“I was standing on the ocean. I saw a blur come around from my right side to my left. It was a hand putting something next to me. When I looked closer I saw that what the hand had put there was a little sea turtle… I picked up the sea turtle and put it in my hand and it turned into a butterfly. And then it turned into a black spider. It kept turning into a butterfly, a spider, a butterfly, a spider. It would pulsate between the two. I put my hands around it to grasp it and blood ran out of my hands and fell into the sand. Then as I let go of it, the blood rose up from the sand and turned again into the butterfly/spider. It hovered about a foot above my hand, and turned into a little ball of light… that whole sequence repeated two or three times: it would land back in my hand, turn into a creature, and when I tried to hold it, it would crush again into blood, and when I would let go the blood would rise back up and turn into a ball of light… I didn’t have to analyze it afterwards. The butterfly and the spider represented two opposing sides: all the things that I love and consider to be beautiful and gentle and wonderful, and all the things that threaten me, the things about life that I can’t come to terms with because they don’t fit into my nice, happy picture of the way I want the world to be. It kept morphing back and forth to show me that they’re both one and the same; they’re dependent on one another to exist. When I tried to grasp at either what I love or what I hate, I destroyed the very ability of being able to really penetrate the essence of either. By trying to understand it, I would just crush it. But when I let go and let it be what it was, it would turn into light to show me that both sides come from the same source. I think the vision was trying to tell me to just live and be joyful and stop creating these internal wars over all the pain that is within myself and that I see all around me…”
— Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel, a year before he disappeared from the public eye
The issue with writing in any sort of online way is a mirror-reflection to the issue of ~interiority~ as it applies to the act of scrolling on a feed: while there may be little thought in the act of scrolling, the content creator must, on the other hand, put tremendous consideration into appearing as a natural and ingrained part of that unconscious action.
By this I mean that the process by which we come into contact with text, audio, and video on the internet is also a process which happens to be (for the most part) private, and so when we try to create work in an online winner-takes-all space, the desire of creative achievement becomes the desire to speak from the insides of an anonymous someone’s scatterbrained scrolling brain. To create content for the feed is therefore to create inside a sense of anonymous interiority.
This makes perfect sense if we step back for a moment as taking in information along a feed is not too dissimilar from the process of coming across an idea inside of our own thought processes. This by no means makes the two out to be completely equivalent, but the equivalency is just opaque enough to make out, and that alone makes it worth looking at.
When we’re in a state of quiet contemplation, a long walk, for instance, the world might ring a little clearer, glow a bit brighter. A similar feeling might arise when following an event, “monitoring the situation” so to say. There’s a feeling of control to both, but confusing feelings of control with feelings of fulfillment leads to trouble, especially when the latter adapts in real time to the interior monologue of its user, attempting, in the end, to digitize and monetize it. This leads to a couple issues worth ravaging with a chunky highlighter:
(1) the outside becomes the inside.
(2) the inside becomes the outside.
(3) the scroll may imitate an interior thought, but only ever to an extent and a very limited one at that.
Let’s work through these one at a time.
The outside becomes the inside. Let’s face up to it: everyone’s in the same room all the time.
We are available to one another, always. Work emails arrive in our inboxes, awaiting reply. People seek to network. Scam emails ask for verification. And then a period of silence feels eerie, an ellipses of days, a sinking dread begins to appear: have I been… left behind? Perhaps I have!
Osmosis takes time, naturally, and over extended periods of being available to the world wide web, the boundaries of our interiority begin to blur. Thoughts and ideas which are not our own begin to appear, and thoughts which are our own have gone to reinforce a vast docket of personal preferences which beckon us on down the rails which are to be laid before us in the digital towards whoever we’re set to become.
A linkage is thus formed — a spiraling motion, if you will — between the experience of the individual and the experience of great masses of people and it’s difficult to say whether this linkage moves upwards or downwards or even whether the two follow a similar trajectory at all. In many ways, big and small, we occupy space in one another’s minds and only time will tell what the consequences of that will be.
In the meantime, there’s a risk that years and years of being too-online might crystalize and that we become unwitting echoborgs, repeating words, phrases, and ideas which we haven’t considered fully. I often find myself wondering, for instance, whether my personal conceptions of the world, of politics, of art, of the ways in which things work are my own or if they’re merely a reaction to something that has either appealed or repelled me online. This doesn’t seem to be an isolated case.
