I took my joy and gave it to a substance to feed back to myself. And now it’s stopped. Why the fuck did I get a job? To prove a point to x? To have structure? Idk. I struggle so, so, so very much w/ my mind and the life furnished by horrors of generations past.
Mine isn’t better, just more info jammed down our throats from the outset. I can’t imagine the beautiful privilege of life before total screen takeover, briefly though I may have enjoyed it as a child. The world, not just images curated by a machine of that world. We had to render our own images, think our own thoughts; ruminate, paint, live; shouldn’t be possible to avoid boredom in the human world. We lose context, awe (obviously given loss of context), boredom, imagination,
I sold those things to the screens for them to feed back to me. But I think I want my things back. I am really not happy or whole-feeling. But was I ever happy before I sold those things? Maybe more natural. But the deep tragic system-halting dysfunction is powerful in that it has just enough potency to its numbing techs for me to survive in the depths of nothingness. Just enough simulated social interaction, emotional stimuli, distractive noises, that I can be almost comfortable in my depleted body-cage and apartment that becomes dirtier every time I look up from my phone, an inhuman bunker where I can order food and goods I need (consume), watch or listen to things (consume), drink or smoke (consume), but all that watching and buying – participation in the spectacle – leaves me very little mental or temporal space for anything but getting angry about my cyclical failure and hunkering down in incredible deep aquifers of self-hatred or paranoia or fear or sheer capitalistic lust. No room for production of anything – out – empathy, joy, love, even boredom – the space is reserved for technofeudal overlords. And I know that but it doesn’t stop me from consistently inundating my brain with context-shorn information. Even good full-length pieces of art turned to mental static in service of being-feeling-knowing nothing of my human self, only constructed algorithm facsimile that constantly sags into its own bad habits. The internet is ostensibly enormous and I’m trapped on three treadmills all owned by billionaires. I am not more connected, but more isolated and hateful. I am not more informed, I am more misled and ignorant about broader contextual frames, I am not happier or more fulfilled or more human; more art may be viewable today than before, but the internet is a massive dump that one has to sift through; ‘oh there, a bigot; oh there, a sports gambling ad, oh there, AI generated spew, oh there an AI generated bigot’; technology is rarely ‘for the people,’ it almost always enters the world as a form of capital and starts dividing from there. And to change that – to reach people, to encourage humanity – I too find myself online. And I wish I could eschew that entirely. But it has successfully interceded in a number of procedures – basic introductions between young people, for example: “Hey, great outfit, what’s your instagram?” “What’s your snap?” The social interaction has changed, and if all you have is a phone number (still more than I’d prefer most days) then you’d better hope that person actually wants to follow up, or the connection may already have died.
Now for some AI has interceded in the basic processes of learning, self-expression, knowledge, even emotional dialogue. Because…?
We’re lazy, I guess, and the primary values inculcated in our society thanks to the predominant modes of production, distribution, and consumption devised and sold to us by ultra-international-mega-corporations who have conquered the problem of scale, are uncritical ease and convenience for the consumer and efficiency and profit gone mad for the industrialist; yet we’re all well meaning. Chat with most low-level Amazon employees and you’ll discover a normal person who knows this is all fucked. And when we as a proletariat all know, and all want the best (well.. most want the best and many who appear not to have come under the spell of those looking to mystify and displace their legitimate concerns for their personal gain; yet there are enough of those emotional and financial pressure points to effectively avert revolution or even basic awareness of the class-based predicament. And one must know class and race wars are being waged every day in the United States, just without much organized resistance. Capitalistic states have aided and abetted both wars forever, sometimes domestically, and sometimes abroad. This revolution without end stands in stark contrast to the social/political revolutions which fought these formations/configurations of power and capital; in the French case, they ended up at war with the monarchies of Europe; in the Soviet case they started fighting internal capitalistic/absolutist enemies and wound up in a long-standing confrontation with the greatest configuration of power and capital in human history, the United States post-war machine (which funny enough never seemed to really be post-war). The baby boomers, at least in part, fought these capitalistic/imperialistic tendencies then were sent en masse to die in an ignominious imperial war, a coupling of events which unleashed a strange incumbent class for my peers and I to have to interact with as we negotiate our entry into society.
So what? Social revolution is stemmed and young men die, and capitalistic revolution – aided by existing power structures, technology that enables further subjugation of the working class (see time work discipline, and industrial capitalism by EP Thompson), and today by their ownership of media spaces and the control over information dissemination which that involves. The police, there to defend capital, operates at a level of militarization and counter-insurgency tactics that render any serious effort to transform the system EXTREMELY dangerous.
(Bleak ending and a bit of a meander meant more to begin to discuss a few of the ideas bouncing around in my mind but that’s where I stopped writing for now.)
B Writes 