the nihilists
an attempt at establishing online personality types
intro: downstream from an ocean of images
Just like these circles we pace around, these days of the same patterns, we make the same observations over and over again about the same topics of conversations, over and over again, because there’s a strange limitation to what is socially acceptable to talk about online and an even more narrow limitation on what’s socially acceptable to talk about in casual conversation—and by this I do not mean the self-censorship in the face of “cancel culture” or whatever, such self-censorship is a band-aid slapped on an invisible wound and if you want to say a slur so badly there’s clearly something else limiting your breadth of interests. I mean that there are hard limits to what topics we absorb and what topics we feel to be shared ground.
This same handful of topics, — alleyway graffiti of the soul, — is seasonal but ubiquitous, firm in its cruel disregard but perpetually invoking a quiet fascination with the contradictions in the social fabric of things. Sometimes a loud fascination. Sometimes a disturbed one. Sometimes our fascination swerves into reaction, other times into resignation, but in the end all bows down to the image of the thing and the image of the discourse surrounding it.
These contradictions can be reasoned away and unravelled but they never are properly reasoned away or unravelled because our instincts have become purely nihilistic since the 1990s when the counterculture worldview merged with the internet’s earliest years, and it’s become more comfortable to turn our backs on any sort of meaning to as everything it could have applied to has become a topic of rapturous debate online. But a human being is quite incapable of doing away completely with meaning—searching for it is very much in our blood—and any nihilist is at the same time treading water in an ocean, scouring the horizon for solid ground to stand on.
The acid-washed ironic end-of-history counterculture of the 1990s was likely the last real time we had a countercultural movement in American life that was in any way, shape, or form platformed—new genres from grunge to rap began to gain an mass audience—and so of course, for our online djinns, this last period of widespread consensus has spread its net far wider through the slow drifting of pop culture entropy which will one day, perhaps, lead to the heat death of pop culture itself. Let us hope.
The 1990s were also the most recent widespread pop-culture rallying cry of the counterculture before it fused completely and unequivocally with the internet in the late 2000s, which has something to do with this spreading out of a worldview empty of meaning beyond rote consumerism for the sake of production and economic goals.
So today, in the aftermath of neoliberalism—Joe Biden stepping down as the American presidential nominee felt like the fall of the neoliberal Berlin Wall— everything in culture is downstream from the internet which is itself downstream of the 1990s.
Perhaps the Simpsons’ writing team in the ‘90s was the apostates for an entire worldview which has since become a consensus reality, unknowingly preaching the world to come. If everything in the twentieth century was reflecting with the pale light of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, everything in the twenty-first is currently reflecting with the dumb, mute yellow of Homer Simpson.
Don’t think of a minute that I’m cynical about Homer, though. If the Simpsons writing staff were the apostates of the current century, Homer stood firm as their prophet, their Christ. The fascinating aspect of the character in the early run of the show was his odd way of winning you over despite his faults. Almost every episode of the Simpsons involves one of the characters having to return to a true lived life from an odyssey of images and illusions. The name Homer is almost certainly a play on this. Episodes of The Simpsons start with the reality of a lived life and then descend into a series of comic book events, escapades, hijinks, and whatnot to eventually return home.
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is a suitable enough choice for the American successor to Joyce’s Ulysses, but what if the real American successor to Ulysses is actually The Simpsons? It’s not as if the characters in the Simpsons ever age: they repeat the same days of their lives over and over again in thirty minute arcs. The show’s a celebration of life amid the struggle of the everyday, about the struggle back to life out from a state of survival, — again, the enemy of a lived life, — amid the vacuum of meaning found in a world of cartoon situations. Only Bojack Horseman understood this hidden instinct of animation to describe our inners sufferings and anxieties. We’re nothing but the multicolored outlines of people against the backlit screens of our discourse.
But The Simpsons holds up Homer as its main character and says, here is your everyman. And who are we all if not Homer Simpsons struggling through an exaggerated chain reaction of events involving the same characters and the same places over and over again? Who are we but Marge Simpsons rediscovering life every day after another days’ adventures?
