#347

Man, information. That's some fucked up drugs right there. 

Wishing to retain for myself the most neutral possible starting-point for analysis, I try to limit my daily informational intake, and I try to stick to sources that present their information professionally, source it properly, and provide various perspectives and contrasting commentary as well as a broad assortment of material in writing. One should not listen to people say the news if one can at all avoid it, in my opinion. I also regularly check sources and aggregates I know are ridiculous or obscurantist, so as to remain informed about those varieties of jargon and mindset. Least often, grudgingly, understanding that a lot of people read or watch their news and understand their worlds thereby strictly from materials provided by either msnbc news or fox news, with everybody referencing to cnn news when they're feeling broadminded--in other words, sources which make obscurantism blush--I take a look at what they're up to.

Visiting these nightmare websites this morning, as I do every few months because it is important to see what techniques corporate overlords are using on the news as part of their communications warfare, I am amazed as always, even shocked, at the naked brigandry, the boorishness of their techiques. 

Saw the word "bogus" in two separate headlines on msnbc--is that seriously how motherfuckers edit over there? The entire website bristles with attacks on a bewildering variety of fronts and moral postures, shame running a bright common thread through it all. It's a temple to the pointed finger, to the shrill note that sings in the voice when one is angry to be disagreed with by someone they believe less intelligent, less morally developed than themselves.

The fox news flow is like a hallucination, naked pyschology, not much content. Like experiencing a paranoid delusion firsthand. Larger type, headlines only, less targeted fury, a broader outrage, like a beast whose flank is pierced by arrows breathing fire into the air. Each headline a little angry blast on a cornet or the pleading grief of a fife.

Father to both and cynical heir to their innovations, cnn roars like the one and stings like the other, insinuates and declares and allows headlines whose syntax is built to make head-nodding sense to acolytes and make the outsider cock their head at an angle and squint their eyes. 

These motherfuckers are becoming churches. That's all I'm trying to say. Creepy churches.

*

Dang, I really bum myself out. This is why I adress the concrete matters of the world less and less on the blog. My insights offer me no comfort, and serve as a fairly mealy form of entertainment. 

Read Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, ed. Alice Wong recently, not a planned book but a very excellent read. Other than that, reading has been mostly in service of school of late. It really does happen like that. I fight it, but the battle is indeed uphill.

Best wishes, dear reader. It's foggy today, that's pretty cool. 

--JL

#327

Looking over some news, and came across some ideas I found too delicious to resist writing some ideas back at. Don't really know that it's a great thing for the blog to be used that way, as my personal comment thread, and I have tried to refrain from that, but it's been creeping back in lately. I mean, I could have written a lot more posts about China. Well, I did write them. I didn't publish them, though. That's something.

Anyway, the salient bits are this: more deepfaked and AI generated images than ever, human brain tasked with processing five percent more information per day every year and it drains people, information apocalypse, a construction worker can make a viral shitpost of the Pope in a puffer while tripping on shrooms and people will think it's real.

It's 2023, twenty years since I started lurking forums on the old web, and to this day I am amazed at how precise and applicable a predictive engine the language I absorbed back then proved to be. The Trump presidency was predicted. The takeover of meatspace by online dynamics and the escalation of the culture wars thereby was not only predicted but theorized, workshopped, designed, and launched, like a flock of autonomous drones darkening the skies. I watched it happen in horror and awe, astonished and fearful, like Ian Malcolm seeing the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park for the first time. The crazy sons of bitches did it, they said what they were going to do and they did it. Meatspace people still think Buzzfeed is like this normal thing that just happened organically instead of a psychic harpoon that punctured their blubber and extended poisonous barbs. Their methodology works on the micro to this day. Practically every niche tworter account swollen with ingroup influence, whose gyrations predict the shape of thousands of sycophant accounts, began as a "mere" shitpost/joke account, as Buzzfeed was once a "mere" shitpost/joke generator/aggregator. It's why my face twists over to one side when someone tells me to lighten up, it's "just" shitposting. It's like, son, I was there. Do you understand? I was reading the posts when these fuckers were telling each other how shitposting is never just shitposting, and this is how we prove it. I was there when they proved it, and now we are all here. 

It is my habit to trade in mental images, especially of internet; one of the reasons people were surprised for a long time that hadn't read Snow Crash. Well, now I have, and the image of ziggurat therein is a powerful one, dispensing the binary commands on which a society operates. How about this: a warehouse big enough to contain eight billion player pianos. 

Hm. I don't have much of a point, I guess, except that some of us have been girding our loins for this type of shit and the level at which it is starting to operate for decades. I have never imagined trusting words and images on internet; almost since I began daily usage I have understood that it is more like a dream than anything else, that words and pictures and even math can lie on internet and that to trust any part of it or think that it is real is to invite a kind of death into your mental processes. It is my overriding assumption, my phalanx, that statements of fact on the internet are designed to mislead your thinking, and that images have been manipulated. To adopt a more relaxed position is to invite calamity. That is all.

