Apocalypse July 2023
One of the Greatest of All Time
Order from chaos, something from nothing. One pop kernel at a time for the algorithm, that is a kind of genius innovation. Logos — the word of God creating the universe. Sometimes to appreciate something good you have to be bored by it. Mundane off. Strength is calm, we lash out in positions of weakness. I see the present as just the present notch in the timeline of the historical. It is notable if the writer is still alive, but many people only read writers published in the present continuous. So-and-so is criminally underrated. But it’s someone in the public eye already, someone widely known and celebrated but what, not enough? You’re getting it all mixed up. Whatever you do, do it carefully.
Social my rights my rights, no responsibility, no conversation, no legislation. Doping. Not anymore, or is the science just ahead of the testing? Sanctimonious. Mainly funny to dudes. Information silos, that’s a you problem. I’m not just watching it with you, I’m showing it to you. The resolution of Netflix at peak time is a rip off. Generic cinema language. Digitally de-aged Harrison Ford. There are so many of these charismatic presenters, sincere, slightly cringey video essays. It’s a bit thesaurusy. Real mixed bag. Cheaper bookable approximations of recognisable voices on adverts. Dumbing down to appeal to some notional 19-year-old; the marketing tail was wagging the editorial dog. With an air of as-much-as-to-say, they all know that nobody cares for them; that’s why they talk so loud.
Dukkha also means grasping — stop trying in order to succeed. Experts recommend posting one to three times a day on social media to maximise engagement. Your feed is like a limb or an organ, an extension of your life. Hangs in the balance. Tightly packed homes but thanks to VR you could see it as whatever you want, maybe even invite a friend in to share your perspective, in your choice of virtual settings. If you’re both fantasising about suicide at the moment of contact then you both drop dead. Science trying to prove assumptions. Back in the day a certain probability of medical treatments with no actual effectiveness would seem to work anyway, and now is just a more refined form of the same principle of whacking a thing on there anyhow.
The Archbishop of York says that Our Father has patriarchal connotations, you don’t say? Sunday Carvery. Don’t be facetious. Just imagine the feeling of it — Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Saturday, Sunday. Fruit and nakedness. Wankpanzers and walking dogs. Windfall profits, corporate bonanza. Rental crisis. Government really has to get a grip, in theory. Show me the Left. Not the Overton window in any given moment, the full hypothetical spectrum. We invite you to explore the world’s seventh continent: Antarctica. Exploring the world in comfort. How about keep your cruise ship the fuck away and leave the penguins and the melting ice caps alone? Time is the only truly scarce commodity. Oh fuck off.
The world is falling apart, entropy all things moving to a state of disorder. All epochs felt this degradation of an ideal of past prosperity? Weak social bonds breed totalitarianism — a strongman arises, and there’s only one way to think. There has to be consent! Us before I, fixation on I paradoxically leads to loss of individuality. It colonises the insides of peoples’ minds, and they’re unable to argue and even experience their own experiences. Reduced to jobholders. Managing your own discomfort. All the answers are there, the work is being done, but the mainstream isn’t being pulled along, or essentially changed. Instead the change, the progress, is filtered out as agreed, established concepts move up and on through. Promise and forgiveness. Thoughtless absence of goodness, radical thoughtlessness. Nostalgia. Organised lying. Yeasty darkness, sticky surface. No roots. By the end of the 21st century, will it be characterised by transition to future or digging in resistance, holding to 20th century norms?
Bombed to fuck Odessa. The work asks questions of the medium itself. Massive fire suppression, militates for, network effects. Yesterday’s giants tower over all. This is too dodgy for our citizens. The EU has declared war on British sovereignty. Squeezing cash out of rocks. Poppy lottery, what a great British thing to do. It’s this illusion of, I’m walking towards something and at the end will be happiness. Future stores automatically scan your things and charge them from your account so you don’t even have to go through the motion of buying them. Why are we still holding this model up when it’s chips in the spine? First pass assembly. Solanum 57 and french fried solanum. Rather than wide expression of individual cost, a linear, transparent hierarchy of cost. Buy famous artists’ back catalogues, spending billions on something that isn’t making money now. See from streaming data that Bowie, Springsteen, Young, Dylan, JT, Bieber, Abba etc. remain steadily popular, so in a few years create artificial scarcity, make access to this work rare and expensive to keep value high in perpetuity. Why else are the biggest vulture fund in the world spending billions on owning 100% music as an asset that they view as gold? We’re still gonna want it (1).
Kids sing to themselves out loud in public, adults don’t do that. Why not? Adults, they have to be stern. Why? I’m a bit resistant to being too much influenced by voices and options that are dominant, and slipping into the safe, mediocre middle ground. I’ll level with you, I have a very short shrift left for middle class, middle of the road, safe content, you can barely even call it art for the amount of new ideas it’s putting forward. You know? You know. I like to exist in that state of process or possibility, or even stuckness or despair (2). Attention is the soul — not too cruel, not too kind. Stolen from you, moment by moment. Longing after reality. What does it mean to ask us to pay attention to you? Man felt the need to overtake his competition. Torn apart or duct taped or burned, or propping up a bookcase. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. But it’s not just about control but also organisation, requisite structure to do good things en masse. But an overdose of organisation is Byzantine bureaucratic stalemate, jammed up cogs, while it also puts a brake on unofficial or unsanctioned organisation, often by oppressive and violent force. Oh indeed, public extravagance indeed.
Restore humanity to the process, in person. Open up the licensing. Simple as. Let people do business around the clock if they wish, as they wish. Why is that not the default already? Don’t we like freedom? What is this puritanical thing of living only during the daylight hours. And work! And sleep! All of us together, the same, doing the same thing. Zero cultural impact. Bristling, slight feeling of doom. Fuck all that nonsense. Zero waste whatever. Oh, I always thought 4D chess meant super intelligent and complex. It’s just breaking the rules, trampling roughshod over any terms of agreement prior hand shaken upon. This hysteria around maximising everything, I don’t know that everything always has to be optimised. Do what makes you happy… Do what makes you money… Sometimes you’ve just got to feel alive, haven’t you? Sometimes you’ve got to throw caution to the wind.
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(1) Blindboy
(2) Patricia Lockwood