Here are some examples of trending topics from my feed: Trump, Conclave, Gaza, Musk, A24 Films, Nosferatu, Chappell Roan, the Chiefs, China, Deepseek, OpenAI. In conversations with friends, I find myself saying tweets I’ve read out loud as if I’m reciting without knowing. It’s almost like I’m swept up in a storm. The worldview of the people in my algorithm has gradually become my own. I feel the same digital gusts of wind they feel. There are still seasons even if the world were to stop turning.
Trending topics become caricatures of themselves, to be traded on the online discourse table in this online casino where it looks like a supermarket but there is nothing to eat.
And so naturally we approach these topics with a hearty dose of irony because if our thought and the light of our consciousness is focused on the trending feeds, keeping up with the news, all of that, nothing gradually matters to any of us anymore after a while. The contradiction is this: there is too much in the world that we can see and our phone screens are so very very small. Such a contradiction, when forced on a mass of people, results in a nihilism which we can’t seem to shake because we’re so alone in it.
And the 1990s remains dominant in the cultural imagination because its countercultural worldview coincided with the birth of the internet, and it’s a worldview that many online posters quietly yearn towards because it feels like the most widespread and consistent worldview that we have left to grasp on to. The futurist worldview of the pre-9/11 2000s and the rich kid sleaze of the late 2000s and early 2010s are quite frankly not cutting it. We’ve tried returning to Indie Sleeze and found that the display room for Indie Sleaze had been robbed, graffitied, and the concrete walls had been stripped for copper wire.
The only issue is that the worldview established in the 1990s, through the art from the period, was of a distinctly nihilistic sort—full of quick quips and sardonic jabs. Think of Tina Fey’s tenure at SNL, think of Seinfeld, think of The Simpsons; all these shows share a very similar worldview of nothing matters, a worldview that makes perfect sense when faced, lonely and isolated, against the contradictions of the modern world large enough to lose oneself inside. And that’s kind of where we are now. Lost in the machine.
I imagine there to be four separate strands of internet-facing nihilism; they can be described like this:
(1) “nothing :( matters” nihilism,
(2) “nothing :) matters” nihilism,
(3) “nothing >:( matters” nihilism, and
(4) “nothing >:) matters” nihilism.
part one: the passive nihilists
(1) “Nothing :( matters,” nihilism
is a passive and pessimistic online nihilism. It is a lurker’s mindset.
These are mindsets in the face of the vacuum of meaning who quietly toil through their day to day with the creeping dread of being beneath the shadow of the end of the world. They’ve resigned themselves to the truth that meaning has become impossible. Whether this is generally true or not doesn’t matter to them in the slightest. They would prefer to ignore such questions, toiling away at a career or wellness.
These mindsets are typified by the couple of seconds after Wille E. Coyote runs off a cliff and continues running through open air without looking down. If he avoids reality, he can keep running. He hasn’t seen that the object of his desire, — the road runner, — is no longer in his direct path, but he continues his run anyways.
“Nothing :( matters” nihilism is a refusal to look down and to ignore and to keep running, to continue the futile pursuit of chasing something you know deep down to be an illusion. It is a state of mental survival no different from the rest of the nihilisms, — to be a nihilist is to exist in a constant state of survival against the world as it pounds its branches against you. They lose themselves in the illusions they know deep down to be false but refuse to get off the treadmill. Along with Wile E. Coyote, we have Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos, Bojack Horseman in (um) Bojack Horseman, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. All these serve as good and well symbols of the “nothing :( matters” set that continue in their self-destructive wandering through the desert of meaning without daring to look around. Kurt Cobain represents an interesting example of this, however, in that he fluctuated between an active and passive nihilism, — the performance allowed him a vibrant active nihilism on stage, which made his passive nihilism quiet moments unbearable.
