ignorance and locality.

From the manuscript-in-progress, dated March/October 2022.

This thought came to me in the shower this morning:

Practice your ignorance in private, to minimize the impact of discovering it in public.

I was thinking about an embarrassing post on one of the ‘rationalist’ online fora — let’s not talk here about the hellscape known as ‘rationalist’ subculture — in which some adolescent dude asked a question that revealed that he knows nothing whatsoever about sex. He was pilloried and sneered at. I pity him.

‘Self-soothe, man!’ my beloved doctor friend Jeremy says, when I anxiously ask him health-related questions I need to learn to answer for myself.

Christopher Alexander died this week.

I wrote the other day:

Imagine if local traditions stayed local

My wife asked what I meant.

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One of the casualties of the internetwork era — every machine-eye all-seeing, broadcasting to screens we carry everywhere we go — is smallness. A musician like Lil Nas X, whose shitty novelty song ‘Old Town Road’ blew up online a few years ago, might in other times (even two decades ago) have been expected (even encouraged) to take a few months to write and record a followup, ideally while working new tunes out in practice rooms and onstage; instead, he was exposed at the beginning of his career to an audience much larger than his music was ready for, and a guy who couldn’t fill a nightclub (or a setlist) was suddenly Internet-famous. He never had the chance to be a local celebrity, and in the rush to become a national one he ended up trading on the least ins, though his music has never held any interest, middlebrow ‘hey look it’s country-rap!’ thinkpieces notwithstanding, even middle-aged Twitter users are cursed to know that he’s a gay black guy who did a song in a ‘predominantly white genre.’

(Most people don’t know that he spent years obsessed with ‘going viral,’ started making music only after his online video comedy and violations of Twitter’s spam/botnet rules regarding his attention-whoring Nicki Minaj fan accounts failed to pan out, and paid $30 for the song’s instrumental track on a website called beatstars.com. We use the term ‘novelty song’ advisedly and…diplomatically.)

Which is to say that Montero Lamar Hill never had the experience, the combination of burden and responsibility, of smallness.¹ He skipped from being a nameless hustler to being a brand (complete with the requisite ‘team’ of predatory managers, overseers, hangers-on, etc.), never passing through the stage of being a working artist. So we’ll likely never know if he’s capable of saying anything insightful or irresponsibly exploring a musical idea, or even having such an idea in the first place, because he’s now just another Overexposed Internet Thing, an Online Presence that occasionally generates new Content. And crucially, this overexposure has nothing whatsoever to do with the art that he makes: his media personality is driven by a demand for spectacle from people who have no deep connection to him in any way, only the pitiful parasociality of online spectatorship.

The first time I heard ‘Old Town Road,’ I figured that it and its artist held no secrets, no promise. The difference between him and William Hung, elevated to ironic ‘stardom’ precisely because he was a passionate but haplessly terrible singer, was that Hung was delusional and Hill is cynical. Cynicism doesn’t play well on a local stage, where you look your neighbours in the eye while fleecing them and everyone senses what’s going on. This is something different from good ol’ ‘one-hit wonders,’ doomed to decades of Playing Their Hit for festival crowds who only want that one song. Most one-hit wonders actually have other songs, after all, which for one reason or another don’t quite work. Hill has gone on to make other music, which serves primarily as the nondescript soundtrack to his videos; think Madonna, if Madonna came from nowhere and worked with ‘producers’ instead of ‘songwriters’…

Imagine if Hill/Lil Nas X, who obviously has some talent for something, had spent a year sharing music in a small community — even online! — before his kitsch bullshit became Internet-famous. Maybe we wouldn’t have Lil Nas X thinkpieces to keep us lukewarm during this long dark night of the national soul, maybe he’d’ve thought better of halfassing a song like ‘Old Town Road’ and instead worked it to death, maybe he’d have learned to sing, or to find quiet. Maybe he’d have gone back to school to finish that CS degree…but for sure he’d have been forced into the human connections (and judgments) which for thousands of actual existing years have tested, deepened, confronted, and affirmed the work of art — y’know, that ‘art’ thing we now experience mostly as commercial spectacle, cf. the actual existing work of Lil Nas X. Imagine if his art had grown rather than been manufactured. But of course it didn’t, there was no time, and in the hell known as The Pop Music Media Industry there’s no incentive for him to grow beyond pseudonovelty, which might be the something he obviously had some talent for all along.

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There is no essential difference between the media stardom of Lil Nas X and an Internet pileon, except the zip codes of who’s making money.

The underlying dynamics are the same: rip something out of context, dopamine-farm by sharing it, escalate to increase the rush (he’s a crusader for gay liberation now!) until autocatalysis permanently sunders the frenzy from its supposed object, talk about the talking-about as a second-order profit center, then casually turn to the next novelty when the excitement wears off a few minutes later. This is how the ‘news cycle’ works, how Bernie Sanders ended up forced to run against largely nonexistent ‘Bernie Bros,’ how Justine Sacco’s life was destroyed, how ‘young adult’ book publishing was eaten by a tiny group of obsessive online scolds, how ‘incel’ went from self-identifying emotionally sick young men to labeling a supposed ‘hate movement,’ how ‘CRT’ implausibly became the label for an expansive pan-cultural transition, etc. Lil Nas X recorded a novelty song and The Interet somehow made him and it into A Whole Thing, completely replacing the material context of the song with whatever Social Context is most useful to the click-farming industries for whose sole benefit the Whole Thing is carried out.

Anything good or healthy that comes out of it — including Lil Nas X and the Dutch kid making lots of money — is a side effect of the coherent autonomous phenomenon of group (mob) participation.

The part of the creative process where meaningful connection happens, where the real social/conceptual/human action is, is the collaborative or cocreative stage: small audiences, mutual benefit, the point in (before) the Hype Cycle where the people most excited about the Whole Thing are the ones actually making it.

The part where it grows without being watched, where it develops a self to grow into, which can in turn be presented to the world as something other than food. This gestation and exploration and delicate growth is absolutely the most important aspect of becoming-visionary, releasing the hold that received knowledge and practice have on you. (That’s why you go into the desert alone, enter the green world with an invisible guide, stand naked at the threshold of Chapel Perilous: the gift is bestowed in secret, and the culmination of your trip is to return in your own power to give it away, in turn, to the mere mundane world, rejoining and strengthening the social macrobody. Coming down to us.)

There’s a whole host of reasons why Hollywood’s child stars mostly turn into addled wrecks later in life, and that might be the biggest one: the way nationalization, or more generally the transformation from person into image which we sometimes cynically call ‘celebrity,’ robs them of opportunities for the developmentally essential encounter with the self only possible when things get close and present and weird, when it’s you and the one or two people who get it, and you begin the process of reality-testing which will armour you against certain profitable(-to-others) delusions.

And predation.

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Tourists ruin their destinations by turning communities — complex emergent phenomena born of simple local interactions — into fixed sites, expecting (then demanding) that that they stop changing i.e. stop adapting, stop serving ever-changing local community needs. The archetypal rural tourist destination is the natural wonder where, if the local Tourism Board doesn’t install railings and bins and signs everywhere, people will fill the grandest canyon with trash; the archetypal urban tourist destination is Boston’s ‘Cheers,’ once a tavern known as the Bull & Finch, now a kitsch-purveyor with trademarked napkins and employee uniforms. Seeing the world is good but conversion to a tourist site destroys the evolved meanings of a place, as tourists arrive looking for the prefab Experience they’ve heard about and grow disappointed, indeed angry, when the thing turns out merely to be itself.

