Anna Galí’s book makes me sick. It makes me sick with pain as the father of a young boy whose interior world I think I understand, but, in reality, can probably only guess at, and this will only get more pronounced as he breaks from adolescence into young adulthood. I feel enormous pain when I thumb through Anna’s memorial to her departed son Tomeu, whose death from an overdose underscores, along with our digital lives and legacies, several warning signs, several unmitigated corruptions of spirit, of love, and of youth that seem to be taking for granted during the high tide of technological control and irresponsibility.
The harvest of all bad intentions is on its way, homeward bound, set to roost in every home with a monitor. This book, its pain, and its cautionary tale should be embraced for the deep and foreboding tale that it is. I commend Anna as much as one can for sharing her story with the world, the tragedy that will forever shape her life. With bravery and determination, she has reminded us all to hold our children close and pay attention to them in the wide world of digital manipulation and its ethical indecency. This is not buyer beware; this is a buyer run for cover. Take all your personal belongings and those you care about, and find shelter in your nearest safe place. It won’t get better.
Not to be alarmist about it all, but Time on Quaaludes and Red Wine, published by Éditions Images Vevey, signals to us the massive shift our children are undergoing. Suppose you are not a digital native and are of a certain age with children. In that case, this will possibly be a terrible, truthful reminder of what to expect in the coming years, a reminder that forces are manipulating our children and that they are forced to compete with them to be part of the ever-shrinking and malicious world. The digital economy is a strange honey trap of thought where the world seems infinite, where individuality appears to be rewarded with dopamine. Performing the Internet is a term that I am going to use loosely here in association with how our digital lives are separate from how our real-time lives are lived, which creates a schism of development and character, shrouds our exterior world from the performance, and which enables all manner of consumer-oriented selling of the body, the mind, through a type individuated claim, an exercise in branding ourselves in a certain way to gain followers, dopamine, and credit in the vast sea of people (and bots) we exchange with.
This is a genuinely terrifying moment to be a parent, as external forces are vying for our children, literally molding them from a callous clay, when it is our job to keep them on course, to develop their consciousness, and to keep them safe from predatory commissions, consumer programming, and ideological assassination. Why is it that wealthy people tend to keep their kids off phones and social media as long as possible? It’s not because they are ashamed of their wealth; it’s because they are aware of the corrupt nature of the Internet. They are aware of brain rot, the shortening of attention spans, and the erosion of enjoyment of the natural world, which is erased through the paradigm of calculated machine programming.
Our job is to protect and nurture, not aid and abet the obsequious pull of our children’s attention and formation. And often, being new to the new world, we fail. We perceive the benefits of connectivity, such as socializing with friends, as sufficient to overlook the bullying, the performative nature of the platforms, and the excessive level of self-hatred and overanalysis of perfection and salacious selling that it encourages our children to engage in for the sake of dopamine and an audience. Children used to dream of being rock stars and Hollywood actors. Now, they dream of a YouTube channel where they dance without pause until they are overly thin and loved. The omnibus, the uneven biography of life, has been perforated by dirty stabbing tools, and nothing you or I can do will stop it.
With Anna Galí’s book, these questions haunt the pages. Tomeu, her 18-year-old son and a biomedical sciences student, tragically died from an overdose at the age of 18. Baffled by her loss, not understanding how her young son could fall prey to a increasingly common form of drug death, she began digging into his online life through his social media channels, emails, and wherever she could cull information relating to his private life in an attempt to understand what could have driven his choices. What she found was a shocking double life, one that encouraged experimentation with drugs, and in which an alternate persona had been crafted. The experience led her to making the book as an act of forensic exorcism, a way to quantify the utter alienation that she felt in her son’s unrecognizable double life. The book is quite shocking in its quiet examination of Tomeu’s life, featuring photographs of his belongings, unusual arrangements of his double life, and his secret existence.
The sheer terror of seeing and researching her son’s doppelganger provided more questions than the answers she sought. The book is a reflection of that experience. You can feel the palpable sense of loss, of forensic analysis, and the enigma of identities shaping its pages. I give it the fullest praise possible, but that is not quite an adequate term or value to use with such material. It is a very humbling experience to thumb through and reminds me that we need to adjust for the times we live in and expect our children to experience. The threats are real, the pain is punctuating.
