I absolutely understand you, if you read that sarcastically. The world is definitely burning right now, whether you measure it by Celsius or Kelvin, carbon emissions or racial tensions, obesity or starvation, depression or inequality, overpopulation or genocides, racial tensions or political polarization, digital nihilism or geopolitical Thucydidesness.
But look, in the third of a century I've been in existence, or 0.0000000023% of the existence of the universe (32/13.8 billion years), I experienced using the internet that cut off when your mom held up the phone, as well as speaking to a portable phone that transcribes my utterance into words, converts that into 0s and 1s, emanates them through electromagnetic waves, relays them across the world under the ocean, feeds them to some large language model, that speaks intelligible words back to me.
It's not just some digits pretending to be human over electromagnetic waves – that penetrate through my cells without doing anything (unless we learn that they do, like how cigarettes used to be harmless until they weren't).
I mean, yeah, we might all be dead by 30% of the existence of the universe (6/(13.8+6) billion years), but at this rate of exponential breakthroughs, we just might be on track to answer Asimov's Last Question, or at least buy us enough time to get close. And we're not even that stoked about it. Just mostly terrified by how it might kill a lot more people.
"How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?"
If you want to sum up what economics means, you could do so with the following statement: Individuals and societies are forced to make choices because most resources are scarce. Economics is the study of how individuals and societies choose to allocate scarce resources, why they choose to allocate them that way, and the consequences of those decisions.
– Khan Academy, AP Macroeconomics, Summary of Lesson 1
If there's no scarcity, there's no need to allocate anything. There's no need to fight for anything, or actually, do anything at all. By getting everything we ever need, we have nothing to die for, or inversely, nothing to live for.
res_1 when you tell your homies you're trying out allocation during times of plenitude
To be honest, if I had to guess, we'll use this superabundance to worsen inequality and fuck ourselves to the ground, way before we become some mettaspecies-being.
But man, we get to watch it actually happen, instead of reading some dystopian sci-fi novel about it.
What a fucking time to be alive to watch the world burn hotter than ever.
Let's fucking go, brothers and sisters and non-sibling-identifying spectrum-beings.
What will YOU do when there's literally nothing to die for or live for?
As for myself, if I didn't paint a Pollack on an abandoned wall with my brains from the unbearable misery of not making it to the ruling class, I might just be writing something like this email.
What will YOU be doing?
( ͡❛ ͜ʖ ͡❛)✌
– ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊ ⅋ yӭ𐦤⚇⍕⍑
random_sampling
some things from the whole thing; excerpts
Everything, forever
Permanence sounds tasty – at least in concept, whatever the sound of taste means – even though we, the mortals writing and reading this in our precious little time, cannot taste permanence, ever, thanks to fucking entropy. I mean, sure, we can at least do basic arithmetic with infinities, but we can't really actually wrap our heads around it at all, because we're very, very finite.
But we still yearn for it. Even if we cannot exist forever, at least to have everything remembered forever sounds so enticing.
We like old shit that feels permanent. Old buildings, old trees, old cassette tapes.
res_2 An old building, an old tree, and an old cassette tape walk into the bar
As if it proves that we can somehow leave a trace in the world, be remembered by everyone. Here's a nice quote:
"There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time."
But if you've ever walked into any building named after any human being, you know that you have no fucking idea who the fuck that guy was.
Maybe realizing how futile it is, some fuckers go the other way, trying to live in the moment, be in the present, and sometimes sadly claiming that every present moment is an infinity in and of itself. Some philosophers dedicate their careers to thinking about the nature of time and twist themselves into a fucking pretzel, just to end up as a formless unbaked dough claiming that every moment is an infinity.
But does that even make sense? We literally cannot understand or feel what that means. We're just making up words to fill some void we can't fill, and pretending as if the void has been filled.
Let me give you a concrete fucking example why permanence isn't only stupid, but also shitty. My email is out there, forever. According to the emails-for-sale found by haveibeenpwnd.com, my email has been pwnd multiple times into oblivion. And it doesn't matter, because no one wants my email, and my spam filter is good because Google is working hard to make our emails usable, just so it can read all our emails, just so it can give us better ads.
🚷
Don't even pretend as if Google is not using federated learning to read all your emails. And don't even think that your email or your ill-defined sense of privacy is even remotely relevant to anyone. NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOUR DEEPEST TRUTHS IN YOUR EMAILS. WE ONLY CARE AS LONG AS YOU'LL BE MORE LIKELY TO CLICKY THE AD.
Yesterday, some FUCKER decided to subscribe my email to 250+ newsletters. I thought it was an annoying prank, but upon searching, turns out this is what they do right before hacking your bank account or buying extra-large condoms or luxury condominiums in your name, just so you don't notice.
res_3 the (hot) newsletter summoner
So I had to spend a few hours changing all my emails and passwords and stuff, even though I have different passwords for each of them and have MFA on for all of it. FUCK PERMANENCE.
So let's stop pretending. We're all going to disappear, no one is going to remember us, there will be no trace left for any intelligent species that will travel to find our ruins, and the inanimate universe is literally incapable of giving a fuck about any of our precious moments of feeling love, crying tears, laughing together, or thinking deeply.
Let go.
res_4 it's all very real, isn't it?
Nothing, ever
Nihilism is sick, man. I mean, not in some cheesy punk sense, that allows you to tattoo antiestablishmentarianism on your forehead and smoke cigarettes and pretend not to care, just to hide your childhood trauma or capitalistic ineptitude to survive in the modern economy.
Nihilism is sick because it's true. There's no meaning to any of this. You just made it all up. And you're just trying to convince yourself and everyone else to believe some shit you made up, just so you don't lose your mind.