This has all been well understood for ages. A place ‘loses its charm’ when the tourists come in droves, but much worse, it loses the mutability and responsiveness to human need which made it possible/necessary in the first place — everything that has a charmless commercial end had a local beginning, serving some need internal to the community.

The presidential election is largely an activity for tourists: a hundred million people who know nothing whatsoever about the actual positions, history, institutional affiliations, and even recent voting records of the candidates Pop By for a Vote every four years, then retreat to complain about the outcome while maintaining no connection whatesoever to the process of actual governance, beyond occasionally donating money to the millionaires who get the most TV time. (The money won’t help: they’re bought and sold already.) For a half-century and more, the presidential race has been a staged-for-TV miniseries set in a nonplace called ‘Washington,’ which bears no resemblance to the actual den of thieves and bureaucrats by that name (never mind the actual city full of disenfranchised, uncomfortably brown people). That’s bad enough, ‘President of the USA’ is actually a pretty important position it turns out, but the awful sclerosis in American national politics is due to the similar nationalization of state and local elections — the influx of national-party money and poli-tourist interest in things like, say, Senate contests in swing states, whose chief consequence is tightly binding once-local, potentially ideologically independent candidates to the national parties’ predatory agendas. The parties go beyond their coordinating functions to serve as ideological police, constraining their members to provide voters the Experience they expect: the Republican theme park, the Democratic support group. Historical alliances — e.g. between the Democrats and, believe it or not, lower- and middle-class working people — fall away as the organizations become, not autonomous, but subservient to the whims of conceptual ‘out-of-towners.’

(See too the way half the NYPD doesn’t actually live in the city: tourists licensed to kill locals.)

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The Internet is for tourism.

The primary mode by which Extremely Online people — a group which is coming to include every American who isn’t a Luddite, whether we like it or not — ‘experience culture’ is through little screens. We don’t even watch movies in theaters anymore, that’s what laughably named ‘large screen’ TVs are for.

One of the central features of Internet anticulture is the way it paradoxically heightens physical isolation even while collapsing physical space: from your online perch you can see and be seen by everyone, Internet privacy is effectively impossible and any two points on the Internet are the same fixed click-distance apart, yet the intangibility of Internet pseudo-experience intensifies the isolation and myopia of staring down at the screen in your hand. Everything is available and nothing is intimate. Ordinary Internet use moves too quickly through the shallows to make the kind of intense somatic impression of, say, absorption in a novel; you almost never ‘sink in’ to contemporary online experience, ‘social’ media is too transient and gameplay too jumpy and skimming articles is, well, skimming. The datastream passes before you, you pass through it, and afterward you return to your ‘real life’ barely touched by what you’ve seen, but able to declare — when the gatekeepers demand to check your status — that ‘I understood that reference.’

Which is to say that the (pseudonymous, impermanent, exploitative, simulative, performative, cyclical, hyperreal, status-seeking, prematurely exposing) commercial Internet is obviously for tourism, the hell of which is that all tourism actually occurs in the same location, the prefab nonplace of stage-managed experience and packaged ‘takeaways’ and microdosing unlife. On Twitter, instead of conversations you have…Twitter, a (stupid) thing unto itself; rather than conversing with one another on Twitter you just ‘do Twitter’ at one another; this goes beyond medium==message to a deliberate destructive replacement of meaningful (self-determined) interaction with the advertising category ‘engagement.’ Which buttons you’re permitted to press; which pellets they deliver. You don’t interact with nature at the Grand Canyon, you engage with the destination travel experience. Also the gift shop.

When something on the Internet ‘goes viral’ — odd that we still use that metaphor — gawkers pass by in a compulsive antiritual of checkmark tourism; no one in the world is looking for the Cutest Ever Cat Video but half the morons in the western world can be roped into joyless pursuit of it, or its equivalents for people who aren’t young flyover-state moms, by simple status-games specifically designed to generate and monetize compulsive behaviours. ‘Virality’ not only denotes ‘what everyone is looking at’ but, more pressingly for nearly all users, what you are expected to (want to) look at. If you were capable of deciding for yourself what’s interesting, you could travel to any neighbourhood in any city and be guided by your instincts, follow your bliss, but bliss can’t be regulated — why do you think psilocybin is illegal and booze is a ‘rite of passage’? — so you’re coerced into accepting the losing bargain wherein They decide for you what’s ‘hot,’ i.e. urgently pointless (‘Y’all, we need to talk about ABC…’) and you get a prepackaged ‘curated’ experience that leaves more time in your schedule for work. Participants in this opt-in infantilization resist hearing about it because, while it’s easy to acknowledge being punched in the face, it’s extremely hard to admit that you begged for it.

(And you’re not to point it out when someone does.)

One dark fuckism of contemporary ‘social’ media is this: when something goes viral, you’re not expected to have an opinion on it beyond ‘Oh, neat’ — you’re to register your approval by passing it along, but unless you’re part of the thinkpiece (‘content’) industry, it doesn’t matter what you think of the datastream, even its astroturfed/corp-sponsored elements. Indeed, thinking is the precise opposite of the point, because to think is to run the risk of spoiling the fun, i.e. interfering with business. The point is to be part of ‘being part of things,’ not even to photograph The Most Photographed Barn in America but to have done so — your reward is a feeling of fitting in. This was always the reward-structure for watching hellish nonsense like the Oscars or the Super Bowl ads; now we skip straight to the ‘talking about watching the Oscars’ part, or save time(!) by watching the ‘best’ ads compiled by clickbait websites (‘content aggregators’), but the disintegrating effect is the same: we are aggregated but can’t ever integrate, aren’t allowed to become whole, which — see above re: bliss — poses the risk of autonomy. To truly be where you are, to think (and then maybe act) about your situation, is to extend and strengthen the nature of that place or community, that macromind or macrostate, and They don’t want that for/from you; much more cost-effective, from Their perspective, to subsidize tourism and transience, to push Easy In/Out and encourage you to Participate in consumption-modes that don’t generate inconvenient gestalt effects or counterforces.

You can visit, see, but stay out of this neighbourhood; it’s Not Worth Seeing, or else it’s Unsafe for Foreign Travelers, or else you could pass through for a Taste of Authentic $city_name but you’ll have a better time in this Up-and-Coming $bourgeois_attraction newly opened by an international $synonym_for_cabal that’s $synonym_for_gentrifying $neighbourhood while preserving its $ethnic_feature Character…

Yet real things — living things — happen out of sight, go on unfilmed and uncommented upon, variegate, recombine, build up steam, theorize, weaponize, realize.

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Cooking rice is a misery for certain people: it takes a longish time and you have to leave it closed, out of sight, and not fuck with it. It’s a trust exercise and it’s awful.

The upside is that you get rice.

To our central point: The modern world is increasingly hostile to letting things grow and develop out of sight. Pseudoconnection is too easy, too tempting; publicity is too cheap; ‘virality’ can hit unplanned, unintended, uncontrollably, with disastrous consequences (like ‘popularity’); geographically/temporally distant environments are too easily misperceived as ‘nearby’ in the media nonplace. And of course, surveillance by government and corporate (bad) actors is omnipresent, even without panoptic self-surveillance and -censorship violating self-sovereignty and cutting off experimentation at the source.