Naturally this uncertainty of muddled sources and half-baked slogans creates a certain anxiety, a certain instinctual coldness which might appear in, say, a pilgrim when they find they’re lost in a dark, ominous wood. There are strange noises either in the faraway distance or in the zone of too-close-for-comfort, some rustling in the bushes there, an owl hooting in the branches of a spruce... None of us know who’s watching us at any given moment and yet, on the other side of the proverbial coin, none of us know who we ourselves are watching.
Recently, eliza mclamb broke the story on marketing agency Chaotic Good, which, living up to the first half of its name, runs “narrative campaigns” by creating thousands of fake accounts to flood various platforms in order to promote and snowball the notoriety and discourse around a given artist to sell more of their records, sell out bigger shows, etc. This sheds quite a bit of light, I think, on the strangely intense reaction people had last autumn to artists such as Sombr or Geese, both of whom make perfectly good music, especially in the latter’s case1.
All the same, this remains a brilliant move for a marketing company to make — what could possibly be better than a physical billboard or an instagram ad but actual manufactured word-of-mouth?
The sense of betrayal runs deep amongst music fans, however, who often consider themselves as stalwarts of the counterculture. The once unwritten contract of social media was that the accounts you might see on a feed are real, human people, with their own taste, their own opinions, and such a trust is fraying quickly. Taste and opinions have always been manufactured, of course, only there’s very little pretense of a separation between advertisement and discourse anymore.
I’ve spent a lot of time (too much time, probably) on Substack, and there’s a constant question needling on about what happened to fiction, “why is no one reading my fiction?”, excitement over a New Yorker article about Substack fiction by Peter C. Baker, users grinding for months on stories only to grow increasingly frustrated with little to no traction, eventually dropping off from the platform altogether to pursue other forms of publication.
The most obvious answer to what happened to fiction in the twenty-first century is that (well) it’s doing just fine. There are plenty of online literary magazines, physical magazines, and books from small presses which shine brightly with new directions. But in terms of grand, sweeping epics of the human experience we can look right here to the platform internet as a whole. The conjoining of millions of individual senses of interiority has begun to resemble something of a grand narrative in itself. Everything has the potential to be a fandom so long as it scratches the itch of personal pursuit and in such a way, history is now written while it’s transpiring by those who are keeping tabs on the situation.
I used to joke that Qanon was the last great American novel but now, looking back, I realize that the great, longwinded decline of the United States under the weight of its own ignorant symbols and self-mythologizing is likely the to be the final and greatest American novel, and Qanon was only its prologue. The last great American novel is so vast and so great that it’ll be a wonder if the whole world doesn’t drown inside of it. Our hearts certainly have.
The inside becomes the outside.
“We are entering the age of implosion after 3000 years of explosion. The electric field of simultaneity gets everybody involved with everyone else. All individuals, their desires and satisfactions, are co-present in the age of communication. But computer banks dissolve the human image. When most data banks come together into a reciprocating whole, our entire Western culture will turn turtle. Visualize an amphibian with its shell inside and its organs outside. Electronic man wears his brain outside his skull and his nervous system on top of his skin. Such a creature is ill-tempered, eschewing overt violence. He is like an exposed spider squatting in a thrumming web, resonating with all other webs. But he is not flesh and blood; he is an item in a data bank, ephemeral, easily forgotten, and resentful of this fact.”
— Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers, The Global Village
This is the idea which I thought Ari Aster’s Eddington capitalized on best: namely, what happens when people are turned inside out by systems fixated only on their data? What happens when interiority is given the encouragement to instantly be broadcasted and reflected, frictionless, against the world?
McLuhan was right to write that, in an increasingly networked planet, the activity going on internationally would become more known through its ripple effects than by its content. The medium is the message, after all.
Imagine for a moment that globalized electricity is less of a connection of wires and power plants and rather a great pool of water in which everyone is reflected all at once. Once we’ve looked long enough into this basin, the ripples will come to shape our sense of reality more than what is actually reflected. More importantly, the ripples will shape how we see ourselves.