The pessimism described here is not necessarily a pessimism about the future, — though certainly that is also often the case, — but rather a pessimism towards the current moment in which they live, a pessimism towards any possible grasp of meaning. These nihilists simply would rather not exist in this time devoid of meaning, and so their major political action is one of non-activity: mainly, avoidance, or a desire to defend their illusions but not necessarily being capable of caring enough to do so. They would rather wait until death and make their time as streamlined as possible until then.
The project of the passive, pessimistic nihilist, — the Nothing :( matters set, — is to survive through the current vacuum of meaning by avoiding eye contact with the world, making their time on this Earth as seamless as possible. Their view of their own lives is that of a perfectly streamlined arc from a clinical birth to a clinical death.
They are not optimistic about the present moment, but they’re not active enough to change themselves or the world around them. This tends to result in a personal resignation in which they’re avoidant of the world completely until they’re allowed to no longer be a part of it.
(2) “Nothing :) matters,” nihilism
is a passive and optimistic online nihilism. This is likely the Homer Simpsons mindset through his troubles: very content with his lot in life, content to eat donuts and nap in the control room where he makes just enough to support his family and no more than that. This type also, of course, finds no meaning in the world, — and like the “Nothing :( matters” set, has stopped seeking it out. Rather, this type resigns to the meaninglessness of the world but attempts to find a cozy corner in it anyway, attempts to love the meaningless void all the same, even if it’s something human beings are incapable of loving.
Like Wille E., Homer tumbles off high places quite often throughout all 36 seasons of The Simpsons, from cliffs and buildings, but Homer always looks down before he falls and more importantly, he is not falling because he’s chasing an illusory dream, but rather falling because he just happens to be falling. Simple as that.
He’s falling due to circumstances beyond his control more often than not, but there’s no denial of the truth. He walks off the fall, literally bounces back sometimes, and returns home to spend time with his family and the people he loves.
This optimism is not necessarily an optimism for the future but an optimism that everything in the world is alright as long as we appreciate the small things. The reactions online that fall into the category tend to read as ridiculous sometimes as they’re captured in the reaction machine of social media. In terms of literary figures, Leopold Bloom from Ulysses fits this category, as does Tyrone Slothrop from Gravity’s Rainbow, at least until he’s ejected from it into the mysteries of lost and forgotten history. Dougie Jones from Twin Peaks is a good example of this.
The project of the passive and optimistic nihilist is, very simply, to find a cozy corner in the world where they can feel safe in their connections to others. If nothing matters unequivocally, might as well try to connect to the world and the universe. Suppose nothing is imbued with meaning anymore, as is the common consensus. Then the plight of the passive, optimistic nihilist is to feel comfortable, eat good food, and take pride in their role as a survivor of these times because perhaps such pride could develop into meaning.
part two: the active nihilists
“The rebellious have nothing to lose but survival. But they may lose survival in two ways: by losing life too, or by embarking on its construction. Since survival is a kind of slow death, there is a temptation, not devoid of passionate justification, to speed the process up and die more quickly—to go flat out in a fast car, as it were, and ‘live’ the negation of survival negatively. Alternatively, people may try to survive as anti-survivors, bringing all their energy to bear on the enrichment of everyday life and thus negating survival by drowning it in the joys of construction. Both alternatives clearly follow the single yet contradictory path of decay and supersession.”
- Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life
(3) “Nothing >:( matters,” nihilism
is an active and pessimistic online nihilism. If anybody’s still confused about why Luigi Mangione has become a folk hero in the American pantheon of outlaws, then look no further. While he himself may have had more of a “nothing :( matters” approach in his online presence, his act—if he actually did it, that is—symbolizes the ultimate radical act of active and pessimistic online nihilism. Active pessimism is an approach to the cyber-seasonal tides of online discourse with an eye towards deconstruction to create meaning, especially when the boredom simmering within the passive types comes to a full rolling boil into full revolutionary action directed at a class-war target—an idealized symbol of the collective suffering, such as the American Healthcare industry in the case of Luigi Mangione or Wall Street with the Occupy Wall Street movement—or merely a project in escaping the whims of the attention economy. That being said, these types are those posting long, passionate essays in tweet threads (or on Substack), attempting to make meaning through construction through the systems in place and ultimately themselves.
