Our artistic senses are saturated in this era of electrical communication's specifying, blinding light. Electricity first gave humans a newfound ability to store and transmit information precisely, eternally and instantly. An unprecedented increase is coming in the ratio of specific consumption over generation, multiplied by individuals’ static psychology.
The “light” cast by modern electrical communication does not fully illuminate parts of an idea. Unfortunately, we have in effect cultivated a self-fulfilling, implicit belief that it does. In the long term, electronically-stored ideas are effective at successively sieving a culture’s ideas into various buckets until its remaining fluidity to imagine truly innovative concepts are like dry, depleted topsoil hardening in the sun. 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 of torches in darkness: the electrical telegraph, telephone, ARPANET, and the early Internet. In the mid 2010s we began to perceive these information networks as pools of functioning knowledge in their own right, replete with its experts and transgressors. Simple example being “_____ twitter”
As an aside, the shift in the Internet’s interpretation of McLuhan’s work is a meta-example of how electrical ideas has gained in “static-ness”. Take the word "medium" in Internet bloggers’ favorite quote of his “the medium is the message.” In his own words, he was referencing the unpredictably vibrant, ideologically explorative, resulting "milieu" arising from everything, including the components we identify as “technologies,” within its fabric. Today, tech bloggers often interpret "medium" as referring to the technologies themselves. What often follows is the sieved categories of “offline” and “online” interaction, and these centerpiece ideological filters have themselves increased in staying power. They are great discussions in spirit — why are we in this electrical box in the first place? Our guts clearly detect something is wrong, but in this medium many of us cannot help but think within the framework of the already-applied sieve.
Another ongoing example is the dogpile onto the virtues of blockchain, even among self-labelled technologists. Blockchain technology is the paragon of an theoretically sound, all-illuminating dawn. Yet at its root it is a roundabout technology that makes it strictly more difficult and expensive for humans to coordinate. The coastal knowledge worker vanguard sings praises about an incoming revolution for human nature, and in private rooms share a laugh about so and so who was early on this or that coin.
Imagine the case where blockchain mechanics are as foundational to human coordination as semiconductors are for consumer electronics. Its petrifying light of abstracted numbers and values will wash over what we (self-fulfillingly) believe captures the full complexity of our culture. Will everything be ratcheted to financial derivatives? The effect of encoded strictness isn’t something we’re unaware of — tales of rebels against speech and behavior codes are as old as human language. Abstraction sieves what it means to be human — diverse — into a collapsed, self-propagating Ultimate Mediocrity.
McLuhan further observed that humans are becoming the sex organs of machines. The truth includes that, and our models of thinking are becoming machines as well. Those adept at working with these electrical systems are, by definition in our specialized society, 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. The collective in particular has happened upon electric eternality to great effect. Specificity accrues endlessly as a feedback loop for self-propagation, its light specifying and locking in what we understand as ground truth.
But as long as risk, art, and ambiguity exists, we have a path to keeping the future vibrantly flexible.
Where high-bandwidth communication still has yet to envelop, we see art, intrigue, and excitement. Varying global culture still holds off electric translation, the darkness of parties holds off the electric light, still-respected books still hold off electric analysis. Some artifacts are under imminent specification and labelling, marked via growing debate: sexuality, modern art imploding with self-awareness of its own mediums, and individual self-agency of mind and destiny. Their incoming new connective atmospheres are characterized by increasing inhospitality towards our individual humanity and artistic visions.
This album of essays was created to exist as a counterexample and perform as a counterirritant. Ideas in these 8 essays identify and suggest alternatives to how our behaviors and self-agency appear to interact with growing cultural conditions. In service of this, they were developed together as an album; my intention with this was for a release with minimal external feedback and inviting stronger interpretation of a vision sketched with depth. As for the process, the ideas were taken from my notes organically accumulated over the past year of living — without any intention of writing. These ideas are what emerged organically throughout. Then the essays themselves were prepared in six stream-of-consciousness sessions to preserve the ideas' roots in real experiences.