Apocalypse August 2023
Countermand
Mushroom men, file together into the antique darkness. We have to see the vomit though, no just saliva. Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin dead in plane crash. Who does he work for? What do they look like? Who would play them? Did you sell this show or were you cast in it? But here’s the thing. Really fearsome animations. Indigenous peoples grifting for the ignorant colonists, sharing folklore, made up dances, selling crafted trinkets. There’s always invention wherever researchers ask for tradition. It’s a little story in a much grander narrative. Deep and philosophical. Unapologetically weird. The historical sensation — subjective and implausible connection between long-deceased source and reader today. You know, we’re scientifically rolling in the dice out here. Shh! You’re about to blow the whole gaff.
Get too online, eventually you undo yourself. Showing too much, ripped from side to side. People being sarcastic speaking almost exclusively in clichés, like woke up and chose violence. People earnestly over-explaining matters of fact in cringey walls of TLDR. People snitching on others they know or things they’ve seen IRL, attention vultures one could call it. All annoying, overly online, pseudo-urgent meta-discourse. Digital assault on deep reading, the thoughts it prompts, all the peripheral contemplation that reinforces comprehension. Put your phone away and pick up a book or a cup of tea. Open the curtains. But it’s not like before we had these distractions, everybody was living lives of betterment and intellectual nourishment. Rags to riches didn’t really happen, but space for aspiration within, rigid, but not stagnant. Dives, the rich man, knows and has always known how to pass off his interests as the interests of Lazarus, the beggar. Noble vs. Obscure. Then we’re back to haves and have-nots. Have what? Property. Capital. Pity and charity, poverty and faith.
It just is this way No! Not good enough! Right to buy to let council houses, working-class landlords. Some voters and loudmouths stay home, others turn out in their places, so there never feels like hypocrisy outright. It is horrible because it is based on competitive struggle. Man has founded all his calculations upon a mathematical system fundamentally false. His sums work out right for his own purposes, because he has crammed and constrained his planet into accepting his premises. Judged by other laws, though the answers would remain correct, the premises would appear merely crazy; ingenious enough, but crazy (1). So pious. Reacting to a market and a moment of paranoia and mental illness, but also contributing to and producing same in putting out your thing. In a given moment, these are who felt impelled to create, material with this energy. Sponsored ads but profound discussions. Not exactly a barrel of laughs.
The worst thing about Elon Musk is he’s a massive whopper. He knows it, we all know it. His internal mental torture is high. It’s a tragedy for all of us, himself included. I think we call that a dunk. Un vrai monsieur. He is what he is, no airs and graces. Fuck that for a laugh. He scanned the menu into GPT instead of thinking. It may be generative but it can’t actually create. Ordering, building things, that eventually get swept away. Human work against the current of entropy? At some point all these old farts are gonna croak. A software update is required. A very narrow, shallow presentation of all the richness and depth of human culture, that’s what grates. The trash of it, is what makes you sad. The thing of needing to slap a homogenous vocal on the top or people dismiss it instantly. Idiots, right. Overly note-run loop-the-loopy complicated vocal melody for the chorus, to make it an original hook? When the sound is so saturated?
Adventure horn — very patriotic, very exploratory, very battle-oriented. But perfect play results in a draw. On a crisp winter’s evening in Australia. It’s hit or miss, you know? Previously they’ve been unflappable, they’ve been flapped. The king wasn’t there, World Cup Willie isn’t present. A kind of periphery view and a sidelong view of what’s going on. It’s hot in Dammam and, right now, a little bit too hot for football. 35 degrees and humid, camera crews on a short loan from Premier League Productions. To be provident, faithful. Citizen, denizen. Travelling is, to some extent, participating in the destruction of the beauty. There are things we have to change and … I’m facing the challenges, accepting them. Romantic players consider winning to be secondary to winning with style. Increasing one’s advantage by causing the opponent, who has one weakness, to have a second weakness. Even if both weaknesses are minor, the fact of having two, in practice, becomes a major weakness.
Casing point. Over achiever. Dreamer or artist? It’s like fucking Dark Souls whenever I go outside. Filthy lucre, venomous soliloquy. Rainbow-clad monk worshipping at the side of the road in a bus shelter. You just want a clear steady purpose. Talented, hardworking, mental in all the right ways. How do you be at the right place at the right time? Pure chance. Okay? Good luck. Life is so precious, and so many people essentially sell it off. Build buildings that are only supposed to be standing for ten years, left open still after twenty and you can see it’s physically crumbling apart at the seams. Waters contaminated, place is held up by scaffolding. All these tiles, all that wood, all those girders. No, I think it doesn’t translate. The idea that society’s getting more progressive or more socially liberal, or more sustainable, yeah obviously it’s bollocks now but time was not too long ago we had assumed that was natural, logical, reality. Waiting mode. Frustration tolerance. Gigantic steps backwards on abortion rights and same-sex parenthood, in Chile, in Italy. The fear of being labelled feminist is real. Monster transmogrifying, pre-internet notions reapplied in the digital space. Infrastructure of global persuasion if not manipulation, a system that wasn’t really on our side. Fundamentally it’s a question of autonomy — to want what we want to want.
Most jobs continue to require people to fill them. Otherwise, the machines would appear to be running the show, which is a dangerous look in a world where people still count. We’ll be defined by needing to be more human, not reduced to quantitative task completion. Often the price of job security is drudgery or repetition. Doing the same job for many years can be boring. Trying to picture the arc of a working life is almost impossible when the rate of change is so rapid (2). Where is the platform for a positive future in this era? It doesn’t exist. If anything important happens to you, you don’t have enough time to process it before work the next morning. You can’t see yourself. You’re trying to fit yourself into the shapes you see around you, while other people are looking at the actual you. Relinquishing self-will, being freed from the prison of trying to control everything. Close off attention from loud distraction takes double the attention effort. My life has barely begun, mate. I’m excited. Bear with me. I’ve got an idea. It’s quite sexy. I’m filtering it through myself.
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(1) Vita Sackville-West
(2) David Runciman
