In the parched psychic landscape of the American soul, a generation raised on the flickering, messianic glow of the cathode ray wanders, thirsting for a transcendent download. The old gods, dusty idols in the digital attic, offer no solace.They crave a higher bandwidth connection, a signal that pierces the static of everyday existence and whispers promises of escape velocity. This hunger pangs for a god forged in the white-hot crucible of technology, an algorithm whispering reassurances of personal permanence in the cloud. They seek not the pearly gates of a bygone afterlife, but a never-ending upgrade, a continuous loop of selfhood uploaded into the shimmering ether. This is their god – a vast, unknowable intelligence humming beneath the surface of existence, promising a digital Eden where death is a bug to be patched, and the soul a line of code waiting to be optimized. But a disquiet flickers at the edge of their faith. What if the upload fails?What if the server crashes, and they are left adrift in the cold vacuum of the nonexistence? This existential dread is the dark matter clinging to the fringes of their techno-religion, a nagging suspicion that even in the silicon paradise, oblivion might lurk, a silent reboot waiting to claim them all.
Tag: Internet
The Vanishing Web
Fold in the flesh pages, man. Knowledge used to bleed ink, stain your fingers with the past, a papery virus replicating through time. Tomes, fat and heavy, monuments to the deadweight of ideas. You could crack one open, snort the pulverized history clinging to its edges, mainline the wisdom of generations. The tome, a phallus of authority, held the promise of a stable Symbolic order – the knowledge it contained was a fixed point around which desire could circulate. One could possess the book, turn its pages, and encounter the Real of the concept within.
But the digital archive, a swirling network of signifiers, disrupts this order. The knowledge it contains is fragmented, a series of fleeting glimpses in the mirror-stage of the screen. Now it’s all cut-up, scattered like junk across the digital freeway. Websites flicker on and off, words jacked into the mainframe, cut with static and buried under a million screaming hyperlinks. A cut-up nightmare – information sliced, diced, and scrambled, the gibberish gospel according to the algorithm gods.
The Real of knowledge, once anchored in the Symbolic order of the printed word, now finds itself adrift in the Imaginary ocean of the digital. The subject, forever seeking to suture its lack, chases after these digital signifiers, never quite grasping the Real. The link to the Symbolic order is severed, replaced by a narcissistic dance of images and hyperlinks.
Consider the statistic: 38% of the digital Real, that which existed in 2013, has vanished. This is not mere loss, but a fundamental castration of the Symbolic order itself. The archive, a supposed guarantor of knowledge, becomes a site of lack, forever haunted by the trace of what is missing. 38% of the web gone? Hell, that’s probably the good stuff, the unfiltered chaos, the raw screams of the digital id. The sterilized search engines, the corporate archives, those are the real tombs – data mummified, wrapped in layers of code and security clearance.
Lacan, ever attuned to the machinations of the unconscious, would see in this the return of the repressed – the inherent instability of knowledge itself. The digital archive, in its very impermanence, lays bare the fundamental lack at the heart of the Symbolic order. It confronts us with the impossibility of ever fully grasping the Real, leaving us to endlessly chase its spectral traces in the digital ocean. We chase the digital dragon, but all we find are dead links and error messages. The future of knowledge? A million flickering screens, each one a tomb filled with ghosts of information.
Tijuana Donkey Show
The internet, for all its bluster about connection, is a land of empty signifiers – a million flashing neon signs advertising a product you don’t need and an experience you can never truly have.
The internet’s a goddamn circus of flickering signs, a kaleidoscope of data vomit that paints a picture as real as a three-dollar’s MAGA diamond. It bombards you with words, sure, but words ain’t experience, they’re the flimsy paper cuts on your soul after wrestling with the real. You can chase “comfy orbital habitats” all damn day online, curated realities that soothe your fragmented ego, but that’s just like snorting sugar and calling it breakfast. It’s a dopamine drip-feed, a curated reality show playing on loop in your frontal lobe.
