There's this rule on the internet called "Remember The Human." It's kind of like a 21st century version of the Golden Rule, and like most nuggets of wisdom, if we unpack it, we may find something more nuanced hidden beneath the surface.

In it's simplest form, the rule refers to trolling - or, more specifically, anti-trolling. A "troll" being someone that sows the seeds of dischord on the Internet by starting arguments and just being an all around dick. It's like a game they play. They destroy someone online in such a way that it can actually affect the real life person on the other end of the keyboard. Hence: "remember the human." There's a real breathing person out there that you're arguing with about cat videos. They have hopes and dreams and families and maybe even some cats too, so play nice.

However, this idea can be applied more broadly and maybe even shed some light on a topic that doesn't come up quite as much...

We lose something on the internet.

How is it that an anonymous person saying something contradictory to our world view can enrage us so much? How can we get into such heated arguments? We're more connected than we've ever been, technology and culture are at a milestone, and this is what we do with it?

One of my favorite artists (and from whom I've learned proper Wacom technique) is Mike Krahulik - or as he's known to the greater Interwebz: Gabe from Penny Arcade. He summed up the problem quite elegantly:

This phenomenon has a real name. It's called the "Online Disinhibition Effect" and it's defined as a loosening of social restrictions during interactions with others on the Internet that would otherwise not be present in normal face-to-face interaction.

It's almost like we take on a different persona that we more identify with our online self. For some, this means donning a mask that enables all their vitriol and apathetic sadism to pour out, as if the light that would normally shine in their eyes goes dim and they retreat inward, into the shadows of the macabre corners of their darkest neuroses.

Alone and faceless, left only with our symbols on a rectangle of light, the demons break free, and run amok.

The above image was made by Mark Miller, a scientist who was trying to understand the structure of the brain. By cutting thin slices of a mouse's brain, he came across this structure - a structure prevalent throughout the entirety of the brain itself, not just in mice, but in brains in general. It's a neural network; a spider web of neurons, carrying electrical and chemical signals through both space and time.

It looks like threads. There's big ones and small ones, and they coil and twist, nestling together to form more complicated structures which then multiply exponentially outward into even more intricate forms.

Complexity from simplicity.

This seems to be how Nature works. There are small particles of energy interacting with these ancient forces like Gravity and Electromagnetism, and they create structure. That structure then interacts with space-time giving rise to Matter, and thereby everything we observe, whether it be the cells in our skin or the rocks of the Earth.

So where do we fit in all of this? Are we just products of these interactions, deluded and meaningless, traveling on a determined path towards annihilation? Or is there something more? Are our lights on?

The first line in FLOLAS is a question. "What's it mean to be human?" It's a question I'm interested in because it implies humanism as a sort of interface for nature. Perhaps we are all just insignificant motes of dust, but that also supposes a fallacy: that only large things matter. Maybe we're all children of God, but that personifies a singularity and puts a smiley face on an unknown.

What seems to be actually happening is that there's an expansive force ever pushing out, and a reductive force ever pulling in, and everything we are and know is the result of the interaction between the two. Light bursts out from stars, and the void of black holes pull in. Space itself, much like the surface tension of water, gently keeps it all together.

These mechanics produce magnificent structures. Forms from functions.

Scale is rather irrelevant too. It all obeys the rules of physics and geometry, from the quantum to the atomic, the molecular to the biological. In fact, if you keep going outward, past humans and rocks, past cities and rivers, past mountains and oceans; beyond still, past the Solar System and Milky Way... Eventually you get to this:

This is the structure of the Universe. A fibrous web of galaxies woven through the void, carrying electrical and chemical signals through space and time. Look familiar? We're in there somewhere, on our little planet, in our little galaxy. We're on a thread called Laniakea, which is an Hawaiian word meaning "endless heaven."

It's all threads of light contracted by dark, the whole structure, and it's turtles all the way down. We may very well be the only beings that have any clue of this, and our interpretation is quite literally all we have. We're all the walking talking rhythms of these threads of light and pockets of darkness, and it is through the prism of our forms that meaning is made.

We are the measure of all things.

Maybe when we virtualize ourselves and separate our minds from physical forms, we lose a fundamental aspect of what makes us human. We lose the face, the body language, the tone of voice - even the smell. It's like we only play one note of our inner symphonies, and then it bends to noise. We lose the structure. We lose the form. We create a new one, twixt together from the vulgarities of our tongues, woven from symbol and fictions...

So remember, there's a human in there. A real life, walking, talking product of the Universe; a light caught by the dark, trying to keep it's warmth and stay from the cold; a process forming crystalline lattices, the material of the world, and bending the light into it's forms, birthing the spectra of life.

Just like you. Just like us all.

Even if sometimes we act like a dick on the internet.