Ever since a Girard-pilled Peter Thiel threw money behind Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against gawker.com in 2007, the coercive social threat of the internet has solidified into a feeling that we too might be selected for public ridicule for something embarrassing or something hitherto considered private. The blackmail machine of the world wide web is a topic for serious discussion well beyond the scope of this essay, but the natural response to such a web of dirt on one another is that the user begins to live their life with the aim of doing nothing embarrassing, never letting go of the performance as their digital shadow takes on more and more of a personal brand for itself. Privacy still exists, of course. There’s an ominous feeling, though, that it doesn’t.
We’ve come to accept that our phones create spatial maps of the spaces in which we live just as we’ve come to accept that our lives have been turned inside-out to shake out the loose change in a lucrative quest for profit and bottom-line bolstering.
Hindsight may be 20/20 (for the most part), and we might say mass surveillance was always going to be the most likely aftershock of a celebrity culture gone sour, but this admonition doesn’t change the fact that the 2020s have so far been a heavily conservative decade for a reason.
Last Thursday I played a show at a tiny dive2 near Loyola University. There was enough room for twenty people in the bar and our poor drummer was shoved into the deep recess of the corner, wedged between a dartboard, a jukebox, and a beer cooler, but it was a fine enough spot in that the narrow dimensions did fun things with the sound, for better or for worse, and in that I had a good time playing and singing along to the songs we’ve written while watching the televisions above the bar, set to a local ABC station, play headlines such as WHOPPING WATER BILLS and SKYROCKETING GAS PRICES before Jimmy Kimmel opened his late night show with a monologue which featured at least 5 different Trump tweets3.
This sort of pervasive confused seriousness about everything going on in the world right now, locally and abroad, feels dominant. Everything is going wrong, it seems, the decline is increasingly evident and everyone is more than willing to tell you all about it with little word of any solution or optimism besides a stern expression and a certain self-censorship.
Uncertain periods tend to resolve themselves with certainty, eventually. Tepid moments lead somewhere. For every decade-long trendline in culture, there’s eventually a reverse in the trend as another generation rises into the conversation and, irritated with having to deal with their prior generation’s quirks, they begin to seek out their own voice as a unique bloc. Already the embarrassment of being perceived and heckled is beginning to dissipate.
I dislike when any cultural critique looks to the “next generation” as an answer but in this case I find it unavoidable. The younger members of Gen Z and the generation following it have been immersed in the current media landscape their entire lives and it’s quickly becoming apparent that they don’t clam up in the face of cameras like older generations. They act quite differently. I’ll touch more on this in a future essay, currently with the working title “the cowabungist manifesto,” a piece of work which might get me into trouble if I’m not careful.
The scroll may imitate an interior thought, but only ever to an extent, and a very limited one at that.
Some of the best moments in these quaint little lives of ours are those in which we forget about all of the above and simply let ourselves live.
These are the times in which we’re strung out amongst the world in almost spiderweb formation — ah, spiders! those daring little trapeze artists! — Becoming, in a capital-B way alongside others, active as a mail carrier, going for a jog with our running club, full of good breathing, having exerted ourselves in an almost unconscious but dutifully directed way, reminded in our hearts that we’re still alive, reminded in our internal potted plants that we still have room to grow despite the weight of our pot.
But resigning oneself to living is not the same as resigning oneself to passivity. Contemplation differs tremendously from immobility. Even a poorly conceived contemplation leads down the road, eventually, to harmony and rest since it prompts us into a engagement with the world, attention to its nuances, ask someone’s advice — and if they’re worthy of trust, they’ll be sure to tell us if we’re off track.
Not one of the major social media platforms satisfy the function of a good contemplation, nor will they likely ever. Every site must to maintain a frictionless air to remain competitive and friction is a key component to a productive think.
Video-based social platforms, for instance, are designed to abolish the friction of personal contemplation and thrive off of the user’s avoidance of boredom. The video may loop or otherwise the next video will prompt itself quickly.
Many of our text based platforms, on the other hand, will hijack our scrolling thumbs with some sort of mechanical quid pro quo with our eyeballs to keep the train of content riding down the rails with the occasional advertisement or fandom post — and what’s the difference for those of us who are uninitiated? — hollering about some new article of media to be worn down and cast away or condemned and swept under the rug only to reemerge as a caricature’d reflection of itself later on in the decade. So rather than abolishing it altogether, like video platforms might, text-based social media instead approaches contemplation as a integrated piece of a collective pondering about the actors on the stage play of the platform information economy.