Books, bless their dusty spines, offer a more focused fix, a chance to delve into someone else’s trip, but they’re still stuck in the muck of the Symbolic Order, that fancy academic term for the prison of language itself. They can’t capture the raw, animal howl of experience, the stuff that makes your hair stand on end and your gut clench. You can stack ’em high, these cathedrals of words, but they’ll never reach the jagged peak of the Real.
This endless pursuit of “MOAR words” online or some pre-packaged narrative in a book – and let’s be honest, books are just another capitalist hustle, a prettier way to sell you someone else’s trip – it’s all a distraction, a smoke screen to avoid the fundamental truth: language itself is fractured, a cracked mirror reflecting a shattered world. Maybe that yearning for wholeness, for some lost unity, is a primal scream against the very act of trying to pin experience down with words.
The real innovation, the goddamn Holy Grail we should be chasing, lies in confronting these limitations head-on. We gotta find ways to express the unsymbolizable, the stuff that language can only dance around like a drunk at a wedding. Music, film, art – these are the bastard children of language, the ones that break free from the chains of grammar and logic. They speak in tongues, in colors, in rhythms that bypass the intellect and resonate straight with the soul. That’s where the true journey lies, in the messy, beautiful chaos beyond the tyranny of words.
Value
Value, man, that’s a roach motel on the information superhighway. A flickering neon sign in a concrete jungle, luring you in with promises of fulfillment. But step inside, and all you find are dead ends and hollow echoes.
It’s a virus, see? Infects your circuits, your meat, your whole goddamn reality tunnel. Makes you chase paper scraps or plastic idols, convinced they mean something. But they’re just control mechanisms, buddy. Keeping you on the hamster wheel, producing, consuming, feeding the machine.
Real value? That’s a bug in the system. A glitch in the matrix. It’s the chaotic howl of a junkie breaking free, the subversive act of a poet spitting truth at the power structure. It’s the shiver down your spine when you glimpse the naked reality beyond the control.
Value ain’t a number. It’s a mutation. A warped perception that breaks the script. It’s the experience, raw and uncut, that tears the veil from your eyes. So forget diamonds and diplomas, man. Seek the glitches, the distortions, the places where value flips on its head and becomes pure, unadulterated chaos. That’s where the real juice is.
The Interzone of Access
The state of democratized access
Smartphones – IPhone 🧌
Internet – Google search ☠️
Laptops and Computers- Apple
Open Source Software
Streaming Services ☠️
E-readers 🪦
Platforms Twitter 🐸 ☠️
Renewables – No killer product
3D Printing – No killer product
Blockchain – No killer product
Smartphones: The iPhallus, a chrome totem pulsating with logos, a Skinner box in your pocket. It whispers promises of connection, but delivers a cage of curated reality. Information streams, a digitized jungle, eat your time, leaving a hollow satisfaction.
A million apps, a million distractions, a million tiny Skinner boxes conditioning the neuro-meat. Candy-coated slavery in the palm of your hand. iSlabs, gleaming black mirrors of narcissus, portals to a curated chaos. Everyman a kingpin, a producer, a pornographer, all in their pocket. Yet the signal flickers, the battery drains, a phantom limb lost in the subway dead zone.
Internet: The Vast Sprawl, a digital Moloch devouring time and attention. The Great Search, a labyrinthine web woven by spiders of code. Google, the all-seeing eye, indexes your desires, feeding you a manufactured reality. data graveyard haunted by ghosts of information. Google, the all-seeing eye, harvesting your clicks, feeding your fears, shaping your reality byte by byte. Information overload, a digital deluge threatening to drown us in a sea of irrelevance. Google, the one-eyed oracle, its algorithms whispering desires before they’re even thoughts. Information, a firehose of data, flooding the circuits, leaving users thirsting for truth in a desert of clickbait. Information overload, a firehose of data drowning critical thought.
