TURBINE | KAPOHAU

ERIK KENNEDY

Dead Internet Theory

I had a dream that I outlived 
the internet. I came across its wreckage
on a stony plain. I could read a few words on it:
recipe, neuron, expertise, South China Sea, zero.
But mostly it was as broken as the landscape,
a close-up shot of a damaged tooth.
Why did they build the internet
on such hostile ground? In the dream
I knew why, the reasoning was obvious—
in remoteness there was safety,
girded by a black climate and unspeakable animals—
but that is not what I remembered when I woke up.
When I woke up, I was convinced 
that it had once been at the centre of things,
held in the people’s bosom like
an eighteenth-century pub or an ornate fountain,
and terrible, repressed events
had driven the people away from it.
But dreams can lie, as anyone who has had a dream
about someone loving them knows.