To clarify, the pessimism felt by this group is not a pessimism about the future, necessarily, but rather a pessimism about the present moment and the current structure of power, a feeling which is drastically opposed to the optimism felt by the group in the next section—the "Nothing >:) matters," nihilists. And so this ragtag of depressed online faces, who are actively trying to self-actualize and construct some semblance of meaning in a world devoid of it, are the enemy of “Nothing >:) matters”, who are actively optimistic about the current state of the world and swat away any changes to the status quo.
The project of the active and pessimistic nihilist is self-actualization. “There is only one valid way to forget,” Vaneigem writes. “And that is to erase the past by fulfilling it. To avert decay by superseding it.” (The Revolution of Everyday Life)
They possess an awareness, even if subconscious, that the idea of human beings being transformed and isolated into mute, powerless objects is an inherently bad thing that should be remedied, that the state of temporal survival we feel in our day-to-day which at the same time blots out the potential of living a full life is a bad thing that should be remedied, that the trappings of the neoliberal system of rents and payments are bad things which should be remedied. This awareness can develop into a number of unpredictable ways, — just like a tennis ball tossed into a room of hard furniture can’t be predicted, neither can the active pessimists’s actions, — but perhaps the most defining attribute of this sect is their basic project in attempting building a life understood and lived out of a state of survival, literally constructing meaning out of the vacuum of meaning so that something new can supersede their nihilism and abolish their misery.
This type of nihilist, remarked by thinkers tremendously more thoughtful than myself, is only a couple of footsteps removed from a revolutionary proper.
I find it difficult to think of any contemporary pop-culture figures representing this type because more often than not they actively do find meaning in a transformation into a revolutionary, an act that abolishes the “Nothing >:( matters” nihilist and replaces it with a person who has found meaning and then goes on living a life in accordance.
One somewhat recent example of the “Nothing >:( matters” type that comes to mind is Aaron Bushnell, who superseding himself by setting himself on fire to make a stand on the death toll in Gaza. Such an act transformed him into a bona fide revolutionary for a brief moment through the situationist dystopia of images, signs, and signifiers that we find ourselves within. The issue with such a protest, though, is that the message rarely overcomes the medium.
He made himself into an image that haunts, giving his life a meaning in a meaningless world but becoming a digital landmark on the hazy map of current events over these last couple years has a strange irony to it. It’s dark stuff.
Just to be clear: there are other, healthier ways to self-actualize. (please don’t light yourself on fire) A fictional analog to this type of nihilist is Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. At the start of the series he works towards unravelling the murder of Laura Palmer, but the case gradually descends into a question of self-actualization as Cooper is confronted more and more with hidden contradictions of reality that force him to take up esoteric practice and almost occultist worldviews to establish and find truth. We go through similar journeys to find meaning in our lives; and unfortunately such a task doesn’t seem possible as I’m hard pressed to think of anyone who’s found it.
But if there is a method to discovering meaning in a meaningless world, it’s by constructing a personal understanding and a personal sense of the universe in which your individual actions matter. Aaron Bushnell figured this out through the act of self-immolation, an action that in his mind made his life worthwhile in a world actively squeezing out human worth. These acts, though, can also be personal rituals: meditation, working out, religious practice, astrology readings, whatever works. All that matters is that it is a profoundly personal driving through the constant rain of illusion and contradiction.
These types of nihilists, the “nothing >:( matters” type, span a wide ideological spectrum, but at the center of it all is an active role in attempting to change things. We have been ingrained with the idea that we are incapable of doing much of anything except posting, a mindset that’s become increasingly exasperating the higher rent and medical costs continue to rise. If we’re merely surviving, the exhaust vent where we call out for help is firmly (and safely, for the capitalist class) in our pockets.