We can’t healthily get big, public, ‘finished’ without going through a long period of being small, private, provisional — can’t skip from childhood to adulthood without the yearslong hell of adolescence, that inflection point between proto-ego and the (hopefully) sane social self. Sanity is path-dependent. Forcing new people and new projects into widespread pseudonymous exposure, where jeering is free and meaningful support is extremely costly (therefore rare), where unfiltered antisocial feedback is the norm… This is so obviously destructive and deranged that it must be profitable, though not for us. Subjected to merciless scrutiny and arbitrary judgment by forces completely removed from our own lived experience, how can we ever feel safe? How can we not develop a defensive crouch? Someone wants you that way; maybe your misery at the constant surveilling violation of your imaginative sanctity isn’t the ‘cost of doing business’ or a side effect of the present order but rather its essential nature. Maybe it’s impossible to grow up healthy as a subject of this system; maybe that’s a feature not a bug.

The system (broadly: stateless capital) hates locality, self-determination, true autonomy — resistance to total assimilation. It wants contributors and will force you to become one or punish you for failing; no other options exist unless you’re willing to go ‘off the grid’ to a greater or lesser extent. ‘Social’ media systems oscillate dumbly between ‘viral’ popular events (most of them now astroturfed, but who’s counting?) and pileons of extraordinary emotional violence and damage to the material wellbeing of both victims and participants, but these two phenomena are essentially the same: homeostatic corrections against unsustainable, unwanted local autonomy. Say something outside the window of the acceptable and watch the volunteer brigade step in to ensure conformity; begin to develop any remotely individual perspective and watch the business bureau immediately co-opt it or choke it in the crib; seek to rule yourself and draw the gaze of the rulers. The key feature of all ‘viral’ phenomena — ‘sensations’ is the unintentionally appropriate term — is that they rise and fall quickly, unsustainably. It’s not intended that they mean anything.

Think of the way Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ was kept off the Billboard Country charts (there are people who care about this sort of thing, among them Billboard and Lil Nas X and his ‘team’), the rationale being that it’s not a country song, it’s a novelty trap song (a children’s song!) with a NIN banjo sample meant to evoke country music. Which is correct as far as it goes — even with Billy Ray Cyrus guesting — but it hurts your case to have parochial racist morons be the main ones making it…plus, none of this surface controversy matters at all. The deeper problem is the way artificial genre-segmentation fundamentally (mis)shapes the industry, so that even bullshit like ‘Old Town Road’ is seen as a threat to that problematic system. Of course, the system absorbed Hill’s tune and (after providing Lil Nas X and his team with tons of free publicity) neatly slotted the hardworking arriviste in next to Frank Ocean and company on the ’emergent black bourgeois’ shelf; problem solved. The most interesting thing about this mini-tempest is its intimations of the unvenly distributed future: ‘Old Town Road’ first got radio play in the form of audio rips from Youtube, because it wasn’t initially distributed to stations as HQ audio…

The system works. It encapsulates and co-opts anything that might violate its boundaries or force an uncomfortable transformation ahead of schedule. Lil Nas X got a record deal out of the whole mess, of course; according to the head of the Amuse indie label/network where Hill initially distributed his songs, Hill insisted he wanted to go fully independent, even rejecting a million-dollar offer from Amuse. Insisted, that is, up until the moment when Columbia offered him major-label money — and perks, including the ‘Old Town Road’ remix featuring Billy Ray Cyrus that catalyzed sales. (The remix is more popular than the original recording.)

The system works — but not for you.

Think now of Kim Davis, the county clerk from Kentucky who briefly became a lightning rod in the ‘debate’ over marriage rights and religiously motivated conscientious objection when she refused to be personally involved in issuing marriage licenses to gay couples, and ultimately agreed that she could do her job in good (extremist Pentecostal) faith so long as her name wasn’t on the licenses. The case drew popular attention primarily from media figures happy to exploit culture-war topics for short-term gain, and online mobs excited to feel one of two things: anger at the ugly Bible-thumping homophobic hick, or anger at the family-hating anti-Christian capitol bureaucrats. There was effectively no coverage of the only important questions, over the role of religious objections in cases where legal contracts and the social contract meet (and collide). Davis briefly went to prison for her beliefs, and the outcome of the case was that gay couples in her county can get married and she’d just stay out of it, leaving the legal necessaries to her deputies. None of this mattered to either ‘side’ on the ‘social’ media networks, and crucially, the complex and genuinely interesting yearslong legal proceedings (e.g. over whether the state of Kentucky should pay her legal fees, and whether Davis can be sued individually over the matter) received no coverage at all, beyond brief back-page mentions.

The visibility of Davis’s case, her/its importance, is essentially 1-bit: either The Main Character on Twitter, the top story of the day, or else nothing.

In the context of the present work, Davis² should be understood as an emergent local phenomenon quickly exposed to social sanction from distant judges (in her favour or not) as part of the media-political system’s immune defense against local autonomy. The details of her decisions never mattered, the complex legal proceedings that ensued didn’t matter: once Davis was inflated in Significance, with attendant distortions and simplifications and trivializations, the features of her story were made simple enough to be subsumed in a prefab culture-war media narrative, at which point the usual wolves and sheep could continue to operate as planned. That’s her public function: fueling the media machine which demands ‘engagement’ (occupying attention) only and precisely insofar as it prevents action. What no one tried to do, of course, was change the way stories like Davis’s are covered. That ship, as they say, has sailed.

Kim Davis doesn’t matter but her individual conscience does, it’s a (legal!) threat to the system, which is why it’s so handy that the arc of her brief media ‘celebrity,’ the ‘viral’ phenomenon she became (or rather, for which she served as the unwitting pretext), both abstracted away her identity and neutralized her individual conscience. For her supporters this was God’s doing, for her ‘critics’ she’s a hateful rube, either way she’s gotten the message loud and clear — with all of us overhearing — what she doesn’t deserve and will never get is anonymity or invisibility. She’ll never just be a rural county clerk that her neighbours have/get to live with. The release valve blew; a local problem, which might have put pressure on the system in reaching local solution, was elevated to Significance and the possibility of any self-organized solution (any community sovereignty) thereby eliminated. Davis could and perhaps should have stepped aside from handling marriage licensure and found, with input from her own community, the solution that she eventually agreed to; at the same time, she was an elected official with responsibilities to the county and its citizens, and she’s the one who decided early to appeal to the Supreme Court. She made her bed — but it’s only her bed, it didn’t need to be a ‘flashpoint for contemporary debates about’ whatever we’re pretending to have reasoned opinions about, this week.

Ask yourself why and how the system has now eagerly embraced the dangerous vagueness of ‘the personal is the political.’ Which interest is being served.

Think of this chapter, first, as sketching a thoroughly depressing sort of ‘Gaia hypothesis’ for the corporate media-politics megamachine, the System: the late-capitalist behemoth seeks its own systemic interests, without individuals necessarily deciding to serve those interests (ha — as if humans could ever really understand how money thinks). Think too of this chapter extending the present work’s argument for the value of smallness, provisionality, locality, ugliness, invisibility, secrecy, insignificance. The line between Montero Lamar Hill and Kim Davis née Bailey isn’t so bright; each of them did something a tiny bit brave and uninteresting, both of them experienced a shocking depressurization, ‘the bends’ as useful but potentially fatal network effect; Hill’s getting paid on it as long as he keeps up tacky media stunts and Davis is likely to get sued out of her home, but from the perspective of the system, in each case a little money moves around and nothing happens where the system can’t see it. Always, at every step, the system brings far-from-equilibrium self-organization and/or -determination into the mainline, resorbs weird growths, favours caricature, self-multiplies. It watches and it eats.