It's also cool that Nikhil, one of the most common names for Indian boys, means like the opposite thing as Nihil. But this also doesn't matter, because words and names and concepts are all just made up, so we can pretend to know and control and make sense of this senselessly meaningless existence.
We may think that forgetting is a failure, a defect of our brain.
But actually, it's an active brain process. The brain is literally WORKING VERY HARD to forget stuff.
“The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness or fear, will never know what happiness is.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
While we yearn for it, we cannot deal with permanence, or for that matter, truth. While we want to taste it, feel it, know it, we can't. So might as well just appreciate forgetting everything while we're here.
I lived with my grandmother for several years as she slowly lost her memory. For the last decade or so of her life, she didn't even know my name, let alone what she said a second ago.
We thought that was sad as fuck, but maybe that's just really who we really are, to the eyes of literally everything else but our little tribe of people, busy feeding each other semi-coherent stories and nodding at each other, to pretend as if it's all very, very real and very permanent. Maybe it is real. But it's definitely not permanent.
So might as well just keep telling stories and keep forgetting. That's probably the only semi-real thing we will do semi-permanently.
convolutional_kernels
adding a thing to a thing; remixes
Digital Permanence
Information is permanent on the internet now. We can't even really get rid of it. It just infinitely reproduces, and forever stays in the server house, some sad little hard drive somewhere in Central Europe, waiting to be pinged by a client, just so it could serve, just like any good server would.
Everything is permanent, even if there's no one looking at it.
TL;DR: we could be obscured enough for your future-partner or employer is lazy enough not to be able to dig for it, but we cannot be forgotten.
Or is it?
No, I don't fucking mean it in the "if the tree falls if no one was there to hear it did it make a sound" bullshit. Of course it did. You can go to the forest and see the fell tree and hear it clearly in your imagination. Or by looking up a YouTube video of a tree falling to justify all fell trees that weren't heard.
What I mean is, is it really fucking permanent, because data permanence is just a cute little atomic fiction in the eyes of the universe. Your cute little cloud hard-drives are just etches on a metal plate that gets written and re-written and read and re-read with electrons. And that metal plate slowly disintegrates.
And it disintegrates faster and faster, as we copy-pasta the same memes into all the message threads, hoard all the blurry photos and blurby messages, and duplicate the redundancies into the 'cloud' that's very much on earth, just in case we lose these precious things that we never look for. And we'll run out of metals to keep writing the same stupid shit over and over again.
So stop saving all those fucking photos that you'll never actually see, if it weren't for the algorithm you hate notifying 'Memories from 4 years ago...'.
I met a traveler from an antique land, Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
No one will remember, even including yourself. Especially if you're too busy snapping away in your perishable portable digital camera, desperate to remember, but delinquent in feeling – etching a stupid piece of metal, instead of your very consciousness.
pressure_censor
things that sense & get incensed by signals; shorts
propaganja_news
Local finance bro finds maximum speed on road bike, claims, "I couldn't have done it without this speed suit!"
Catholic Priest checks into mental hospital after reading Kama Sutra on acid
Jesus Christ it's Jason Bourne! CIA arrests Matt Damon in daring home assault
Area thrash metal drummer gets academic validation to please parents who never support his passions
quantized_quotes
"Why does Australia have refugees what's happening in Australia. Did that boomerang finally come back"
– Nick Mullen
"That [giant water bottle] looks like a new Starbucks size, inflation adjusted venti."
– ƴΐ⍧ի⍲e⌊
"If I made a list of all the people in my life who I wouldn't want to have a gun, it would be the same list as the list of people in my life who do have a gun."
If Chuck Palahniuk didn't pour his internal narratives into a literary narrative, he would have been considered a fucking threat to society. But a small one, since he's a pretty soft-spoken guy in a small frame. He captures the cute little masculine angst into words and condenses them into a point of angry explosion. Well, maybe he's become a bigger threat by writing it all down and stoking all of our angsty anger deep in our psyche in this psychopathic concrete world drowning in a digital information flood. Or maybe he captured it all into words, so we can just jerk off to it, instead of actually going out and blowing the world up, or our brains out. Meaning is all made up, happiness might be too, but anger sure as fuck isn't. No decent citizen can condone anger, but there's something real to be looked at in every anger.
prompts.bib
Header /imagine prompt: a confused, dejected man looking off into the distance over an oceanside cliff:: an ocean that represents time, beginning to end, the waters hold the secrets to the temporal cues of the universe:: a colorful ocean full of the world's secrets, swirling and whirling:: intricate ink drawing on paper::0.5 --c 4 --v 5.2
ex 1 – yay abundance /imagine prompt:a group of whacky, crazy faced caricatures of human beings roaring with laughter:: a group of anonymous beings laughing at the plight of humanity:: a group of happy hippies in a meditative circle calmly laughing it out:: chill vibes:: the homies:: females, a group of females:: --v 5.2
ex 2 – yay old shit /imagine prompt:<the entire response of the ChatGPT prompt - give me 10 prompts for an text to image model that will produce an old building, an old tree, and and old cassette tape walking into the bar, literally> [remix] a giant oversized cassette tape sitting at a bar [remix] a tree and a cassette tape sit at a bar
ex 3 – yay hot hacker /imagine prompt:a great battle between a mage and a large computer screen. The computer screen is shooting out emails, little bright envelopes, at the mage who stands bravely --v 5.2
ex 4 – yay nothingness /imagine prompt:two silhouettes meditating on tall columns, facing each other cross legged:: black and white threshold posterize:: --v 5.2
Contributors to Wikimedia projects
Glenn R. Wylie