Online language, though much more diverse and explorative than that of written language in the twentieth century, still clings to the twentieth century’s discursive logic, and what we’re quickly realizing is that a sense of dialectics is intrinsic to any type of discursive thought, be that in a week’s twitter discourse or in a broad sense of recorded history.
Internal dialectics, the back and forth of ideologies and counter-ideologies, symbols and counter-symbols, are essentially kaleidoscopic to whatever medium they’re within. There’s something intoxicating in watching the patterns form. Whatever goes up must come down. Whatever utopian vision which emerges will give birth to its opposite, reactionary vision. Yesterday’s take will be used against it; and then from the other end of the discursive back-and-forth, as time nourishes the arguments and resentments on either side, monsters emerge from the shadows of idols and devils. Struggles between believers and atheists, pacifists and militarists, bourgeoise and proletariat, communists and fascists, democrats and republicans, and so on and so forth are not in the fundamental experience of experiencing the world in its instantaneous moment but the separations between factions are well within the fundamental experience of living in the discursive mode of the internet. A proper Hegelian might say that to combine all the divisions into a wholistic vision would create a coherent view of the situation, and that may be true but I haven’t read Hegel yet.
The takes ecosystem of online spaces often boils down to nothing more than a snake eating its own tail, the controversial and the cruel spirited tend to rise the quickest and thus the orientation of the whole becomes skewed, day by day, year by year, towards apathy. I’m well aware that by saying this, I’ve fallen into the very trap from which I seek to escape — that of making and disseminating “takes” — but such a contradiction as “a take against takes,” like a Zen Koan, should hopefully give us some distance to look into the truth of the matter.
Kaleidoscopic processes, like the quick-moving discourse of online spaces, can only tear apart the relationships between seemingly contradictory things in our living such as friendship and romance, accomplishment and failure. These ideas maintain a dynamism of their own when held inside an individual life; they’re a significant part of what makes the life itself so worthwhile. We die alone, to be sure. But we also only make sense of our world alone. And neither has to be a lonely process. If the world breathes along with us in our growing into the containers of our living, it will die with us too. There’s a certain comfort to be found in the thought. We’re beings of dirt, water, and sunshine, and that’s not too bad a way to be. At least for me, I enjoy the dirt, the water, and the sun and am proud to be a representative for all three. One day I’ll return to two of those forms, and I’m not sure it’s something I could possibly regret.
We forge our own path to peace, and the world forges us in return. Quiet moments looking out of a window, thinking deeply on a long walk, a shared intimacy between friends, lovers: these moments give us the time and space for discerning a reality which is never one thing but rather countless things all happening at once. Very little in our phenomenological experience can be summed up in written language or in encoded messages.
The unspeakable4 exists beyond our rational methods of understanding5 so it must also, by extension, exist beyond the ability of code or language — and aren’t the two simply two sides to the same coin? — to ever completely figure out.
“As for reason, it is like a mist; behind that mist, however, intuition discovers the stars,” Eugene Minkowski wrote in 1933 in Lived Time. A beautiful sentence and it puts the point I want to make beautifully. Immobilizing ourselves in an attempt to argue out binaries we see on the internet—and I know plenty of people whose lives revolve around gathering up takes to disseminate around whatever proverbial water cooler they come across — takes6 away from the actual act of living and letting things grow and shrink as they do in a life’s organic wanderings. Paying too much heed to these things, too, takes away from the consideration which our own life demands of us.
The only kind of living in which our internal potted plant feels at peace, free to grow towards what exists beyond the horizons of our imaginative daydreaming, is in living out the reality of our circumstances inside the world of nestled objects, a type of living which we might call a knowing becoming in which to know it and to become it are the same.
The “knowing” half of the equation might be well established in terms of raw data but it would be a mistake to assign the purpose and meaning of life to what is immediately quantifiable when so much of the joy of living is felt when we go beyond what rationally binds us down — we hope, we yearn, we grow, we go beyond ourselves everyday, above ourselves and below ourselves, we live beyond death, we can exist beyond a wall we can scarcely see over when we think the grass is a bit greener on the other side. These are by no means fault in a person’s character any more than they are what makes a character into a person.