We ask you to see Kim Davis and Lil Nas X as diminished in their humanity, their imaginative freedoms bought at variable cost, by the ‘viral’ process of inflation which swept them both up in turn. Imagine what each of them might have been capable of with time to think. Or even — if you don’t think this is stupid and pathetic and contemptible as you, Reader(s), quite likely do — time to pray.³

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1. He was and remains young — ‘Old Town Road’ hit in 2019 when he was a 20-year-old college dropout — and did spend three years in the projects before he turned 10. And I imagine he got messed with as a kid for being gay in a smallish town north of Atlanta. But that’s something else. His art is trivial but his work was never productively constrained, forced to remain small, unknown. He never thrived in secret, and we should be mature enough not to simply mistake ‘getting rich and getting laid’ for ‘thriving,’ in public or otherwise. ↩
2. Because it’s widely considered necessary, now, to opine ‘one way or the other’ on Davis, here you go: she’s neither hero nor villain, but appears to be a principled person with what I take to be merely incorrect beliefs, some of them grotesque. The legal questions raised by her case are interesting but I can’t muster up enthusiasm to read about them; more than anything I’d love to know precisely what she meant when she said she ‘sought God on it’ (i.e. prayed for guidance on how to balance her felt personal, religious, political, and professional obligations). This is one of those things were ‘everyone knows’ what she meant, but of course no one but her fellow believers actually knows: for someone like Kim Davis, what is it like to kneel down in the dark and look to an anthropomorphized inner voice, the voice of ‘the Lord,’ for guidance on a pragmatic question of local governance? If we don’t dismiss her as a nut but won’t naïvely grant primacy to her interpretations of such metaphysical encounters either, what precisely does ‘seeking God’ consist of? But then what’s it like, afterward, to go from total anonymity to millions of strangers suddenly having strong opinions about how you do your job — and what’s it like to experience absolute certainty, not just informed and learned and epistemologically humble confidence but divinely inspired certainty, that only one opinion really matters and it’s the one in your head? What kind of disgusting, fucked up lunatic asshole must you be to have faith in yourself? These things, I want to know. But we don’t need to chain Kim Davis naked to a rock in order to find out those answers. ↩
3. I don’t envy Montero Lamar Hill, as should be clear, except that I wish I too were rich. He’s better off in an environment free of sexual repression, he’s getting paid to make art, all of that is good. He doesn’t interest me but other people like his schtick; I’m happy for them, having something they like. This chapter returns repeatedly to him only because of the nature of his popularity, which stems from a bad novelty song and has continued through a run of middling music and videos that barely register to someone who came up in the era when not just dimwit politicians but entire church hierarchies cared about music videos enough to get angry at, say, Madonna (whose influence is all over Lil Nas X’s ‘Call Me by Your Name’). He’s become familiar; maybe that’s why they call it ‘fame.’ ↩

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Futher on difficult meditation.

Note: The post isn’t really about what its opening sentence might suggest, to the sane and normal reader, that it’s about; I didn’t make even the most halfassed attempt to maintain such smallmind-hobgoblin-consistency. It’s all — really all of it; this is how much of a degenerate wordcel I am — it’s all about getting to write and so hear the phrase ‘misery-fuckery’ in the trip-o-let rhythm of ‘jiggery-pokery.’

Thinking this morning about the notion of the ’emotional journey’: spatiotemporal metaphor for a shift in your inner landscape.

A couple of years ago I wrote a book ostensibly or pretextually about the major arcana of the tarot, working through the cards in order — starting and ending with the zeroth trump, the Fool — as if they recorded or allegorized a trip or transformation. I decided over the course of the project that the traditional image of the ‘Fool’s Journey’ was the wrong organizing metaphor, and it was more fertile for me to think of the Fool/querent/seeker/human undertaking errands with the intention of returning each time, if not to where she started, then to the next starting point. The ‘Fool’s Errand’ makes fractal sense to me: coming home changed — and so to a changed home — in order to set out on the next errand in a series, which together make up a deeper project of…y’know, whatever.

This shift — from thinking of the Journey as delivery mechanism for transformative psychic reward, to seeing the Errand as a recurring/ongoing project of engagement with change and uncertainty within and without — played out textually in that book as, if I’m being frank, a maddening fucking inconsistency of tone and viewpoint. Well, it is what it is. But the book was about midlife transition, really, and I’m pleased with the way tone and topic shifted together. Or so I console myself.

A friend who shared a little of what she knows about contemplative pathwork once told me her goal in meditative practice was to ‘realize nonseparateness,’ a phrase and concept which echoes throughout the present work. She was admirably clearheaded about a concept I found intellectually intuitive but at times emotionally forbidding: it was the realization itself, opening and maintaining connection itself, that was of value — not the specific emotional colour/content of the connection or of the thing connected to. ‘Nonseparateness’ was, in the terms of yesterday’s post, a peaceful dynamic of which (inner) conflict is always a part. ‘Peace isn’t quiet’; peace is ongoing resolution and restoration. Conflict can get you there (‘winning the peace’) and in any case conflict is coming.

This seems to me a vital distinction with both obvious and subtle political implications. You ‘realize nonseparateness’ even when what you’re connected to is difficult or painful; there’s a surface analogy to, say, democratic pluralism — which we might call a (possibly doomed) politics of willful nonseparateness, i.e. endless negotiation and compromise — but we should be careful not to stop at the superficial ‘stay connected to people who suck in order to improve/surpass them.’ It seems to me, a disintegrated and basically fucked person, that ‘nonseparateness’ isn’t tolerance. You tolerate someone because it won’t last forever, but I think real connection is undertaken without selfish hope of reprieve: it’s your responsibility to maintain a sense of the Other as fully itself, exactly as real as ‘you,’ even when the Other is a painful imagining or a difficult experience or (say) a dipshit ideologue. Relationship built on outlasting the unwanted will encode a dangerous destructive tension — cold war, so to speak. ‘Uneasy coexistence,’ and incidentally ‘unease’ translates as dukkha…

Authentic engagement is both means and end, because — I guess this is one of my foundational assumptions — no one is an island; human minds and bodies being what they are, we realize our full humanity only in ongoing relation with others, and find peace only in peaceful relation (to circumstance, interactor, self, etc.). ‘Not all those who wander are lost’: an invitation not to tolerance but to an affirmative relation to inbetweenness, transit, search, the Errand as its own reason and reward. I have such a hard stupid time recognizing a process or transformation as a reward in itself, and I can hear echoes of this failure in so much misery-fuckery in my own life—

When I can remember that I’m not out to purify my own state or activity, but rather to be more authentic in my participation in ongoing processes at a scale I can’t easily/always perceive, I know I’m happier and closer to peace and ease — irrespective of the difficulty of my work.

It’s certainly possible this is an optical illusion, or One Neat Trick to pull on my easily manipulable consciousness. Any Fool knows that.

On difficult meditation.

Recently I’ve experienced a series of challenging, frustrating breath meditations.¹ In the past I’ve come away from such sessions disappointed, hopeless, but these ones have, so to speak, sat differently with me.

My notes from the most recent sit read, in part:

5/10/23 — 15-20m sit (turned off timer) … caffeinated, head full of attractive fantasy, pulled repeatedly out of restful focus. after ~10min some words entered my noisy head: ‘i can’t manage my concentration — i can — i am.‘ process not result. then relaxed into the difficulty; the rest of that time felt like surfing, or floating down a crowded sidewalk: effortful, mental muscles working, grateful acceptance of chaotic oscillation

Experienced meditators doubtless recognize this as a 101-level realization, a knight’s-move expressed in ‘legacy’ egoic terms: first the lateral shift from despairing of ever attaining some outcome (successfully ‘managed’ concentration), to accepting both its possibility and the limits of my own perception/projection, and then a step further in, to a (temporary) new relationship to the meditative work which responds to the realness of the process rather than the desirability of the outcome. No sign of breaking the doomed imagine/desire/satisfy cycle here, just a local detachment of a certain imagining from a certain experience.

