internet as graveyard/ internet as heaven

manufacturing heaven, part one

And this too will one day be swept across the shoreline of the real; not like a seashell but like foam to be dissolved against the sun.

just realizing how much this looks like a face carved into a pumpkin

ON SATURDAY NIGHT, a coworker of mine ran past me quickly, from here to there and then gone again, bussing a table to reset it for a two-top standing idle near the front door. Placing dirty glasses on a black tray, she quickly chirped: “trump, shot, face.”

She sped away, glasses clinking against one another, and I was left saying “what?” So I walked to the back alley, took out my phone, and yeah: shots were fired at trump at a rally in PA. Huh. Phone away.

Over the next four hours, the patrons (all mostly older and monied) began to receive phone calls, ding! text alerts, and the wave of entangled blips settled in upon everyone in the place here like a fine mist.

Watching a political event like this unfold in real time in real space felt surreal,—in the past I have only seen them happen unfold through twitter, google, or instagram.

We’ll all move on from this within a week of course; our collective unconscious will forget,—but will the collective unconscious forget?

No matter the actual of content of these political events which we plod through, they nonetheless echo up and down the walls of these corners of the cyberspace canyon wherein we’ve planted our flag, and then they disseminate against the cold steel of the real where people do actually put their phones down and continue to eat their entrées.

Information frenzies like we saw on Saturday night refract and multiply like soundwaves in a church hall, like information whispered at a restaurant, and there is no reason to think that these social events are not being consumed and repackaged by the algorithms behind generative AI. There’s no reason to think that this moment couldn’t be included in the mash regurgitated en masse. Certainly, the picture of bloodied trump with his fist up is now being pulled from for generative prompts¹.

you will see this picture again and again and again through the kaleidoscope of generative AI,—it is quite simply never going to go away

If the internet economy of the 90s and early 2000s was a place where small actors and bloggers could make a real following via their html hodgepodge websites, then the internet going forward has increasingly become one gridlocked by a handful of platforms which have effectively stymied any real opportunity to think outside of them.

These platforms have become graveyards over time as the posts accumulate and accumulate, as users pass and their thoughts and imprints remain in circulation, and now with the rising tide of AI slop we’ve begun to see ghosts emerge,—uncanny waftings of past content, stirred in a black cauldron in the back of the graveyard by the binding natural forces of the graveyard itself, the algorithm has come alive just as the ghosts of the dead make a haunted graveyard seem as if it were teeming with an unnerving sort of life. The living has no place in such a space.

As more events are added to the graveyard, their ghosts will swirl around the newest nodes and repackage them just the same.

The desire towards cyberspace, for me anyways, has always been a desire towards spaces hidden away from public eye. Perhaps this is the reason that one Keane song goes as hard as it doe; perhaps this is also the pearly center of the chronic mass appeal with which harry potter novels pushed themselves onto a generation or two. Platform 9 3/4 and the black household, hogwarts castle and the weasley house, all of these are ideally places one must know how to seek out for oneself,—thus our childhood thoughts of such places were of safety from outside eyes, places only we know.

Of course this feeling has been bottled. But what hasn’t?

I walk past the goblin market in the mornings when I walk to the gym and in the front window of the manga shop is a spinning rack of golden board books each entitled Bob Ross, or Martha Stewart, or Dolly Parton,—there’s even one for Walter Cronkite²,—all of them prominent twentieth century media figures. These books are ways for parents to push onto their kids representatives for their nostalgia. It’s awful, it’s draconian; literally the haunting of the present by semblances of stories about brand names from the past³. Regurgitated slop, all of this too⁴.

Certainly the phenomenon of AI slop, as described by Ryan Broderick for Garbage Day, and Kate Lindsey for Embedded, is much more a symptom of a cultural trend more than it is itself an disease,—and the same of course can be said for Donald Trump as he’s quite simply a symptom of the rot at the center of American politics and not the disease itself, of which Biden could be considered another symptom.

Anyways, big tech has embraced AI slop with tremendous gusto because it falls in line with their zealous adherence to algorithmic structure; big tech’s reliance on recursive algorithms stands out to me also as a repackaging of the Christian missionary mindset of Europe’s colonial days; there’s a similar emphasis on infinity;—I’d go as far to argue even that the Christian notion of infinity tracks well within the prerogative of those who have implemented our algorithmic world: that’s to say, American tech firms have achieved an achieved dichotomy of the Christian infinite.

For Dante, time all flows to one place: eternity. In a passage from the Inferno, Farinata degli Uberti tells the poet:

the brain rot of social media news cycles, summed up neatly

In the Christian canon, at the end of time, the end of history, the end of the past-present-future dichotomy of our understanding ourselves, all the living and the dead will arrive at one unified point (in Joyce, poetically, that of paralysis underneath the falling snow), that of an infinite without the double vision of past and future tacked onto our present moment, instead of any conception of time there is only a constant gaze into the present abyss of God, of the eternal moment of damnation or salvation, as indistinguishable as the past and the future.