*

Another tidbit that I found delicious and amazing was that one Artificial Intelligence guy saying we will one hundred percent go extinct if we don't cut the AI shenanigans like immediately. 

It's like, I hope they stop too! But mostly because it's all been so stupid. It's been a stupid revolution, and it's a stupid way to die. Yet, it is a highly probable way to die. Hope killer AI gives me the chance to smoke that classic final cigarette, because stopping is not a thing we do, as species, as a global civilization. Even if by some miracle ninety percent of all labs and individuals everywhere did stop, the people who most should stop will continue, so as not to lose their precious edge over their competitors, who have not stopped because they know the first motherfucker won't stop, and so on around the world like a noose, plus the dumbfucks who don't stop because they think it's alarmist bullshit. 

At this point, I'm just glad for a surefire solution to climate change. That's probably a factor of my failure to reproduce, but I'm going to take comfort in it anyway. 

*

Against my better judgment, I grabbed Resident Evil VII.I.AGE, and it has been massively rewarding. Resident Evil 4 was never scary enough; this bastard plays like RE4, but it horrifies in a way playing as the world's twinkest superhero never could. No matter what fucked shit RE4 threw at me, I was ready to take it and fuck it up right back. There was tension--certainly, I didn't want to have my head chainsawed off, or plucked from my shoulders and devoured by a writhing parasite. But I was never terrified by the very concept. Playing RE7.1, I don't want any of this shit to happen to me, and on top of that, the things I'm seeing transcend tension and impact the very gut with basal, reptile fear. In RE4, I wanted to shoot the next thing, make progress, to prove my shit-hot skillset. I don't want anything in RE7.1 at all, I want nothing to happen, I want it all to stop, except for getting my daughter back, even though she's clearly some type of fungus, and so am I, apparently. Going by his example, all damage to the body--legs, shoulders, protracted blood loss, whatever--can be repaired by splashing one's left hand with plant extract and pure alcohol. 

It's like, I didn't play Resident Evil 7. Ezra's playing it now, though, and RE7.1 had a nice little recap. But he's definitely some kind of mutant, right? He's a bioweapon. This Mold shit has altered him fundamentally. But still, man. Some shit pierces the illusion. Not enough to block the incredible fear this game makes me feel, like a thick cold syrup invading my blood, but enough that I notice it every time.

Anyhow, I'm two bosses in--that shit in the basement of the house with the puppets was UNBELIEVABLY FUCKED--and I'm hoping this feeling lasts at least all the way through the first playthrough. I understand that subsequent playthroughs will be an exercise in dominance over the material, but for now, cold fear, please and thank you.

--JL

#120

Don't like conspiracy theories, personally. The minuscule sliver of them that are perfectly true and are only termed conspiracy theories because of CIA disinformation campaigns are simply not worth the rest of them, some of them also CIA disinformation. I hope it's not too crazy to make that statement; nothing I have just said is not on the public record.

*

In particular, and as always, I am thinking of and still absolutely amazed that the History Channel, which I could easily and accurately call the W.R. Hearst Legacy Channel, broadcasts the show Ancient Aliens to the viewing public. I hope Umberto Eco passed without having seen it. It is everything he writes about in his essay on Ur-Fascism, everything he talks about when he discusses critical historical misinterpretation and dangerous textual telephone in his book Serendipities, it is just plain conspiracy theory and the undermining of rational thought and empirical thinking and inductive reasoning.

If you want to know what the show Ancient Aliens is actually about, what its purpose is, and why the people who make it and the trolls that feature prominently are just irresponsible at best, get a load of this shit. Slip into the rabbit hole a ways. Learn about "Awareness" and the true story of our solar system. You're either the kind of person who will fall for it and come to believe that I am the insane one--possibly even not human--for not believing in it, or you'll understand why I'm pissed.

*

I have hazel eyes, by the way, and possess vivid memories of my childhood dreams, many of which involved being strapped to a vertical surface by shadowy figures and being pierced by a shifting but always circular pattern of individual lights like floating crystals, so bright they rayed and spangled wildly in the vision. The feeling was one of total panic and of being penetrated and rearranged internally.

So you know, this has particular significance, according to the above conspiracy theory. Makes me special. Singled out.

Still think all of that is bullshit. Come on, people. Get with a program that is called the delusion of being outside a delusion. Take a step back. Then take one more.

*

Not a very productive post. Hey, I hate the fucking teevee and the insufferable lunatic demagogues it so clearly empowers and rewards, everybody! I hate to death its infinitely hungry, ever-regurgitating, white-glowing maw! 

Of course, I am a person who has watched a lot of cartoons and PBS and HBO which is, of course, still television. I love the teevee as much as the next guy but FUCK. 

Similar to how I'm pretty much an internet person, shaped by its forces and disdainful of misunderstandings of what I believe it represents, but am absolutely disgusted by everything about the internet, loathe it and belittle it at every opportunity.

Now back to reading this "mainstream history" book I am enjoying, even though it is clearly written specifically to keep me in the dark about how the Earth is actually hollow and full of things that want to drink my blood and steal my hormones.

--JL