ill avoid the elephant in the room, rabbit hole conversation about the long term linguistic and etymological effects of decentralized digital media (me trying so sound smart)
and stay on topic…
You have an understanding of the difference between physical and digital which strangely enough, im not sure is ubiquitous anymore, and therefore value proposition gets muddled. especially in the first world west.
but all it takes to fix this is a single sustained power outage.
just one.
I hope we never have to live through such a disaster, but you're right that it would really wake people up.
I certainly do find it odd that the physical/digital distinction is getting lost. Maybe younger generations who have a digital presence from a very young age blur that distinction too easily.
Perhaps the digital world is the realm of thought. In that way it would be similar to books. A writer can exert presence through a book just as an influencer can exert presence through a TikTok video. The reader or viewer who receives that receives ideas, which are without a doubt real in the mind. So, one can say that someone may have an online personality just like we say someone has an in-person personality.
The consequence, though, is that the more time we spend online in this realm of ideas, the less we associate the self with the physical body. The self feels extended across the digital world, present in some way wherever anyone is reading one's internet posts. So it would seem the loss of physical/digital distinction is associated with a loss of locus of self.
I think this explains much of the appetite for constant reinvention we see among young people today, manifested in tattoos or hairstyles or gender "transition." When your self is spread across the digital world, the body is just an avatar.
That's part of what I mean by "liquid modernity," and it definitely overlaps with some of the concepts of transhumanism.
