flowerworld is gonna come up a lot on this site so I think it’s best I at least have some kind of home page for it. As mentioned on the homepage, it’s an idea I’ve had for 3 years now, and seems to become a more and more pertinent concept by the day.
flowerworld, to me, is a few different things. Initially, it was a term I coined to refer to physical reality that was intrinsically more optimistic than something like “meatspace”. The term for physical reality should always, always, sound preferable to digital reality. Cyberspace sounds cool, meatspace sounds gross. Flowerworld sounds beautiful, which it is.
However, since this, it has now taken on a broader meaning, one not just for the reality, but the perspective from which the name arose. The philosophy of deriding meatspace and preferring flowerworld, is now what I refer to as “flowerworld-y”. Not just a conscious philosophy, even unconscious ones. People who start using flip-phones willingly, people who cancel their music streaming subscription to use an iPod, teenagers who read a physical newspaper to spend less time online, and so on. I think these behaviours are “flowerworld-y” even if they aren’t thinking about them.
I think in this vein, there’s a progression that everyone has experienced, or that we as a culture and society have experienced.
The core of it is as follows:
- Pre-Digital: There was the time before widespread internet adoption, before social media recommendation algorithms, before big tech oligopolies being the robber barrens of our time.
- Digital: What feels like the inescapable reality we find ourselves in, one that is digital first and physical second; one where what is presented and depicted virtually is as important if not more than what manifests in reality.
- Post-Digital: The reality we’re striving to achieve; the one on the other side of recovery from Instagram Reels addiction. The one where we aren’t emulating an aesthetic but embodying values. This is flowerworld.
Flowerworld Dialectic
I am going to dedicate a whole other article to this at some point but it is worth using this as a chance to present this concept.
I posit that there is something distinctly Dialectical about the above progression. For those unfamiliar, I am referring specifically to Hegel’s concept of Dialectics not Marx’s Dialectical Materialism.
What makes this progression dialectical, to me, is that both the start and end are actually the same thing. As in, physical reality before digital reality existed and after digital reality existed are the same physical reality. There is nothing different about the grass being touched, but rather who is touching it.
So, in Hegelian terms, we had base reality, it was negated by an alternae form of Digital Reality and then we experienced aufheben where this negation didn’t destroy base reality, nor could we return to it in earnest - it created something new: flowerworld.