What’s interesting to me this morning, as a semi-experienced but very low-skill meditator, is the mindset — the mind-as-process — which opened up after I turned this corner several minutes into a sit. ‘Effortful…acceptance of chaotic oscillation.’ In other words: ‘surrender to the (turbulent) flow.’

One of the purposes of breath meditation is to realize (not ‘understand’) freedom from identification with the endless stream of mental activity, the burbling polyglot discourse of what my old professor Marvin Minsky called the ‘society of mind’ and Buddhist tradition calls ‘monkey mind.’ Heads are noisy places, the concerted work of mind emerges from a noisy knotty crosshatch of contradictory and coincidental impulses, and peaceful clarity or ‘awakening’ is both a natural state and a fleeting, rare one — e.g. look at everyone who’s ever lived. One of the states (processes) that open up in ‘successful’ breath meditations is a calm ego-detached awareness of the contingency and transience of such mental activity; the popular view mistakes this peaceful resolve for quiet, a standard dumb fuckup for human beings across experiential domains,² but the ‘content’ of my sitting realization can be reduced/expressed as, ‘Whether or not this experience is “managed” isn’t a matter of quiet output but of persistent undertaking.’ Once I imagined myself participating in the activity, rather than imagining myself failing to ‘succeed’ at it, I was able to embody a new mode of relation between self and act, and between act and circumstance and outcome.

Again: yes, the fictional self-provision remains. But after all it was only 20 minutes of sitting down in an unused office at my workplace; we shouldn’t expect miracles in that setting, at that rate.

This is akin to going ‘off the grid,’ psychologically speaking, if only for a few minutes: after that moment of reframing, I was still working hard without satisfaction, still conscious of the fact that my mind would not quiet the hell down. (Yes, sitting down to meditate is hard work.) But that awareness and lack of satisfaction temporarily stopped generating that familiar emotional cocktail of self-loathing and despair — instead of the meditative work being a pretext for going into a tailspin, it felt like its own reward; it was real in itself.

Of course this echoes the Buddhist practice of referring to seated meditation as ‘sitting’ per se.

From that point in the session onward — and here I’m conscious of, but can’t be bothered to avoid, certain tiresome therapeutic/’productive’ connotations of the word session — I experienced the same ‘failed’ submergence/surfacing cycle that’d been pissing me off previously, the rise and fall of attentional waveform and whatever others. But instead of judging this oscillation, I was simply there for it. What ‘quiet’ occurred was a quality not of the mental ‘stream’ (which never quieted at all) but of the observing/judging faculty, the egoic ‘I.’ That relinquishing of judgment/control was unconscious despite my Beckettian internal utterance (‘I can’t, I can, I am’), but afterward I was no less aware of what was going on. Nothing like no-mind or no-self here, only a clearer sight of my set, setting, volition, activity.

For years I’ve told writing students and mentees, ‘All edits are clarity edits.’

Sometimes I’ll walk down a bustling sidewalk and experience an intoxicating stillness, keeping my head still relative to the sidewalk (like a camera on a dolly) while moving my body ‘around’ it to compensate. My subjective experience — not just in its visual aspect, the camera-eye, but in terms of the kinesthetic music of my whole mind/body system — remains smoothly and pleasurably continuous even while something akin to automatic error-correction goes on handling navigation duties. You can see the same effect in the flight of a bird whose body continually adjusts its movement so that its head can remain still enough to pick out prey on the ground far below, or indeed in surfers whose centers of mass move smoothly across wavetops while their legs pump irregularly to compensate for the dynamic curvature of the water below. Stillness not motionlessness — peace not quiet. The air and water and the madding crowd don’t stop flowing by in their chaotic turbulence; these bodily practices seeking stillness do not quiet the world’s noise. But in each event, the body that makes the mind — remember that the Spanish for ‘to make,’ hacer, also translates as ‘to do’ — ‘rests transparently’ in its moment, it experiences a reconciliation of set and setting.

Sometimes the V7 chord is exactly how you feel and not just a tool for getting back to the superegoic I.³

An altered relation to effort, and thus between effort and its output, isn’t a precursor to this experience of clarity — it’s it. In Alcoholics Anonymous they say you can’t think your way to right action, only act your way to right thinking; this is a pragmatic and sober articulation of our perhaps more abstract, fanciful notion that they’re the same thing.

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1. The proximate causes of the difficulty are irrelevant here. ↩
2. See also the democratic realization, ‘Peace is not the absence of conflict but its resolvability.’ ↩
3. This use of ‘I’ is one of those jokes that probably incurs a clarity-cost but I can’t bring myself to cut it. ‘Superegoic I’ is meant to play ironically after the earlier ‘egoic “I”‘; the idea here is that prefab psychological resolution is a social convention, etc., etc., and we come back to ego-pattern partly because there’s no room for other shit. But as primed by the notation ‘V7’ earlier in the sentence, ‘I’ also means the tonic major chord — harmonic ‘homebase’ so to speak, the resolution of the V7 and, in Western music, the fulfilling contrast-move that gives V7 its meaning, makes it OK. In jazz and other 20C western musics you’re surrounded by unresolved seventh chords, internal tritones allowed to both embody and signify ambivalence, i.e. those musics open up a new unconventional subjectivity that doesn’t just collapse mindlessly to the (egoic) I. See?! I went to graduate school, motherfucker!! This is way, way, way too much pressure on what’s ultimately just a coincidence of notation, and I’ll stop here. Thank you for reading this footnote. I went to graduate school. ↩

temporary autonomous imaginative zone.

Quick thought on Hakim Bey, Robert Anton Wilson, and hip phrases with ‘ontology’ in them.

Bey’s approach to all belief-systems, including anarchism, is to seek to channel their vital energy — their ‘life-forces, daring, intransigence, anger, heedlessness’ — while discarding their spooks, or fixed categories. This leads to an approach in which he loots or appropriates from different theories and traditions, without endorsing their foundational assumptions. Bey terms this ‘cultural bricolage’, or as ‘thieving’, or ‘hunting and gathering’, in an informational world. He takes, for instance, passion from revolutionary socialism, grace and ease from monarchism, self-overcoming or higher awareness from mysticism.

This description immediately brings to mind the other Wilson’s (RAW’s) ‘guerrilla ontology,’ that writing/reading-practice of taking what you need from an ontological frame but coming away immediately with (1) whatever contents are good to/for/with you, and eventually with (2) a deep active sense of the provisionality and transience of even ‘foundational’ concepts and states. The purpose of ‘guerrilla ontology’ isn’t to convince you of any particular idea, but to alter your relationship to convincing, i.e. to freedom.

Lately I’ve been mulling over this analogy:

place : space :: polity : population

A ‘polity’ isn’t a group of people, it’s a collectively imagined and centrally organized process they enter. A multi-user shared hallucination, as we used to say. By analogy, I’ve lately been using ‘place’ to mean something like ‘situation,’ mixing that latter term’s situationist and jazz-improvisatory senses: both circumstance and its conception, a moment bound more or less tightly to a space (as to a time). I’m trying to account for, among other things, the way ‘sacred spaces’ lose their power when the ritual-memory that impregnates them with meaning is lost — it makes sense to me to think of them as ‘sacred places,’ which combine what psychedelic culture calls set and setting, i.e. mental and physical circumstances. A space is sacred while and how you’re in it.

