sorry i left you on read,—i threw my phone in the lake

How to get to new york, part eleven

I’m tired of communication; i’m sick of responding to texts; i’m tired of posting; i’m over putting on a pose,—i use a lowercase i not because it’s trendy here but because i don’t like myself enough to capitalize my name; i’m increasingly past all the memes; i feel like running when my phone lights up; when it buzzes and i’m near a body of water, it might just go in there; i’ve become more accustomed to leaving it on do not disturb all day; i’m tired of keeping up with trends, with cycles,—it’s all a familiar cycle, isn’t it?; i’m over waking up and scrolling; i’m tired of the American bedroom; i’m tired of responding to comments (but thank you for reading, i love all of you); mostly i find i’m sick of this sickly sticky text forward interfacing with you and you with me,—and that hurts to say because i love talking with you, i love hearing from you—but there are increasingly more and more moments throughout my day-to-day in which i simply don’t want to communicate with anyone at all in any way whatsoever except,—

There’s the ding of my phone’s polite speaking voice, a quick ahem, as it speaks up, and of course i check what it has to say. What if it’s urgent? It’s nothing, though, naturally, and so my resentment against this communication grows and grows.

And then i start to worry. Boy do i start to worry. I think about how behind i’ve fallen now that i simply don’t feel the need to communicate. There are oh so many people online who want to communicate more than me. What does that say about me?

Let’s say the quiet part out loud, then: the american economy demands that one be competitive, and to be competitive one must be fully immersed in the connective tissue of the current moment,—how else can one expect to achieve success otherwise? A person in their twenties today therefore has to strive completely towards the sun, towards total immersion within the deepest parts of the ocean, towards being not just merely a node in this constellation of nodes, but to be a significant node: you have to stand out because otherwise who even are you?

It’s toxic thinking, plain and simple. It’s also, i should add, a put-on, a feeling that’s been lathered in the anxious hands of the media climate and applied to your back to be massaged in vigorously during your whole life, your parents’ whole lives (assuming they themselves grew up in the u.s.), your cousins’ whole lives, your friends’ whole lives,—the keepers of the status quo in america have managed something unthinkable: they’ve privatized our stress.

“Have we even thought about how bad this is?” Asks Mark Fisher after having paced around the front of a lecture hall in sweden for close to five minutes. “Have we really thought about it? I mean, let’s look at this way: how much did you care about communication ten years ago? Now, okay, you do want phone calls now and again, don’t you? I mean you’d want them like you’d want letters,—they’re kinda nice,—but not like,- not every thirty seconds… You didn’t have a compulsive need to check for such communications, right?… Communication didn’t matter that much and on the level of content it still doesn’t matter much now.”

Mark laughs and staggers back, resuming his anxious pace back and forth. He’s bubbling, his mind is quite frankly frothing, throwing out ideas seemingly to himself and to the lecture hall in sweden where he speaks,—the camera follows him back and forth,—and he’s shooting off more ideas and stopping occasionally to answer questions from swedish accents… Here inside my macbook pro, on its backlit screen, here inside Youtube: here is one of the few places where Mark Fisher is still alive.

and there’s Mark! You can actually see him there when i turn the flash off.

Mark Fisher died in 2017. Pills. Very classic. But yet still… He’s still here. He’s speaking to me. How odd. His ghost is still very much still alive online. There’s no rest from the constant communication, not even in death! Mark would have get a kick out of this, i would imagine, if he were still around… Perhaps he even considered the thought before…

Outside my window the summer in chicago has begun its annual swelling down into the blustery sunglazed heatwave that almost always signals summer’s end,—this is a good time for taking psychedelics if there ever was one—and here i am, unemployed and sweaty and pouring over Mark Fisher lectures, reading his old posts on his blog, k-punk, trying to put pieces together in my head, in my notebook, trying so hard to understand while at the same time cramming my head so full of media that I can barely breathe.

I’ve watched his DOCH lectures on pathologies of the digital probably three times now,—his lectures are like pure dopamine into my ears, into my eyes, they go oh so many places: up ladders, down slides, in and out of ideologies (stars make up constellations and ideas make up lectures, i suppose), bounding up and down walls as he paces back and forth, sometimes playing hauntological club tracks from the mid 2000s, sometimes barreling through the topics we talk about on this app so regularly without lingering in any one spot too long, quickly hopping onto the next topic. There’s enough here for a hundred substack posts, surely.

I remember discovering Mark Fisher for the first time in 2021 when i first came across a copy of Capitalist Realism in UW’s memorial library¹ during the time in college when i would wander around that (mostly) empty library with a dab pen, a mint posh, gathering up whatever book looked interesting, gathering them up in a stack (my beautiful bounty, don’t touch) and pouring over them until the library closed at 9pm and i had to shuffle home through the wisconsin winter.

But now it is summer, and I am out of a job yet still struggling to keep up with responding to texts, responding to DMs, responding to messages,—not because i can’t, only because there’s a desperate sadness in running on a treadmill like this. You feel this too, to a certain extent, i have to imagine.