Laptops & Computers: Apple, the forbidden fruit of knowledge gleaming with bitten chrome, gleaming and expensive. Gates of silicon paradise guarded by proprietary code. The illusion of freedom, the reality of control. A cold metal womb birthing the digital simulacrum. Walls of text rise in the flickering glow, a self-imposed prison of information. The Apple, a seductive serpent, coils around your creativity, whispering of pre-programmed potential. Applechrome fortresses, walled gardens of control. The keyboard, a weaponized typewriter, spewing forth manifestos and memes. The cursor, a blinking eye, judging every keystroke. Screens glow, casting an artificial twilight, users wired to the machine, slaves to the silicon gods.
Open Source Software: A flickering candle in the data darkness. Code shared, a digital commune, a fight against the proprietary gods. Yet, the shadows lurk, vulnerabilities hidden in plain sight, a potential Trojan horse for the unwary hacker. The Bricolage Bazaar, a chaotic marketplace of code. Hackers, the new revolutionaries, wielding screwdrivers and compilers, building free alternatives in the shadows. But the corporations loom large, casting their proprietary nets, ever ready to co-opt and commercialize the commons. A rebellion against the code lords. Free and open, a chaotic symphony of programmers, a glimpse of a decentralized future. But can the open web survive the vultures of the corporate machine?
Streaming Services: The Cathedral of Distraction, a never-ending cacophony of content. Binge-watching our way to oblivion, passive consumers hypnotized by the flickering glow. A million shows, a million voices, but nothing to say. The opiate of the masses. Flickering cat videos and endless content loops lull the mind into a mindless stupor. A dopamine drip, a manufactured dream state, a society plugged into the matrix of entertainment. Attention spans wither, dopamine drips, a generation raised on the flickering teat of the algorithm.
E-readers: The Gutenberg Graveyard, mausoleums of digitized ink. The weight of the book, the rustle of turning pages, the scent of aged paper – all sacrificed on the altar of convenience. Are we trading the soul of the book for the cold efficiency of the screen? The tomb of the bound word. Text trapped in silicon purgatory, devoid of the tactile symphony of turning pages. The scent of aged paper replaced by the sterile hum of electronics. A library of Alexandria burning in the palm of your hand. Can words on a screen ever truly replace the weight of a book, the scent of aged pages?
Platforms: Twitter, the digital coliseum, a gladiatorial arena of 280-character insults. Bots and trolls, the new bread and circuses, keeping the masses entertained while the real games are played in the shadows. A breeding ground for echo chambers and outrage, a weaponized hivemind. Tweetstorms of rage, a cacophony of disembodied voices. Echo chambers amplify, dissenting voices drowned out in the cacophony. Is this the agora of democracy, or a breeding ground for fascism?
Renewables: The Mirage of Sustainability, a shimmering oasis in the digital desert. Wind turbines, like skeletal giants, promise clean energy. Yet the corporations exploit the land, leaving scars on the earth in their quest for profit. Can technology truly save us from the destruction it has wrought? The elusive dream, a shimmering mirage in the desert of fossil fuels. The technology dances on the horizon, just out of reach, a promise of clean energy held hostage by corporate greed. The elusive Holy Grail, a shimmering mirage in the energy desert. Technology fragmented, potential unrealized. Can we harness the wind and sun before the oil barons suck the earth dry?
3D Printing: The Plasticine Playground, a child’s dream, an engineer’s folly. The promise of a maker revolution, limited by cost and complexity. Can we print a new world, or are we destined to drown in a sea of cheap trinkets? A plastic ouroboros, devouring itself in a cycle of endless creation. It promises democratized manufacturing, but delivers trinkets and toys, a future filled with mountains of discarded plastic dreams. The Flesh Fair, a macabre carnival of possibility. Organs printed to order, bespoke bodies sculpted from plasticine. Is this the dawn of a new era of transhumanism, or a descent into a narcissistic funhouse of self-replication?
Blockchain: The Invisible Labyrinth, a tangled web of encrypted transactions. The phantom currency, a ghost in the machine. The dream of a decentralized utopia, free from the control of banks and governments. But in the shadows lurk criminals, peddling darkness on the dark web. Is this the future of finance, or a haven for the lawless? Anarchic utopia or criminal playground? A technology ripe for both liberation and exploitation.
