I'm hiding in the corners; I don't work or pay rent. Touch my web so I know you're there. ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 8/11/2026 Locality vs digital a-locality: you are at all times in your bodily location, this is a layer of reality which cannot be altered, that is Dasein; but the way you interact with the surroundings obscures this relation to being-there, which is not quite empty, but is constituted by facticity ( I eat this food, I walk on this grass, I have these legs and these hands which form the limits of my range of motion). Digital a-locality is a form of contextualization, it places locality in a context which is outside of that locality, its needs, conditions, and circumstances. It places weight on the locality to adapt to a-locality, or a position viewed from nowhere. Social media is just such an a-locailty. Its algorithmic structure places the burden of response on the individual, who must orient themselves relative to this content and their own frame of reference. We live in a world defined by displacement and alienation. Thus a deep desire exists to return to, revive, or cultivate genuine, grounded, localized ways of living. Whether these can be achieved in our modern society is the big question. It is already the nature of our technologically connected world that a symbolic relationship to life has usurped a materially oriented one, to such a degree that like with Levi Strauss’s raw and cooked formulation, we could not be “embodied” prior to disembodiment. This is not merely alienation from the means of production. This is alienation from the means of orientation. What was once an ordinary connection to the environment: food, land, clothing have become rarified. One pays a higher price, as a sign of luxury and status, for what was once inexpensive and banal. One must be wealthy enough to afford to opt out of modern life while benefiting from it. So, in the United States there is a pull in two directions, one away from modernism and the other toward futurism. Yet both are denials of locality, which is variable to the extent that it cannot be widely copied. What is applicable to one community is not to another.