This saturday i went to a friends’ pajama party and what a wonderful time it was! Sure, i lost my favorite pair of sunglasses,—where? somewhere in Anna’s house (shrug),—but the irl makes for good moments precisely because those moments feel real. It is so nice to see people’s faces, to have conversations, to meet new people and discover how much you have in common with just about anyone. Earlier in the day i went to a block party my friend ollie hosted and him and momo ran the merch stand for the chicago fashion brand he works for,—they had a custom made chess set as well where a neighborhood kid around 8 years old destroyed me in a couple moves (it’s hard to feel too bad,—kids are often the best chess players, not to mention there were two other neighborhood kids who whispered advice into his ear).

the brutality of chicago’s street gangs knows no bounds

During all this my iPhone 8 dropped down to 5% and i decided to just simply not open it for the rest of the night,—it would stay firmly in my pocket,—and suddenly the rest opened up in a real way. I felt myself become one with the world of people in a way that i usually don’t. Deleting the substack app has helped with this too, not going to lie.

But then when i’m sitting at home, when i’m typing these words to you right now, having shut off my phone and placed on the kitchen table,—all that matters is that it remains outside my bedroom,—i slowly start to feel an incredible loneliness enter into my heart. That of detachment. A loneliness i can only describe by linking a song.

There’s a myth that you’d be happier if you put more effort in. Here’s the privatization of stress again, knocking in your ear like it’s a closed door (and sometimes my ears are closed doors, whose aren’t sometimes?), whispering: “if you can just figure out what’s wrong with you, then you would be happier and less anxious, right? but that’s going to require a lot of work on your part. It’s not really the system that’s messed up,—and besides you can’t change the system, so why try?—you need to figure out what your diagnosis is and to strive to overcome whatever it is inside of you that’s keeping you from enmeshing yourself with everyone else who’s so clearly having such a good time without you.”

“And hey,” the privatization of stress whispers, “if you find that you can’t reify yourself with the economy you can at least support the pharmaceuticals industry…”

There’s no end to the work. What drugs do you take to stay as productive as possible? Or is it only the hope you prescribe yourself? Or is it the fear that’s instilled in you from a young age, that of homelessness? Well it’s getting worse and worse to be homeless in this country, as it’s increasingly being criminalized nationwide. Fire to our collective asses, i suppose. If people have felt even an ounce of comfort while being homeless, they certainly won’t be allowed even that ounce of comfort for very much longer.

We’re existing in a totalitarian state of mixed messages. Everything in your life (if you’re an american, at the very least) is designed to produce endless anxiety inside of you. Your attention is being shuffled around everywhere constantly. This is intentional. You’re not allowed to think about one thing for too long. You might think about systematic problems. That can’t be allowed. You might think about how the United States has the oldest democractic constitution for a sovereign nation in the world; you might think about how we could write a new one. Have you ever thought about that? What would it be? I haven’t given it much thought either, to be completely honest with you, but it could happen and it could make things better. Would that be a revolution?

But on the more small scale, I really have held myself back from throwing my phone into Lake Michigan once or twice. The main thing holding me back is thinking about the poor fishes. They wouldn’t even know what to do with a phone.

Another quote from Mark, in a post for The Occupied Times:

Labour is essentially communicative. The boundaries between work and life are permeable. The incessant demans of semiocapitalism stretch the limits of physical organisms. Email means that there is no such thing as a workplace or a working day. You start working the minute you wake up… At the top of the tower, there is no liberation from work. There is just more work — the only difference is that you might now enjoy it (life is too exciting for sleep).

There’s seemingly nothing that needs to be said about much of anything, as lived reality kind of speak for itself in a way.

Yet where is this drive to communicate coming from? This intense need to receive communications and to communicate back every couple seconds of every minute of every hour of every day?

There’s seemingly something here in the room with both of us, a spirit or a force, some phantasm of the collective cybernetic libidinal force which speaks fluently in multiple alien languages which I’m not sure any of us can quite make out. It’s such a futuristic lingo.

The future is a beast which can be dwelled on,—it’s in chains currently. 

And here with us there is someone in our bedroom, our collective bedroom, this ghostly apparition having emerged from the combined sum of all our online spaces and all the communications (all the notifications we get, every minute of every hour of ever day), is babbling on about something unintelligible and why can’t I stop myself from listening to what it’s trying to say?

Is it even possible for those of us who’ve grown up under teeth of this holy digital spirit to ever make peace with it?

I don’t know.

Who does?

Mark might have.

But who knows.

One Mark Fisher quotes before this thing closes out:

There are now two classes: those addicted to work and those forced to work. But this isn’t quite accurate. Whether we are working for our employers (who pay us) or for Mark Zuckerberg (who doesn’t), most of us find ourselves compulsively gripped by the imperatives of communicative capitalism (to check email, to update our statuses). This mode of work makes Sisyphus’s interminable labours seem quaint; at least, Sisyphus was condemned to perform the same task over and over again. Semio-capitalism is more like confronting the mythical hydra: cut off one head and three more grow in its place, the more emails we answer, the more we receive in return.

See u next week!!

xoxox,

briffin

P.S. i suppose this piece is something of a addendum to last week’s How to get to new york, so i’ll drop it right here:

all roads lead to amazon, unfortunately

1. For anyone reading this attending UW, or even if you’re just in madison (you cna get a community library pass for like $50 a year or something like that), memorial library has an incredible esotericism section. they have a lot of stuff that’s incredibly difficult to find, many books on magick that have been out of print since the 60s and the 70s, including one laying out a social theory of magick as it pertains to protest movements,—fascinating stuff though i can’t for the life of me remember its name. I do remember looking for copies online and finding that they were pushing two thousand dollars used so um yeah lol