Raw data is incapable of grasping such nuances which we struggle to even put into words ourselves. The joy of living is not from being a known statistic but from being ourselves a discovered mystery.
Organizing the drawer.
The benefits of an interior train of thought are difficult to put into words, and a major part of this difficulty comes from the fact that words themselves are never fully nailed down when they float through our heads. James Joyce knew this well when he set out to write his indescribable final novel. Finnegans Wake is written from the perspective of a dreamlike subconscious, — every word is also five or six other words — and reveals, more than any other writer I know of (except for, perhaps, Woolf and Stein) that interior language is a chimera while written language is more like the bricks which one might use to build a house. Any attempt to build a house out of the former leads to something strange and murky.
All the same, we have more control over our internal monologue than we have over our dreams and our yearnings, and becoming acquainted with the former helps us understand the latter. Embarking on a comfortable engagement with the forces inside our head does us good.
But the issue I face with attempting to return to a state of interiority after over a decade of having had that interiority offshored by the platform internet is that whenever I dip my toes into serious thought, one thing leads to another, and I enter into something of an anxious spiral. When I go on a long walk without my phone on, say, a nice Spring day, my mind will wander wonderfully until I think of something I think is funny or profound and soon enough I’m racing to get back home so I can jot the idea down. Only, once I do so, I find that the train of thought has died in the process somewhere along the way home. The context has left the station.
To embark on a solo contemplation then is to leave the comfort of the control room in which the world has been personally coordinated and to set sail for unknown waters without having anything to show for it. The anxiety that festers once we leave these perfectly paved roads of interiority is that we rediscover a physical world in decline, one which has abandoned us at some point while we were looking the other way.
Let’s say someone opens a drawer in their kitchen after ten years of not touching this particular drawer only to discover that its dimensions somehow break with conventional ideas of space & time and that the drawer is somehow full of an infinite number of odds and ends. Upon seeing this, it would be understandable that they might react by closing the drawer to return to their previous state of blissful ignorance. But by pushing through the initial shock of discovery, pushing through the realization of this absurd mess inside ourselves, pushing through our brain’s return to silence, pushing through the short-circuiting until the situation becomes more clear, we might respond differently: by organizing the damn drawer.
the bar is called the sovereign for those of you chicagoheads out there
at this point an old man with pure white hair, a thick white mustache, and a quirky polo shirt came up to me and told me my guitar was just too dang loud to which I said “oh sorry” and turned down. For the rest of the show I struggled to get the volume to the right level. My friend told me after the show that I should have turned up. Maybe I should have
also a wonderful book by Samuel Beckett which might be the most frightening thing I’ve ever encountered
Modern psychology fails in this respect, as the effects of these technologies are rippling too quickly and are far too broad-ranging to summon up a scientific understanding which ceases curiosity with the measurable result.
Modern religion, though, has the potential to reach into the sphere beyond the flatness in which we all live, except that religion has undergone a flattening according to its being the only rational means left to us to find meaning in the world. Online religious rely so heavily on religion’s implied meaning-making that religion, at least in its more-online form, has become a land of grifters, marketers, trad marriages, and televangelists more than it has really understood its destiny in leading us out of a valley of mirrors and back into a land of personal and spiritual meaning. That day is to come but likely not until another prophet. That’s a joke, sure, but imagine living through the time of a prophet! To look over from your dining table in 600 AD and to see the prophet Mohammed just stepped in, to encounter the Buddha in 580 BC, to stumble into Christ giving a sermon to a group of people in the desert. Certainly those times have happened before, even if the mythologizing has made them outsized compared to how influential they actually were in their time (it’s very likely by what we know that Pontius Pilates didn’t know or care much who Christ was). Nonetheless, they will happen again. In a time of such insane upheaval and spiritual emptiness, maybe we shouldn’t be all too surprised when something of a digital prophet does emerge? — and of course, it should go without saying, I don’t mean anyone like Satoshi or Jared Leto, I mean an honest-to-god fourth abrahamic religion. Much to think on.
see what i did there?
i really enjoyed this <3