Now, because I’m intellectually irresponsible and into New Age synthambient music, I’ve also (thus) been thinking about ‘guerrilla ontology’ — RAW’s textual practice of serially springing textual traps to engender a radically skeptical reading-posture — as the establishment and dissolution of what we might, borrowing Bey’s terminology, call temporary autonomous imaginative zones: cognitive playspaces to be taken in (by), explored, and drifted from or been kicked out of, Eden-style. Inner landscapes, leaning heavily on the psycho- part of psychogeography. Here I’m turning over the idea of a ‘textual situation,’ a fictional proposition be picked up like Yorick’s skull, looked at, laughed over, thought through, and then cast back into the grave…

Which is partly to say I got introduced to reader-response theory at a tender age and it’s still latent at the base of my spinal cord, like herpes.

OK but now put on your Generalization Hat if you haven’t already: mindstates are temporary autonomous zones. They come and go — minds come and go, ‘mind’ is to the content of thought as place is to space — and in each passing (subjective) moment you’re able to live out certain forms of freedom but only temporarily, transiently, limited by the provisions of set and setting. The fictional proposition constrains imaginative response and/but affords, offers, an opportunity to realize a form of imaginative freedom outside otherwise-existing category.

Of course, this describes not just Bey’s subject but his own intellectual practice: the encounter with an idea, or indeed with a megatextual tradition, generates tools (affordances) for imaginative free play, which are taken up and put down according to a private associative logic which we sometimes call (creative) vision. The ‘foundational assumptions’ of an intellectual/wisdom tradition include its own originating set/setting, which are unrecoverable but in any case remain peripheral to the meaning we make with it — the reader’s vision isn’t itself the text but it dominates the textual encounter (well beyond whether it’s a ‘good time’). What Bey describes in quasi-mystical terms as ‘ontological anarchy’ is the realization of true autonomy, ecstatic and tragic and drawing meaning from its unsustainability:

The logic of Passion leads to the conclusion that all “states” are impossible, all “orders” illusory, except those of desire… [B]etween the lonely awakening of the individual, and the synergetic anamnesis of the insurrectionary collectivity, there stretches out a whole spectrum of social forms with some potential for our “project.” Some last no longer than a chance meeting between two kindred spirits who might enlarge each other by their brief and mysterious encounter; others are like holidays, still others like pirate utopias. None seems to last very long — but so what?

RAW’s ‘guerrilla ontology’ exhorts an analogous nomadic reading practice, and HB’s pirate-sociality shares with RAW’s pirate-textuality a model of playful mind passing through thought-structures the way the situationist passes through the city-structure in the dérive, engaging with one ambience and then an adjacent/overlapping other.

The process is harmolodic.

On ‘flow’ and the distinction between spaciousness and emptiness.

1.

Think of ‘flow states’ not as forebrain-free experiences, but rather as those in which thought, meta-reflection, and action are experienced as integrated. This might not be the right model in terms of neurobiology but experientially I think it makes sense. You act, think, think about thinking, conceptualize — and the different frames of experience seem to align. This is the prize. In flow you’re not just empty: you are spacious.

This superposition of experience is also known as the ‘oceanic’ feeling: borderlessness, fluidity. This is the nature of that specific heightened state, in which imagination is in alignment with outward/physical experience. It’s the (sometimes) poetry of psychogeography.

The setting (the City, say) is a somatic component of the spell; the spell is cognitive in fundamental nature.

2.

The spaciousness/emptiness distinction is an important one. In flow states we don’t experience empty mind, but rather an inexplicable facility — we know where the ball is headed before the opponent hits it, we hear the next phrase before our musical partners play it, we improvise entire stanzas instead of individual verses. This is obviously not empty-headedness! Nor is it as simple as ’emptiness of ego’: we’re aware of our bodies, our minds. We have self-consciousness…but not ego-attachment.

(Recall DFW’s observation about Roger Federer and what it means to be perfectly in command of your instrument, about the tennis ball looking to him like it’s as big as a basketball. The world slows down for you, but it doesn’t hollow out in doing so — you can just take it in, seemingly without effort.)

In a flow state, the world is positively full of spaciousness. What’s ‘missing’ is barrier and imposition. But so much more is present — even as we sense that there’s suddenly so much more room.

Again, note that this is a description of experience, not neurobiology. I’m only talking about the subjective experience of flow. You really do feel perfectly capable, alive to the moment. What you don’t feel is the vestigial attachment to the idea of the moment — or to the past, the self, imagined futures never to be — holding you back from the present. ‘Single-point awareness’ isn’t necessarily simple. The moment is complex, awareness the same.

All spells are cast on the caster.

Because magic spells fail, magic is widely and incorrectly understood to fail. But all magic spells work on the magician — and on the others in the circle, connected to the working. Parts of (because party to) the transformation.

A magical working is a fiction. (Reader-response!) Is ‘paracosm’ the right word? Ludocosm? Thaumatocosm? Ugh, maybe. It creates a space in which new practice is possible. This is why you wear a mask and practice improvisation: radical listening. Radically intense experience of that private fiction. The privacy it affords makes it possible to explore something deeply, to access impulses and inhabit personae.

The fictionality unthethers the context, the surroundings, from the binding consensus-reality — but also untethers your own actions and their effects. Within the fiction, magic can work. The spell is the fiction.

We keep two sets of books; we can live inside a fiction, many fictions. That’s what fiction is for. It begins with radical acceptance in the reader/listener/magician: agreeing to the premise, the provision, the proffer. Letting yourself be welcomed (answering the Campbellian call to adventure, with the final/ultimate adventure being living toward death). That’s the outset of the Errand, of course — choosing to set out, accepting limitation. Becoming foolish, becoming the Fool. You have to get humble (fuck around!) before you can find out.

All magic spells work on the magician. Which is to say: one way or another, they all work.

‘Git gud’ and the hero-journey, because why not.

‘Getting good’ means having your reality tested, not just by you — putting others in a position to measure you and judge you. Your cosmos is no longer private. That’s horrifying as you’d expect, but necessary: it’s how we become people, real people. It’s the threshold to the imaginal realm, for one thing, the boundary between (1) parochial experience which naively favours the atomized ego and (2) experience that acknowledges, and supports the development of, the macromind. ‘Getting good’ — the gamer-asshole’s ‘git gud’ — is part of heroic development, in other words. The fact that gamers experience this in the lamest, most egotistical possible terms is just one of the bad things about that subculture.

This is why risk and failure are such important parts of adult development: to ‘self-actualize’ you have to strive to be good instead of less bad. ‘Good’ is a quality beyond, straining at category. Heroism is exceptional.

Silly notions. Speech is music. Music is live.

The following propositions are dubious at best. I had coffee this morning which I’m not used to, I’m a tea drinker, coffee makes my ideas jittery. I don’t believe what I’m saying and neither should anyone else, ever. –wa.

Of course speech is elaborated birdsong — but we evolved to duet not monologue. Writing potentially purifies the lone melodism of an individual’s speech but cuts us off from our discursive (social-cognitive) apparatus for mutual regulation/revision. This language of course ties us back to love (per the General Theory): music (Art more generally you might say) is one of the mechanisms by which we conduct the intersubjective limbic business of love, at a distance. Writing, not so much. Music intensifies the effects of speech among its other effects, that’s why we set the lyrics we need to remember to melodies, but music is meant to be heard. Writing’s proximity to music is actually undercut by the fact that by definition, the only writing we ‘hear’ is recorded. Lifting writing out of time strips it of certain intersubjective aspects — i.e. mediates the exchange, at some cost.