Souls, in this understanding of time, have thus existed since the beginning of all things and are set to conclude alongside their end. Christian time is therefore perfectly linear, a clear beginning and a clear end both of which leave the soul in an infinite pool to soak forever. And isn’t this similarly the fate of our online avatars, pulling and pushing the strings of our images in virtual space? And isn’t this fear of hell, fear of heaven, fear of an endless gaze into a constant present moment similar to that lurking fear we feel from AI slop’s slow-broiling the internet?

As we pass away and our avatars fall into a limp pile in the ditch of the world wide web, they will very much so still be open to the stimulus of users’ demands, of fingertips on keyboards, mousepads, they will be awaiting our commands. Their ghosts will be used to generate more and more content, to string words together, words which are not ours and not anyone’s.

There is no death on the internet. For our avatars, as they lay waiting after our own eventual death, there is never relief, never rest,—not until the server eventually goes down and they cease to exist. Importantly, though, a server wipe is not death. The avatar may disappear but its data continues to be disseminated,—it’s disseminating as we speak, as you read this, across hundreds of nodes.

Theirs is the achieved dream of christian history, how a protestant society has viewed human life, come to fruition through technology.

Perhaps this choice of placing eternity into the internet was a subconscious one from a white protestant predominantly American culture. And if the goal of these technology companies is to bind us further and further to the avatars they have developed for us to translate our likeness to browse and appraise, let us be weary of being bound up in a projection of a subliminal religious ideal.

And here we are with the internet of today: a hundred thousands tombstones sticking out from the ground like celery sticks; only there’s no growth, just an emerging of energy, of stink, a conglomeration of spirits building out their empire of simulacrum.

Let’s close this thing out with the song from Nacho Libre⁵. A one two, a one two three four,—

Because you′re there, when I awake

And then you give me a life so great

Because the children with you can play

I think, I think I am

when I speak you're always there

People listen what I can tell

you′re my gospel, my daily bread

That's why I think I am

I am I am I am I am

I think I am, I thank I am

I'm glad I am, I′m proud I am

A real religious man

I am I am I am I am

I pray I am, I feel I am

Oh Lord I am, God knows I am

A real religious man

As I realized, you′re my best friend

Can separate a chance from fate

you have all, I need to take

That's why I think I am, I am, I am

The silent prayer, I just Behave

Saints and sinners aren′t quite the same,

This is my temple, the whole wide world

That's why I think I am, I am

I am I am I am I am

I think I am, I thank I am

I′m glad I am, I'm proud I am

A real religious man

I am I am I am I am

I pray I am, I feel I am

Oh Lord I am, God knows I am

A real religious man

I am I am I am I am

I pray I am, I feel I am

Oh Lord I am, God knows I am

A real religious man

A real religious man

A real religious maaaaaan

Thanks for reading,

xoxoxox,

briffin

next time: more on the haunted graveyard theory of the internet + discussion of neocalvinism in digital spaces (technocalvinism??)

I wrote this piece in response to a much better piece on the topic by Patrick Nathan you can read here:

Choking on the Cloud

p.s.—big thanks to my coworker who gifted me an eighth of homegrown colorado weed as a goodbye gift from work,—it made this piece possible, lol

1. Likely it’ll be the most consequential photo of the year if not the decade. It’s certainly a poet image and love him or hate him its framing stirs something inside. The temptation of the poetic image, according the Bachelard, is that of the infinite instant, a “harmonic relation between opposites.” If this photograph of Donald Trump with his fist in the air isn’t that, well then I wouldn’t know what is.

2. Surprisingly none for Joan Didion much to the chagrin of nearly everyone on this app

3. i know what you’re going to say, i do need to read more Mark Fisher, that is true, i will get to it at some point after i finish reading the master and margarita

4. Let’s say you go to a mexican restaurant, not a real restaurant in mexico but a tex-mex one in, say, chicago, and to one side you have a margarita in what looks like a soup bowl with a leg, and on the other side of you there’s a bowl of donkey chips and a small saucer of housemade salsa. All of it is so good that you decide, fuck it why not? I’ll order a chicken chimichanga with rice and beans for twenty. Unfortunately, though, you can only eat a small part of the meal before you realize it was the marg who ordered the chimichanga through you, so ok you pay and you finish the drink, engage in the conversation around the table, and you box up the chimi to take home with you. The styrofoam box does wonders in protecting it against the rain. The next morning you heat your last hashbrown and mix up an egg and reheat the slop of what was once a chimichanga on the stovetop (because you don’t have a microwave), and what you have here is slop but whooboy does it hit. You feel routinely awful afterwards but it’s a sunday and you can nap a bit. No biggie. Only, doing this for every meal this is not great. For every meal, problems will begin to emerge with this slop. The AI slop is simply leftovers, and only the fattiest bits.

Was there any flavor to the mash of chimi, guac, sour cream, rice, beans, sriracha, and hashbrown which I had on my plate? Of course not. But did it hit a primal human base urbs for pure carb? Oh absolutely. It was lovely. It’s certainly about to haunt me for the next twelve hours, though.

5. Great movie; absolutely incredible song.