Essays

The Withering of Narcissus

Playing Tyrant on the Internet

By Jonny Thakkar

 

My MacBook has a shiny screen. Trawling the internet, I saw myself reflected in its depths: my tabs-Facebook, Wikipedia, The Financial Times-and then me, above and behind, peering. Just a short break from the Plato dissertation.

A Facebook friend had posted the link to a website called 6 Billion Others, and, with little else to do but work, I accepted his invitation. I was confronted by a wall of multicolored faces-six hundred and thirty of them, approximately. I found myself attracted to a brown-skinned fellow with impressive orange headgear and three teeth nestled within a huge white beard, so I clicked on him. He turned out to be an Indian aged a hundred and twelve. That was all I found out.

The idea of 6 Billion Others is to travel the world filming interviews with random people on various subjects: the meaning of life, God, happiness, love, anger, death, fears, education, identity, money. Each of the interviewees appears in connection with one theme only.

A tribal elder pushes a piece of wood through his nose, complaining of having been denied the opportunity to pass this sacred practice on to his children, and pointing wistfully to the moral degeneration that ensued. A newly appointed village chief is livid at having had to sell a few sheep to pay for his investiture party. A balding punk with a tiara of spiky blue hair professes respect for his parents. And yet for all the disconcerting peculiarity and variety of their circumstances and convictions, I felt something in common with each.

 

 

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