Your Everyday Social Experiment

By Mandira Pattnaik

ASSUMPTIONS:

Let’s accept that your infobahn alias is a pariah, and let’s assume that you’ve begun to acknowledge three things:

That ghosts haunt your computer, your internet, and everything that exists in a parallel non-physical plane.

That ghosts are malleable, can take any form, just like social media profiles and bios.

That ghost aren’t bothered by your rules and/or miscellaneous conventions and laws of the land.

APPARATUS:

Let’s take your average day. In that testing apparatus, put A, whom you’ve followed for ages. Say, she is one who dislikes the cold shoulder treatment she’s given in school (IRL) and on Social Media. However loud she hollers (which translates to a tweet every ten minutes), no one hears. People do see her—156 views—but no one ‘Likes’ her. Alas.

There’s B (profile pic of Pekin Bantam), who mostly posts pics of their pet, clicked at impossible angles. SM can’t decide: AI or CGI. So they give the posts a pass.

Finally, there’s C (profile name Blinded Rabbit). Bio says: “Magical tiger meets super phantom. I can see what’s there before me but not until it’s too late.” A euphemism. No one really cares.

PROCEDURE:

Let’s assume you’re real, that is, you’re not a ghost, or so you believe. You shave, shop, dress, stalk former sweethearts. You cry and laugh, dry laundry and change tires. You yell during hockey; you miss office meetings. As real as it is. You think all three of the above are ghosts because they haunt your feed every single day.

Let’s say, after a year of hardly interacting, you find A has changed somewhat. She posts images of her home, office, neighbourhood. She posts pics of her cute boyfriend: pics of boyfriend in wedding tuxedo, pic of baby bump captioning it ‘Arriving Soon.’ But she is a ghost: She’ll not be satisfied doing the same things again and again though she now gathers ‘Likes’ in the hundreds. So she pops up in people’s feeds, including yours, as blank tweets that disappear when you click on them. Sometimes she schedules tweets, which predict a celebrity’s fate. The tweet appears at the same hour the celebrity is taken to the Emergency Room, confirmation of overdose to come. People try to mute her, try to block her, but do you expect it to work? Of course not. Next, A prophesies climate calamity: “Boston is going to die first, followed by Shanghai.” People delete their accounts in panic so they can avoid her. Finally the bots give her real attention—record internet-breaking ‘Likes’ and ‘Shares’.

Let’s check on B, who chooses to pixelate the day Social Media crashes because of A. They are a ghost who is, at once, everywhere, because there are thousands of them in pixelated form. They haunt everyone’s screens, a burst of tiny colored dots. They cause your software to crash.

C, the euphemism, is bored because SM crashed and she can’t keep scrolling to kill time at her monotonous receptionist’s job. She becomes a ghost who substitutes your partner. She turns and rolls in bed, a jelly bean by morning. You gather the jelly-bean-like-thing in a waste tray, put it in the bin, but it crawls out like all ghosts do, smelling foul.

DERIVATIONS:

First and ONLY observation: Your anyway-poor life will get no better under any circumstances or alterations to this everyday social experiment. It will be, and can only be, driven further into chaos.

You’re horrified, but you have three methods to respond. (Remember, ghosts give you three boons before they wring your neck):

Choice One is to get under a rock. They are coming for you—the ghosts that you always knew existed in a lateral non-physical sphere. When they find you, let them wring your neck, and when you get a chance, pay it back. Wring one bodiless entity’s neck, then another. Who cares? Expect no blood, no bones, no disgust, no regret. They are ghosts.

Choice Two is to bear with all of this, just like you already do in your useless drab life while commuting on public transport, tolerating lies, staying unresponsive when Boss tries new tricks to annoy you, and expect nothing, absolutely nothing, to change.

Choice Three is NONE OF THE ABOVE, to let the ghost substitute your partner, and spin a fantasy web for the two of you. Stay cocooned in that web, similar to the apparitions in granny’s tales that hang from peepal trees, inseparable even in death. Draw them out from supposedly impermeable screens, those that suck lives out. Laugh hysterically because now you can do as you please. Expect your alias to have endless freedom—you’re no longer real, you’re now a ghost too. Expect this to last.

About the Author:

Mandira Pattnaik’s work has appeared in The McNeese Review, Penn Review, Quarterly West, Passages North, Contrary, Quarter After Eight and Prime Number Magazine, among others. She is the author of five chapbooks, the latest “Glass/Fire” to be published. More at mandirapattnaik.com.