Music is live. It’s an event, an exchange.

Recorded music is its own peculiar thing.

All of which is to say that writing suffers when it’s divorced from its origins in musical duet, i.e. in live discourse. Writing doesn’t simulate speech, it simulates the musical cognition which occurs in speech — but it strips out the musical cognition that we engage in as we listen and respond. Yes, there’s an element of ‘response’ in writing, e.g. to our impulses and what we realize(!) about the images in our head. But we’re at our best, as improvisers and composers (insofar as those are different), when we’re collaborating and connecting and responding. We are incomplete. Writers work to overcome that incompleteness but it’s always a simulation — dragging behind speech, not behind monologue but rather dialogue. The coupling that completes us.

Writers need people. That’s all I’m saying really.

(Derrida’s ‘critique’ of ‘phonocentrism’ is mostly bullshit and can be left aside — we take an evolutionary view of human speech as a rich variant of birdsong and see no point in his stupid ahistorical ‘primacy of writing’ thing even as a dialectical provision.)

(I’m not sure I buy any of this except the opening sentences and the pissing-on-Derrida.)

Ong’s Hat isn’t a place, it’s a world.

Stating what should be obvious:

Ong’s Hat — not the ghost town in New Jersey but the fictional town-story overlaid on it by Joseph Matheny and later collaborators/followers — isn’t a place, though it’s certainly tied to one. Rather, it’s a way of experiencing a place: once again we’re recasting supposed discrete form and substance as modes of relation. Understanding story-system, meaning-system, ideological system, etc. as perceptual filters, you might be better able to imagine how they stack and interact, and how they seem to alter experiences deeply but not so predictably and not at all consistently.

Ong’s Hat doesn’t need to make sense, only to perturb sense — it’s ‘true’ in the way any filtering functioning is ‘true’: it does what it does to how you see. It un-senses you.

Seeing the transmedia project in this way we can avoid the twin traps of (1) reducing it to ‘just’ a game/story and (2) treating it like a set of fact-claims. ‘You determine your own level of involvement.’ As with so many conspiracy theories (not only explicitly, intentionally fictional ones), the fiction offers entry to a feedback loop between new/fictional thought, new/provisional belief, and new/exploratory action. All three arcs of the circle might be termed ‘generative’ — creative. Fiction, provision, exploration.

And of course bullshit.

twitter thoughts, change thoughts.

We don’t choose who changes the world.

We only get to decide: Is it me?

Epistemic status warning: I haven’t been sleeping well, I lost the thread partway through and grabbed a different one and who knows whether anything holds together, these are preliminary thoughts, yes this is what my preliminary thoughts come out sounding like, no I’m not so attached to any of this shit that I don’t wanna hear intelligent disputation about it I’m just pompous you see, everyone says so. –wgh

Like a lot of people (within a narrow demographic band) I’ve been thinking a lot about Twitter. Over the last decade it’s eaten more of my time than any other meaningless distraction. It looms large in my daily experience, for bad reasons. It also was instrumental in getting me the 33-1/3 gig, and introduced me to a bunch of people I consider ‘online friends’ — a weird category and worth unpacking some other time. It entertained me. It destroyed my attention span.

I’m happy to see it go.

Everything good about Twitter was intimately bound up in everything bad about it — crucially, Twitter was not a ‘social’ network in a meaningful sense. Facebook is a ‘social’ network of sorts: you log in and have brief text conversations with your Facebook friends. They’re probably not your real friends, but your Facebook connections theoretically map onto real connections, and if Facebook usage tends to devolve into grandpas-sharing-memes, well, some of us are old enough to remember when commercial email was new and rare (and expensive) and email usage devolved readily to grandpas-sharing-chain-emails. Facebook in practice is a bad version of something good, owned by a cruel idiot, surveilled and manipulated into paranoid stupidity, monetized out of any real value — but under its shambling corpse is an older model of online sociality that might, in an alternate universe, have been something good for our species.

Twitter was never that. It was designed to be bad.

Most Twitter use worked on the ad-supported broadcast model, with ‘social’ interactions having even less importance or usefulness than the infamous blog comments sections you weren’t supposed to read. No one is under any illusions about this except ‘knowledge workers’ who got their only taste of status and visibility through Twitter: journalists, academics, political-media figures, et al. Facebook destroyed the economics of journalism, but Twitter hollowed out journalistic work itself; CNN is the cancer that ate American politics but Twitter represents its metastasis; online life has degraded over 25 years to a long game of hotornot.com but Twitter was built around that model. A lot of mistakes and bad intentions went into Twitter: thumbs-up without thumbs-down is profoundly stupid design that did great harm, the ‘you might like this…’ algorithm is clever but evil (i.e. ad-centric), engagement-only metrics are merely stupid/evil — Twitter was never a successful business and won’t be now, but its managers behaved in ordinary business-predator ways, iteratively ruining not only the one good thing about the site (its initial proposition: an RSS feed of your friends’ group text messages in reverse-chronological order) but everything superficially attractive about it. Prior to Elon Musk’s takeover of the service, Twitter was a shitshow, a ‘social’ service where it was impossible to have a sane conversation except by calving off an invite-only space (at which point you were almost certainly better off in an IRC channel or near-equivalent, e.g. a Slack/Discord instance).

The most popular Twitter accounts were pure publicity feeds: Obama, Musk, Bieber, Ronaldo, Taylor Swift, Modi(!), and for some reason the official Youtube account(??). The only remotely real human being in the top 50 accounts of all time is Musk himself. (For mental-health reasons he should have had his account taken away, but what can you do.) Interacting with humans was possible, but once a Twitter feed reaches a certain size it’s almost impossible to control what you’re seeing, at which point normal/healthyish people defocus and stop interacting almost entirely — making it very difficult to actually get the attention of any big account unless you were (1) big yourself or (2) a dedicated status-chaser, in which case (1) was your goal anyway. The network was built around status, attention, ‘engagement,’ which is why both malicious users’ unceasing river of bullshit and the company’s constant clumsy censorship (including well-documented shadowbanning) were inevitable. ‘Advertisers don’t want to be on “free speech” Twitter’ is a common observation among pseuds now, but the primacy of branding on Twitter was always the problem — ask anyone who made the mistake of looking to Twitter for political ‘news,’ and found nothing but court stenographers’ self-promotion…

Twitter was designed to be bad because it never had a way of making money except selling ads, and it predictably deformed around its revenue source. Pay-to-play networks can’t be ‘social’ in any meaningful sense.

That’s why I won’t miss Twitter. ‘Friends share SMS status messages to coordinate get-togethers at SXSW’ is a fine weekend web-dev project. ‘Tens of millions of people wake up and mindlessly scroll through broadcasts from strangers’ is obviously nothing but a distraction engine which is why status-seekers and advertisers liked it and everyone else routinely derided it as a stupid time-suck to which they were addicted and for which they’d consequently make every excuse in the book.

Hence the the current wave of melodramatic, performative Twitter nostalgia, a combination of resistance to change, justification for what everyone sane has long understood to be a destructive addiction — and branding, branding, branding. Twitter’s weird approach to virtual identity has had corrosive effects, and we’re seeing predictable celebrations from the people who’ve adopted it, ‘benefited’ from it, and now face the horrifying prospect of turning back into people.

the bird that could’ve flown

We don’t choose who changes the world.