The reality of this, of course, is that posting on a major, post-IPO social media platform cannot remain a radical act against the establishment, as these platforms continue to represent a central vein of various nations’ viper grip on national discourse and international discourse. Posting is ineffectual fluff; it is merely the creation of illusions that feed down to the less active nihilists and reinforce their passivity. This post is no different. I want the world to change and so I post these blogs because writing’s the only thing I know how to do. Their success does nothing except bolster Substack’s bottom line. This blog was always going to be a failure, but all writing is a failure at the end of the day because once written, I can look around and only think about how nothing has changed.
Instead, for the most part, they choose to remain behind podcast microphones or shitpost accounts, either going on about theory or being as generally and performatively obnoxious as they can be online as a way to supersede themselves in an attempt to get at purpose through the most arid parts of the desert of meaning. They may still make it. We have yet to see.
Even to the end, this type of pessimistic nihilist remains active. They actively seek meaning and are not frightened if that meaning turns into a handful of pills, even in jest. All of this stems from the way we approach and react to the world: we are the proxies of the dead, and this fact is no more apparent anywhere else than in the influence that artists of the ‘27 club’ throughout the past fifty years have had on today’s discourse. For some active nihilists, dying young can be a viable meaning—it is not the default meaning laid out by the “Nothing :( matters” nihilists—but for others, it’s a mad dash to build a life of meaning from the state of survival where we exist, the treading water that the human body feels when lacking any meaning in its existence. The “Nothing >:( matters” nihilists, in online discourse, are the kind that tweet and text death threats as jokes; this is staunchly different from the “Nothing :( matters” nihilists who would be too scared to joke about such things because of their unawareness, or unwillingness, to confront how they feel about anything—because what if they discover in this process of self-reflection that their desire to escape from the pressures of life within a meaningless world is truly, at their core, a death drive?
(4) “Nothing >:) matters,” nihilism.
Our last type of online nihilism is active and optimistic, but don’t let the smile fool you because this (imo) is perhaps the most dangerous type. This is the type defined by Counterrevolutionaries. It’s an active lashing out at the world just like “Nothing >:( matters” nihilism is, but its intent is not to change the world into a more collectively liberated future. Instead of attempting to deconstruct the world to construct something new, the "Nothing >:) matters" type nihilists aim to deconstruct the world from a place of comfort within their position and disgust at the world around. Whereas the "Nothing :( matters" and the "Nothing >:( matters" sects direct their survival state in a desert of meaning towards themselves—ending in either a death-drive or life-drive respectively—the "Nothing >:) matters" sect of nihilists direct their state of survival into a man vs. the world narrative trope in which they're at the center. If nothing matters, then why not assume that everyone else is an NPC if they're entirely subjective from you?
When the phrase ‘old-fashioned values’ is used, they are not contradictory to a lack of meaning in life, they may actually imply it as the yearning towards a past that is entirely fictional. The goal of the "nothing >:( matters" nihilists is partially to change the world into a past that seems to the counterrevolutionaries to have been a time where they felt more individually liberated and partially to capture the future, just as they feel they have captured the present when they make a snarky comment online or drop a slur in an argument and say, "try to cancel me."
Just as there is no way home if one’s home is in the past, there is no true meaning in a fight against everyone else for the top: it's a fight that cannot be won. Thus, their struggle for change is not self-actualization but rather world-actualization based on their own perceptions and biases that they conceive as "the most rational." We see transphobia and TERF politics reflected in this, in the violent lashing out against anything in the present that signals a future unlike the present moment, in which they’re the most comfortably wealthy. This is the political ideology of the cryptofascists and tech bros with their mantras that “it’s not the code that’s the problem, it’s user error.” It’s an active role in a world where nothing matters, but in a completely misdirected way, smothered by a culture war that ignites active anger towards public goods, minorities, and other people in general—all for the sake of sustaining their own comfortable position situated above various less financially-accelerated demographics.