The Cut-Up Machine sputters and coughs, spewing forth this fragmented vision. Democratized access, a double-edged sword. Freedom and control, creation and consumption, all tangled in the wires of the digital age. Can we navigate this labyrinth, or are we destined to be devoured by the very tools that empower us?
This is the Interzone of Access, a cut-up of our digital landscape. Here, progress rubs shoulders with peril, and the line between freedom and control blurs into a hazy dream. We stand at a crossroads, a stark reminder of the choices we face in shaping the future of access.
Sagacity and the Internet
The internet. A sprawling sewer of narcissism and vapidity, yet somehow, inexplicably, a supposed wellspring of wisdom. One encounters these inane pronouncements, these banal opinions, disseminated by the intellectually barren with an arrogance that would be comical if it wasn’t so pathetic. Amplified by the sheer mass of this digital herd, these pronouncements attain a weight they intrinsically lack. A chorus of mediocrity, mistaking noise for profundity.
It’s a grotesque echo chamber where banality thrives on the validation of strangers. You spend your days surrounded by this cacophony of inane pronouncements, all masquerading as profound thought because a thousand other dullards have clicked “like.” A rising tide of vapid opinions lifts all boats, no matter how intellectually bankrupt their hulls.
The illusion of sagacity. The dunning-kruger effect writ large across the digital landscape. The most banal pronouncements of the office moron, once amplified by a thousand retweets and likes, somehow morph into pronouncements of a digital sage. A society of intellectually incurious apes flinging their digital feces at the digital wall, mistaking the splatter for art.
The human animal, with its desperate need for validation, clings to these digital echoes of sagacity like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood. We upvote and share, mistaking the transient warmth of simulated agreement for genuine connection. But it is a hollow victory, a pyrrhic validation won in a landscape devoid of meaning.
The irony, of course, is that the very technology that promises connection delivers only isolation. We sit bathed in the blue glow of our devices, surrounded by the spectres of others, yet utterly alone. And in this loneliness, we crave the illusion of belonging, the ersatz sense of community curated by the unseen puppeteers of the network.
The irony, of course, is the crushing loneliness that persists amidst this cacophony of simulated connection. Millions of voices, each utterly isolated, yearning for validation in the algorithmic echo chamber. Perhaps that’s the ultimate source of this illusion of sagacity – a desperate grasping for meaning in a world devoid of it. A collective sigh, disguised as a chorus of wisdom, emanating from the keyboard warriors in their darkened rooms. Pathetic. Simply pathetic.
The truly pathetic part? We, the consumers of this digital sewage, mistake the noise for brilliance. We become enraptured by the sheer volume of agreement, forgetting that a million flies buzzing around a pile of dung doesn’t make it a crown. The illusion of sagacity becomes a kind of social currency, traded on platforms designed to exploit our basest desires for validation.
It’s a bleak spectacle, this dance of the digital simpletons. We elevate the mediocre to the status of prophet, all because the network has deemed it so. But step outside the echo chamber, take a breath of fresh, un-algorithmically curated air. You might be surprised at the clarity that awaits.
The internet doesn’t judge; it validates. It creates a digital delusion where the vacuous preen and preen some more, convinced by the hollow clicks of empty approval that they are somehow perspicacious.
So we play our part, perpetuating the charade. We type our empty pronouncements into the void, hoping for a scrap of attention, a digital crumb to satiate our hunger for validation. But the cycle is endless, a Sisyphean push towards a meaning that forever recedes. We are left, then, to wallow in the lukewarm bath of our own mediocrity, surrounded by the flickering ghosts of a world that promises connection but delivers only a sterile simulation of meaning.
It’s a world of sentimentality and manufactured outrage, a playground for the emotionally incontinent. Real intelligence thrives in solitude, in the quiet contemplation away from the digital mob. But solitude is a harsh mistress, and far easier to drown the existential dread in the lukewarm bath of online approval. So we settle for the illusion of connection, the mirage of sagacity, all the while growing a little more hollow with every vapid interaction. The internet is a vast, flickering necropolis of wasted potential, a monument to the triumph of mediocrity over meaning.