< - viii - >

2021 - pt vi / the end of 2021


this page was created on december seventh


december 1st

the following was perhaps typed in a sort of manic state of mind where i "relapsed" on looking at tumblr notes

i would ideally like to play some part in minimizing the fundamental alienating harm
of social media by using it as a channel to portray & express & reinforce humanity

but part of me fears that, even if i came to feel less alienated & more in touch with my unmediated humanity
than any other person on the planet, then... feeding that perspective into social media would still just be
appropriating it into yet another attractive aspect of a medium that would turn back around & harm people...

like, you know, even if i make the generous assumption that my output could be an exception to the harm, it's still gonna
endorse that medium that can turn right back around & harm them again once they're back to looking at something else


haha ope no one cares! i guess they were right!!! all i do is post fucking gibberish all day X) they
are actually an angel for pushing in the direction of coercing me off of this horrific platform


basically every dopaminergic aspect of the internet is profound abuse. like, your friend follows you on instagram & you think "oh,
that can't be profound abuse, that's just my buddy," but it's casual paling around being mediated by a larger system of profound
abuse, the same way gestures are love are appropriated into the possession of money. this is how i am coming to see it


it's either turn your humanity into one more thing populating a machine oriented entirely towards promoting quantified
metricated forms of thinking that basically serve to reformat people's humanity into forms with a maximal propensity
for viewing advertisements, or, just let that humanity flounder alone in a room untransmitted. either way, it
wins, i guess. what exists in contradiction to it is either appropriated into it or left obscure

sometimes i just feel like i want to die because no one will come & reflect my passion for contradicting the indisputable horrors
that currently play out across lcd screens. i don't know. there's a billion people going "social media sux" all the time, that
should be enough for me i GUESS. i might be being stupid & absurd right now. like the things i'm saying might even
be true on principle but i'm using the true statements as a vehicle to be stupid & absurd. oh my god just
share in the passion of my hatred for this medium for one second oh my god


i almost typed "i love pouring all my passion into an absolute void of passion by typing posts" but i remembered that i'm trying to
eradicate sarcasm from my communication. so i'll say that no, i don't like doing that, i don't like doing it one bit. in fact, i'll stop
now, because how can i say i dislike something & keep doing it? see? all i had to do was say what i actually thought, instead
of saying the direct opposite of what i thought so that i could feel a little sarcastic & biting & edgy. i don't want to be biting.
i don't want to bite or cut or jab at anything. i'd like to be very soft, as a matter of fact. i could draw some poetic parallel
between the cold, mechanical quantification that social media applies to one's psychology, & the violent rigidity of a tooth
or blade. i could link it to the sense of hostility that social media tends to foster. then i could contrast all of that to a
qualitative softness, like the skin that is cut or bit. i sure do like the quantitative / qualitative binary lately, huh?
bit obsessed with that one! so how are you doing? i don't think i'm typing this post in an upset way
anymore, genuinely, i've found it in me to laugh about all of this stuff now


"i am going to remain stable, out of love for the good concept that i can be"

things are going awry in this regard, because i kept trying to portray my stability through [that] platform, & now, naturally,
i am filled with violent distrust of the platform. & so i now equate being a good concept with instability instead, because to
display stability on a platform that i think is bad just feels like complacency. none of this would be a problem if i hadn't
tried to portray my stability on the platform. the reason i did that was because the platform is addictive. addictions are
difficult to deal with, obviously. no one is perfect. but um. one has to just. do their best to deal with what must be dealt with


ok, the little panel that i can open to un-hide the notes happens to be programmed in this weird telescopic way that let
me add four additional clicks to the process. lucky for me, right? ha ha. ha. let's hope that has a strengthening effect


i think i need to believe that there is lots of evil in my heart, so that i can fear it, so that i can
then cite that fear to myself as evidence that i am genuinely not predisposed to evil. if i
don't feel like the evil is in my heart then i have nothing to orient myself by