Donald Trump, for better or for worse, is the most important international political figure of the 2020s simply because he has so unapologetically recognized and channeled this group that remains deeply scared of anyone knocking down their house of cards. In this category of “Nothing >:( matters,” we have our January 6th Rioters, our Mark Zuckerbergs, our Peter Thiels, Elon “probably owns dozens of Funko Pops” Musk, and Sam Altman. Sam Bankman Fried represents perhaps the first timethat this ideology was not celebrated in the mainstream media as paving the way to the future of mankind—a helpful illusion for these types of posters in their transgressive rhetoric and stupidass tweets.
The optimism expressed by this active type of nihilism is not at all optimism about the future, but optimism in how the world is and one’s own place in it, while still being devoid of all meaning. This is not to say a person should not be optimistic about the world and their place in it, but rather that such optimism must be approached without nihilism. All forms of nihilism are profoundly self interested by default, but this one is more so than the others. This type of worldview supports the Countrevolutionary vision of things and events. If there is any threat to this type of nihilistic activism’s worldview—if its attempts at championing the neoliberal capitalist economy or the gender and cultural norms of McCarthyist American society are rebuffed in any way—the subsequent fear leads to drastic, but almost unconscious actions. Suddenly they find themselves stumbling around the United States’ Capitol building.
This activism is not merely an attempt to return to the way things were, but to accelerate the processes that have made the most vocal advocates of this active online optimism as wealthy as they currently are. It’s a contentment in holding the reigns of power and posing like a Sim at fashion-media red carpet balls for the lulz. This is clearly the ideology of Elon Musk. But it’s also that of Rick Sanchez of Rick and Morty, and this ideology’s ascendence to power through tech and transgressive politics makes going anywhere near that show almost unbearable to revisit. This is the ideology of Marc Andreessen and the rationalists, writing screeds like The Techno-Optimist Manifesto that should be relentlessly torn apart by anyone with any sense of meaning in their lives. It is very telling, I think, that the current Trump cabinet is full of Andreessen's A16z colleagues and people downwind from the LessWrong rationalist scene.
This ideology can be parodied incredibly well as is exemplified by Connor O’Malley’s short films and stand-up. Evil Cooper from Twin Peaks is a good depiction of this type of nihilist in media.
The project of the “Nothing >:) matters” nihilism is counterrevolution. If there is no meaning, their eyes fall to their holdings and everyone else’s. It’s a project of cold calculus, regarding the world through a purely quantitative lens. Their plan to escape nihilism is not through their own death, like for the “Nothing :( matters” nihilists; not a cozy corner, like for the “Nothing :) matters” nihilists; not self-fulfillment, like for the “Nothing >:( matters” nihilists. Rather, “Nothing >:) matters” nihilism represents a forceful push towards tearing the world apart, — because if nothing means anything, then why not? — and rebuilding it as a sleek and efficient machine devoid of life. The project of “Nothing >:) matters” nihilists is nothing short of streamlining reality. It goes hand in hand with the project of “Nothing :( matters” nihilists, who would choose not to feel their own lives as they pass, while the “Nothing >:) matters” nihilists posture as if they’re remaking the world specifically for themselves.
on the supersession of nihilism
American pop-culture, i.e. the only socially acceptable lens from which to extract a personal worldview, ground to a halt throughout the 2010s, — the money that once funded 23 episode seasons of television, with enough room to follow a seasonal arc and to experiment through bottle episodes, dried up as streaming took over the reins of televised media and reduced the season size to a non-episodic 10 episodes without any room or willpower for too much creative experimentation (and by extension, creatively experimental works become de-platformed by its dissolution amid hundreds and hundreds of hours of slop). In a similar vein, the money funding and platforming experimental musical acts dried up as well with the creation of streaming, sidelining creative groundbreaking acts to small subcultures amid, once again, oceans of slop.
