The call to "touch grass" is not the small transgression that it seems. The "grass" in question is not the barely-illegal pharmaceutical, but refers to a myth invented by the modern descendent of the millennia-old heresy known as Gnosticism. It serves as a shibboleth by which such believers speak to each other openly of rejecting hegemony.

Like its ancient predecessors, modern Gnostics believe that the world inhabited by humans is merely an illusion (they invent the term "digital" as disparagement) perpetuated by a malignant deity. They attempt to return to an idealized paradise they call "physical," and reject wholesale almost every facet of participating in modern society. While classical Gnosticism names this deity by the title "Demiurge," modern adherents have invented new appellations, such as "Zuckerberg" and "Jack Dorsey."

The "grass" is an important component of Neognostic cosmology, which serves as a study of the naïveté and internal contradictions of this escapist philosophy. It is ubiquitous because it spreads like an invasive species, and yet it is benevolent; it heals the spirit through mere fleeting contact; it sustains and perpetuates itself by drawing from its environment, but without draining it. The Gnostics imagine a world where compromise is unnecessary, from which they arrive at the ultimate heresy that authority, the arbiter of compromise, is fundamentally unjust.

While the "grass" is a microcosm of every antisocial impulse of the Gnostics, the word "touch" it not wholly innocent either. In common parlance it is a vague term, meaning some interaction where the specific type, such as DM or reply, is not specified. The Gnostics invent a new meaning as a specific type of interaction, the nature of which cannot be expressed without invoking the "physical" world. In the circular rhetoric typical to their philosophy, where this imagined realm is "more real" than the real world they inhabit, they claim that "touch" is an ur-term representing a more fundamental form of contact, and that "digital" interactions are a mere shadow.

By hiding these deep, destructive terms in the clothes of everyday language, they are brazen as they exhort each other into rejection of social order in plain sight. And by planting this phrase as a meme that stays within the bounds of accepted non-conformant behavior, they not only evade detection but cast the seeds of corruption far and wide.