i think i really truly genuinely have some kind of intensely split self with respect to tumblr. like, yesterday, i made that
post about getting to film people building gingerbread houses, right? & i felt all refreshed by it. it's inconceivable that i could
think about all this garbage when i'm off in some normal situation like that, removed from all of this overthought. i go to that
website & become the self that is seen on it, & i mean in a genuine way, not as an act... there's not even any, like... unified
eccentricity of my total self that someone could gawk at, it's all just a digital artifact produced when i mediate myself
there. in fact, when i make a post like i did about the gingerbread houses, where i'm still in the afterglow of
that experience, that's probably the only glimpse there ever is there of what is otherwise me


for a little while there, i think hiding the notes really was actualizing the best potential for that website, which is that... i
might just try to post something sweet or insightful every once in a while, & not suffer for it. i might not always succeed, but i
won't suffer for not succeeding. it's just that having the quantitative scores assigned to my thoughts absolutely destroys me &
sends everything into these kinds of combative spirals. i guess i really kind of am the problem, since, if i could tolerate it,
i could just... you know, inhabit that best potential with no room for suffering. the blog really, genuinely, absolutely can
be, like, a pleasant & affirmative space. & the next time i think about un-hiding the notes, i should think about how i'd be,
yet again, opening the door to totally disgracing that potential. i have the tool to nullify the evil aspect of the platform
for myself, for god's sake, i just need to use it. if i'm comfortable with what i've published, absent the
distortion of a ranking, then... there you go, that's the qualitative

i've hidden my post & follower counts now. i might start stripping lots of websites
down to solely what i need to engage with them solely how i would like to


the struggle which underpins it all is validating myself as an observer, i guess

to simply read in a book in my room & know that no one else knows. to know that the goodness that reading a book in my room
possesses, over the habit of obsessively reporting myself, isn't wasted on me. events that only i saw did still happen...
to know that i can just be lonely. to know that... one person is equal to a hundred, as long as one feels known

thought experiment: even if you have a healthy social sphere, you can look to the limit of that sphere & say
"aw, we're all together, but if we're not known to everyone in the world, then we're just together in the
same solipsistic bubble as if we were alone." but no one says that, because no one cares, as
long as they feel known. & in the absence of one, i don't have to turn to a hundred

a follower count is an interesting conflict between quantity & quality... the quantitative increase in one's reach results in
more qualitative activity in response to what they might post. that wigs me out, i don't know what to think about it


december 4th

you will expend a portion of your passion on a channel of communication that structurally implies that everything on it is
initially worthless until specifically exempted from worthlessness. you will cogently describe your own sense of alienation
until a person who likes to watch movies & then go home & search "{title} explained" on youtube & watch the top result
reads it & calls you schizophrenic. you will continue to type things regardless because it is what you love doing,
& you will love the concealed caring core of the person who called you schizophrenic


december 5th

lying in bed thinking about how bad it is that i'm thinking about something that i'm actually thinking about far
less than i am thinking about how bad it is that i am supposedly thinking about it until i cry out & curl up


december 6th

i'm a bit sad because i was doing quite consistently well for a while & i imagine there could have been people for whom
that was the only face i had shown them & now i can't stop getting all collapse-y on here again. feels like shattering
something. i guess being all collapse-y is the honest reality that i must live on occasion but i didn't have to do it (t)here


december 16th

not trying too hard to make perfect sense in this one

overhearing family guy from the living room & the circumstance is not as simple as it sounds on its
face. if a short ring of a bell is all the repetition it takes to evoke a response from a dog, what
does that mean for hours upon hours of digitally stored reproducible verbatim audio?

i don't like any of the life periods that the hours of family guy audio remind me of, & of course i don't like
the near relentless cynicism of a lot of the humor, especially later in the show. & the cynicism itself was
even a significant factor in the overall unpleasantness of those time periods, feral introjection
of that kind of cynicism from media cause i had nothing better to model myself by...

or rejection of it, but still going nuts cause i had few decent cultural alternatives. it's like being a three-dimensional
being crushed infinitely into a two-dimensional plane or living in a cube that's steadily shrinking. now i have strong
notions of "cultural contamination" & it being much of mainstream media's express interest to inflict that on me if it can

the audio i'm overhearing feels like being nudged incrementally towards a latent
sickness that i had successfully buried... hmm so basically crappy tv show!