Remarked upon ad nauseam, facelessness of mass culture in the 2020s feels defined as the face of the decade—a blank face, one without emotion or feeling, and only a dumb expression that tries to blend in with the chaos of the moment. It may, in fact, be the time of the "Nothing :( matters" set, as it obviously reinforces the "Nothing >:) matters" set. Let us hope, then, that the Simpsons' prophecy of ironic detachment can come to its conclusion in a world of Homer Simpsons looking for cozy corners in their world, where the project of self-actualization is more available to those who find themselves pessimistic about their surroundings. Such a moment would be revolutionary.
To supersede the nihilistic impulses online don’t require leaving the internet, — I don’t advocate for becoming a luddite, although if you do so I would certainly think that to be a (um) cool thing and by all means don’t let me hold you back, — but rather they require you to extend your thoughts and reactions to your lived experience outside what can be turned into mere content, a process which (imo) saps the meaning out of a very important part of a lived life, that being the creativity inherent in following your own route of thought.
I’ve been thinking more and more about art. What a monolith it is! But at the same time, what a narrow scope of meaning! I know that I have been quoting the Vaneigem book to death in this essay and the last one (and thankfully, I’ve finished the book and can now move onto different pastures, — maybe I can even finish War and Peace finally), but his idea of art as a containment vehicle has stuck with me.
A human being lives a creative life. Such a creativity is boundless and overflowing any cups that it can be placed in. A piece of art is no more than a momentary packaging of a lifelong creativity, one which can be bought and sold in a marketplace of “art.” This doesn’t, of course, mean that you should stop making art; rather I think art should be removed from its pedestal where we place it because art on its own is as useless as a pair of shoes never worn.
Rather than art itself, it’s the creativity of everyday living that gives us meaning to self-actualize in a safe and healthy way. Well made art is a wonderful thing, but it only blooms into its full emotional majesty when confronted or created as a narrow snapshot of the mysteries of existence and the equipment used to make it.
Think, for a moment, about all the equipment you use in your everyday life. What does it yearn to say through your lived experience? There’s your art. Film equipment quietly yearns to make art. Like an empty canvas makes its painting in the eyes of an artist, audio/visual equipment of all sorts creates its shape in the eyes of its technicians. David Lynch is an easy example to point to for an artist who understands this deeply, — just look to Inland Empire, a film that is at its core a dream of lived trauma through the digital. But wait! What’s this lived experience? Well it’s an ocean of meaning that can bloom well beyond what can be packaged for consumption.
what does this all mean?
It means I need to spend less time online… And, look, I don’t know if any of this is accurate. I really don’t. But hopefully what I’ve written above can help you piece together your own view of things by agreeing or rejecting. It’s what good radical theory does, as Vanegeim writes, “Radical theory belongs to whoever enhances it.” And honest-to-god that can be you. You don’t need to publish or write or release or post, you only need to read and think and have conversations. That, in itself, can create meaning despite the vacuum of the contentifcation of our lived lives.
to close things out…
Here’s a song I recorded yesterday:
Well think for yourself, what a wonderful star How the hell was it made? Only science has the answer to that. How many miles away, how many miles away, how many miles away, how many miles away, is the moon, From the front door down the road to the bar where you are. Where you talk about whatever it is that you are, so demure. The wind rustles pages, it's the poem on your mind, and all these magicians out here cast their spells to bind you to the old ways where the paupers get trampled but even the boot doesn't think about playing to the bit. Poured wax on the floor, she leaves once more, said she heard a voice coming through the door. How many miles away, how many miles away, how many miles away, how many miles away, is the moon, from the answers for all the things that you do? But I know you will grow grow grow grow grow grow grow in the unknown...
The digits in a bank account have more meaning & significance than the characters on this screen. Allegedly.
NIHILISM: buyer beware
Camus found meaning searching for the absurd, & found absurdity looking for meaning.
Have a significant day anyway.
I can tell you’re not a nihilist because for a nihilist there could be no qualitative distinction between passive and active suicide, in the cases of Kurt Cobain and Aaron Bushnell for example. It takes a political worldview to categorise one of these deaths as ‘meaningful’ and the other as ‘meaningless’. Death as the artistic climax of life can be imbued with whatever meaning we attach to it.
Great article btw.