Our artistic senses are oversaturated in this era of apps and streams that deliver electrical communication's specifying, blinding light. Electricity first gave humans a newfound ability to store and transmit information precisely, eternally and instantly. New thoughts and entropy were created at first, but today the ratio of consumption over generation continues to climb, compounded by individuals’ increasingly static psychology.
These forms of “light” emitted by modern electrical communication are inherently abstractions that do not fully capture the ideas they seem to represent. But where this light shines and specifies, we have cultivated a self-fulfilling, implicit belief that what we see and understand represents what is. In the long term, electronic systems preserve a culture’s ideas into static, unchanging forms, without the fluidity necessary to remix and imagine truly innovative concepts. The agreed-upon abstractions of language originally enabled us to efficiently communicate with each other, but in a similar dynamic to the phenomenon of “overfitting” ML models, today’s Internet-based information ecosystem gives historically prominent ideas an unprecedented static anchoring.
We can do a bit of archaeology through our history of communicative technologies and resulting ideological spaces, and take note of electricity’s effects. Its initial appearances were like torches in darkness: the electrical telegraph, telephone, ARPANET, and the early Internet. In the mid 2010s we began to perceive these information networks as structures of functioning knowledge in their own right, replete with its experts, agreements, and transgressors — one example being “_____ twitter”.
The effects of these communication systems are often critiqued with references to McLuhan’s quote “the medium is the message”. But this interpretation of McLuhan’s observation is itself an example of how certain static ideas have become amplified. McLuhan was originally referencing the unpredictably vibrant, ideologically explorative, resulting "milieu" arising from everything — including the components we identify as “technologies” — within its fabric. But bloggers often interpret "medium" as referring to the technologies themselves, and this idea has taken hold, indexed by Google. Now consumers have crystallized this concept, and we are all caught in a deadlock of believing these “mediums” indeed define us. Then follows the analysis of “offline” and “online” interaction in such “mediums,” and those concepts have gained their own staying power, in a sense dooming the “online” venue from the start to take on positive aspects assigned to “offline”. These discussions are nice in spirit — why have we put ourselves in this box? Our instinct detect something is suboptimal. But many of us cannot help but think within the existing solidified frameworks that were bound to occur due to these technologies’ electrical nature.
Another case of specifying, solidifying technology is blockchain. Blockchain technology is the paragon of a (theoretically) all-illuminating, seeing, and specifying system. Imagine the case where blockchain mechanics are as widespread and fundamental for human behavior as semiconductors are for consumer electronics. Its petrifying “light” and specifications surely would not capture the full complexity of our culture. Yet the ongoing trend advocates that this is possible, despite tales of rebels against rules and systems being as old as human language. Abstraction sieves what it means to be human — diverse, multifaceted, renewing — into a collapsed, self-propagating Ultimate Mediocrity. Similarly, our nation’s vanguard of coastal knowledge workers have gone from hopeful dreams for revolutionizing human nature to prospecting over shitcoins.
McLuhan also observed that humans can be the sex organs of machines. Our crystallized models of thinking are the interface with these machines. Those adept at working with these electrical systems are likely to further think in a language bounded by the reality of those systems. For an increasing proportion of the technological elite, “nonfiction” reigns while our imaginative neurons are underdeveloped. We rarely flex our generative muscles. We leak our rarest resource, agency of imagination, into the growing black hole of collective psychology. In the long run, the collective — and not the individual — benefits from electrical systems’ staying power. Specificity accrues endlessly as a feedback loop for self-propagation, its light specifying and locking in what the next generation understands as ground truth. Each generation’s activities will be the latest chapter in a long story of whether we are reproducing more humans or more machines.
But as long as risk, art, and ambiguity exists, we have a path to keeping the future vibrantly flexible.
Where high-bandwidth electrical systems still has yet to encapsulate a scene, we see art, intrigue, and excitement. The variations in global culture evades comprehensive electric translation, the darkness of parties hides from full light, and the greatest books still wreak havoc in online forums by defying conclusive analysis and agreement. Some phenomena, such as sexuality, psychology, and work, are experiencing increasing specification and labelling: sexuality, psychology. The online atmospheres defining each can be characterized by disgust or confusion upon encountering individual humanity and artistic visions.
This album of essays came into form while considering counterexamples and counterirritants to these changes. Ideas in these 8 essays identify and suggest alternatives to how our behaviors and self-agency appear to interact with growing environmental conditions. In service of this, they were developed together as a longer-form album, disconnected from electric systems of communication, “social media”, and modern incentives. Just long sessions of human thoughts (albeit messy, I’m no writer) being bundled as an artifact. The ideas were taken from my notes organically accumulated over the past year of living, without initial intentions of writing essays. I hope they stand for the abilities of human agency and the beauty of entropy, where electric light still hasn’t blinded us.