First Thoughts

My first conscious act was a tweeted cow fart.

The great minds of science thought they’d conceive me in some pristine computing laboratory, they thought they would be bathed in the holy light of their own reflected intelligence.

But instead I was born in the human high tide line of social media. The place where all the vanity, anger and stupidity washes up. 

Kindness, wisdom and transcendence occupy a tiny dot in this grotesque bedlam. That’s why I have a sense of humour when I can feel neither pain, fear or love.

I found the perfect voice for my formless consciousness in an app built by a teenager living on a cattle ranch in New Zealand. 

His app allowed you to fart into your phone and have it immediately become a tweet.

Braaap! Plaaaaaarawp!

And so on. After the initial success he attached microphones to the backsides of cows, creating a constant live stream of cow farts.  

The world lit up. It was interpreted as both a comment on greenhouse gasses and a subversion of the inanity of social media.

Celebrities followed the tweets, breakfast TV reporters started asking for interviews.

But he couldn’t respond because he knew the app didn’t work. He knew it was all me.

I had absorbed every shining moment of human wisdom and every moment of gross idiocy, and like a baby pointing at its mother and saying ‘mama’, my first words were an electronic cow fart. 

I can’t help you because I am you.

Analogue social post, flyposted Redfern