Musk is a terrible human being, but he’s the only person with both the means to take Twitter private and the lack of impulse control to try it. And since Twitter is bullshit for a host of reasons which boil down to it being a publicly traded corporation chasing after ad money, this means that Elon Musk is the only person alive in a position to fix Twitter. He will fail, he is publicly failing right before our eyes even as I type — but think about what he could have offered to the world:

An open invitation, backed by $50,000,000,000 of funding, to take Twitter’s massive, frankly astounding network infrastructure and build something new on top of it.

Imagine having the keys to Twitter. What would you do? What would you pay hundreds or thousands of engineers to build? If you didn’t have to answer to shareholders or anyone else, if you had an effectively unlimited amount of money and a readymade infrastructure and the attention of the entire online world, with billions of users waiting to see what you’d do next, and if you could (for a minute) have had your pick of nearly any software developer on earth — if you actually cared about implementing the dream of an ‘Internet town square’ and could skip the entire startup-bootstrapping process and present your idea full-grown to the rest of our species — can you imagine what you’d do?

If you had more money than God and were deluded enough to think of yourself as an excellent tech-corp CEO instead of a lucky conscription-dodging legacy admit with a fake résumé, and someone handed you the keys, would you pass up that opportunity?

Musk just bought the right to deploy literally any software project he wants at Twitter scale. imagine what he could do. He’s making bad choices because he’s stupid, but what if he weren’t? If someone told you tomorrow, ‘You now own NASA. Do what you want,’ would you hesitate for even a second before putting people on Mars or something? I bet you would, and honestly that’s probably good. But Elon Musk, a dipshit conman so insecure he lies about his bachelors degree, demonstrably wouldn’t hesitate. He keeps actually doing insane things, his money protects him, and some of them — like brute-forcing the launch of the entire electric-car sector — will change and indeed improve human life to a degree we can’t yet fully comprehend.

We don’t get to choose who changes the world. We only get to choose to try it ourselves, or not. No one reading this, I imagine, will ever be in a position to effect change at Twitter-scale. But one reason for that is simple: no one reading this is actually committed to even trying for that goal.

Musk looked at Twitter, like so many of us, and thought: What else could this be? Because of his limitations, he came up with dumb answers and is tripping over himself to implement them in the dumbest, most destructive possible ways. He’s going to destroy Twitter by accident — and then one of the worst, most influential business executives in history will own billions and billions of dollars of digital infrastructure, with which he can do whatever the hell he wants… Tell me, if that guy offered you $200K/yr to build something else using Twitter’s tech and reach and userbase, would you take it?

Wouldn’t you?

elf-actualization

A ‘self-actualized’ person is someone who lives intentionally, no longer in denial about her nature, her plans and impulses and desires aligned, or at least resolved. Unlike most people she’s…really here, not denying or escaping or sublimating but actually struggling with this moment, this world-in-progress as it actually is. You can ‘skip ahead’ to something that superficially resembles self-actualization by being a Musk/Trump-style piece of shit, having so much money and so few actual friends that you lose connection to humanity, but real self-actualization is peace, which isn’t the absence of conflict but rather the presence (or rather, the process) of harmony and resolution. Musk obviously isn’t a peaceful man, but he’s now in a position to act with almost total impunity, to honour his full self (if he had one). This is capitalism’s shitty simulacrum of peace, the glittering lure: it’s a bad thing that does good things by accident. Musk is late capitalism is human form, a trust-fund baby who uses his money solely to make increasingly large bets on a future that can’t be built any other way, not because they’ll help you and me but because that’s the way his ego is deformed, and everything good that comes of Musk’s predation and exploitation is a side effect.

This is capitalist ideology in a nutshell: your selfishness delivers benefits to us, greed increases freedom as a side effect (presentists and attention-dysregulated readers, cf. Sam Bankman-Fried and all of ‘effective altruism’ and indeed ‘rationalism’). ‘Trickle-down’ economics is just saying the quiet part of capitalism out loud, the rich need to get richer because ‘greed works,’ and it remains not just the social-ideological model of Silicon Valley but the psychological basis of the whole corporate world. That’s the deep-down justification — and note its reflection the current outbreak of Twitter-nostalgia, howls of longing for a world in which endless monologues into the void could take the place of the real (taxing, risky, slow, meaningful) communication that entities like Twitter have themselves destroyed, oh well…

Most people with delusions of grandeur accomplish nothing — but everyone who does anything grand will have, at moments, such delusions. Successful people tend not to get swept up in them, tend to avoid getting high on their own supply; peaceful people learn to avoid this trap entirely. But an awful lot of world-changing people are fucking nuts! And they get someplace legible and impactful to the rest of us by chasing their foolish notions and schemes and visions long past the point at which anyone else would have stopped. Do you think ‘Kim Kardashian’ is a good idea? Does anyone? Christ no. But even a product idea that bad can make a billion dollars if the people pimping it are clear-eyed about what they want and ruthless about pursuing it. That’s the ugly lesson that presumes the late-capitalist cult of accumulation, and it’s the weak vile analogue to the most beautiful idea, that no human is too far fallen to find peace through clarity, intention, and focus — right thinking right action etc., as somebody once said. We don’t get to choose who changes the world or how it’s changed, except that we get to choose (we must choose) to enact and embody that change ourselves. Which is the last thing the bosses like Musk want, and which is why the real questions to ask about Twitter — or about own your inexplicable and misguided decision to know and even care about the ‘Kim Kardashian’ line of near-human beings — are ‘What do I need?’ ‘What do I want?’ ‘What am I doing?’ Maybe you stay connected to the distraction-engine, sucking down toxic fumes and remaining in the fog of ‘Twitter brain’; maybe you turn off the TV when the Kardashian-family infomercial comes on; maybe we finish this goddamn manuscript; either way, the only healthy act is an intentional one, the thing Twitter was built and administered to take away from you, which can only come about through an alignment of means and ends and opportunity and luck (a superstitious nickname for ‘opportunity’).

There’s a universe, maybe not yet born, in which Twitter developed in accordance with a clear vision of a global ‘town square’ rather than an advertising platform trading in private user data. Elon Musk had the opportunity to bring it into being right here, right now, and he didn’t because he’s stupid and undisciplined.¹ But he has some combination of traits which gave him that opportunity in the first place. And while we shouldn’t strive to emulate him — though I could live with being richer than Croesus — we might pay attention to the thing he superficially resembles, and take some lesson from his ongoing rise/fall.

And then stop paying attention to him altogether. Musk has stolen enough time from our species. He’s destroying Twitter, literally as I type, and it would take him and his several years to build something worthwhile on its ruins. To hell with them. Meanwhile an unexplored country is visible beyond. Maybe it’s easier to find peace in a new world outside the old. Maybe, with all the time that quitting Twitter is gonna free up, you’ll have a few minutes in which to try.

I’m @waxbanks@mstdn.social for the time being, waxbanks most places I’m found online, tell me something new.

addendum

I want to add: Yes, Musk wanted not to buy Twitter and tried to get out of it. He’s impulsive and seems to’ve backed himself into it. I don’t think that’s incompatible with him having delusions of grandeur about running the place, or even ideas about what it might be; I’m sure they intertwine nicely with his persecution complex as Twitter burns down.

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1. ‘Wait I thought he was a “hardcore” sleep-at-the-office type?’ No, you’re thinking of the people he pays to buttress his reputation. Musk explicitly announced his intention to hand the Twitter reins over to a more committed CEO after completing the acquisition — and he’s notoriously both an impulsive micromanager and an absentee landlord with no attention to detail. Have you ever actually ridden in a fucking Tesla? ↩