for some way to just turn it all off and be left alone. Ironically, the kids today have increasingly found Optouticus worship exhausting and begun to neglect their tributes to him, just giving up and figuring what the hell, just tell me what I have to click to get this thing to work with all of my wearables. Scholars continue to debate whether, by opting out of opting out, we honor Optouticus or desecrate his memory.