An Ode to the Hyperlink
On an unusually rainy December night in Morocco, I sit in my childhood living room perched in a corner away from the chatter of the family. It is night time, it is cold out, and no person in their right mind is thinking of leaving their warm and cozy spot. By a habit I have developed since I was a kid, I start looking up historical events and figures and find their biographies on Wikipedia. I developed this habit out of boredom long ago. Instead of asking, “Hey Dad who created the garbage can?” I could just look it up through a hyperlink pushed by Google on my outrageously slow internet connection from 2007. I was not going to make sense of any of this information as a five year old, but I could look it up and it was fun.
As I grew older and began understanding things, as everyone does when they grow up I suppose, my queries became motivated. Climate change was now an issue I was aware of, I needed to know what happened to my favorite band, and I wanted to understand the history behind some sports team to see when they last won a trophy. At every step of the process, Wikipedia’s hyperlinks were there to help me piece things together.
Now in my 20s, I go back to my home country every winter, and I face the realities I left for life in Canada and wonder how even as a privileged Moroccan, life at home was so lifeless. There is income inequality, low-income homes in the inner city are destroyed forcefully, and gender relations have been at standstill since the 1970s. I see people bathe in the same unsanitary waters from 30 years ago, although in somewhat cleaner beaches. I would come back to Morocco homesick and leave sick of home. Making sense of this image is not as easy as simply browsing Wikipedia, I needed to query a little more.
I look to the hyperlinks of the past for the untold histories, for the paths not taken by Moroccan society. In this rejection of reality, I needed to understand why it ought to be rejected in the first place. Link after link, I developed an understanding of home and learned of those online and real people animated by the same spirit of revolt, a revolt of the spirit. I now can find the hyperlinks to those voiceless voices speaking to some user. Through existing hyperlinks, I see through the haze of deflection, arrive at healthier conclusions, and come out less jaded. And come to think of it, those voices are not so silent when you click the blue-colored text and HTML is rendered on your entire screen as a webpage.
I have turned the internet into a treasure trove of websites that explain why things are and how things could be. And the best part is I can use that information to find more in the physical world through libraries, events, and communities. This dialectic between the digital and the real helps me filter through the noise and find what truly matters and reach hopeful horizons.
I am constantly aware of the echo chambers and the imbalanced influence social media platforms yield, pushing content through arbitrary algorithms. It is incredibly simple to fall prey to erroneous and detached views of the world online as a result. However, growing up in the cynical and reactionary currents that pervade Moroccan society, I found the internet, powered by countless volunteer editors and developers, to be a place of bountiful novelty, an unfinished human record.
