Home 1.0
I bump into an old acquaintance on the platform. Before we get on the train, he asks me where I’m going. I reply: ‘To Bern.’ He immediately says: ‘Ahh, back home.’ I grew up in Bern, but I haven’t lived there since I was 19. Is home where you grew up? What is home, anyway? I tell him that Bern does feel a bit like home and that I’m currently thinking a lot about the concept of home. He adds that he lived in Bern for almost seven years. I ask: “Home?” His answer comes straight away: “No, lovely memories!”
Mentally, I was just in the process of defining home as a set of memories. We continue talking, and it becomes clearer to me: home is a feeling, a space. Not necessarily a physical place. So I feel at home when I eat my mum’s couscous in Switzerland, but a fondue in Morocco also triggers feelings of home. Home is emotions. Home is in flux and changes. We create it for our children and adapt our own to the circumstances at hand. Although there is a collective homeland or a home town that many share, it is a subjective feeling.
Nevertheless, the concept of home has a powerful appeal. Whether it is to defend a physical place or simply to preserve traditions. Can I, in order to protect my own home, restrict the homes of others? Perhaps home is like love: not finite, not exclusive. The more of it there is, the richer we all become.
Home 2.0
Back when the ‘metaverse’ was a hot topic, one definition stuck with me: the metaverse is not a digital world or any other kind of place. It is a point in time. It is the moment when we place greater value on our online lives than on our physical ones. We’ve been there for a long time. Messaging apps have replaced kitchen tables, and social media feeds have replaced photo albums. In the past, we used to talk about our experiences over a cup of coffee. Today, screenshots of digital experiences are shared in group chats and commented on with emotion. Today, we experience things digitally and process them digitally. Much of the emotional world that can trigger a sense of home has shifted into the digital realm. Quietly, quickly, and without us really being asked. We have evolved the concept of home. Recently, we’ve started carrying it around in our mobile phones. Our Instagram account is our algorithmic home. Curated by us, trained by our interactions: an algorithmic provider of home. Nurtured by daily interactions: liking, muting, commenting, following and unfollowing. It has never been easier to evoke feelings of home: one click, three scrolls. And there’s a good dose of dopamine to go with it. Home 2.0 no longer has national borders; it lives in our timelines!
Our home is changing. The family home that has been sold, the school building that has been completely renovated and is now unrecognisable. Our digital home has changed in exactly the same way: hostility, hateful comments and algorithms that amplify this content. And as if that were not enough, these algorithms can be specifically used to shape opinions. For instance, to silence voices of solidarity with the defenceless population in Palestine, ravaged by genocide: a population from whom not only the digital voice, but the physical homeland itself is being wrested away. And all this is happening many times faster than the changes in our sense of home we have been accustomed to until now.
The result: a generation of rootless people. Uprooted by power-hungry Silicon Valley corporations that promised us greater connectedness but have instead crippled our ability to form genuine human bonds. Uprooting creates a target. A godsend for techno-fascists waging a digital culture war. Transnational and algorithmically amplified. Luring insecure young men with false ideals of masculinity is just one example of how social cohesion is being deliberately targeted.
What remains is the certainty that even Heimat 2.0 is not the end. Various stakeholders are already working on the next update. Heimat 3.0 will feature: more autonomy, less exploitation, more humanity and less Big Tech! The good old days without digital media, which evoke our sense of home? They are exactly that: the good old days. Pure nostalgia. The future does not lie in the past.
Über diesen Text
This text was written by Malik for the «Heimat 2.0» literary festival by zwischentext. zwischentext is an interdisciplinary, multilingual and (post-)migrant platform for literary and artistic expression.
