#190 Fri (12/30/22) - [OW] - endless texts and vampiric medias - Taming the Stimulacrum

 I didn't use to watch reels or go to Insta first thing in the morning, although I did sometimes check FB.  Now it is an everyday thing and multiple times a day, of just skimming through "tiktok" reels on IG and FB. (They are much worse of FB.)

Starting and ending my day this way is unhealthy and even though there are many interesting or cute things, there are also too many stupid, pointless and random things.  Consuming random short form content destroys my ability to form and follow coherent thoughts.  IG and FB are just designed to fragment and incrementalize your day so that you have no drive, direction or confidence.  You feel perpetually lost in an endless scroll of stupidity and vacuity. (If something profound or meaningful intrudes, it is decontextualized and appears only for one reason, to get likes, views and retweets.  Even if it is from the Dalia Lama.

Following that my morning routine includes checking CNN for the daily outrage and horrible atrocity and then over to YT to scroll through more endless, random, decontextualized BS.  So I watch some movie reviews and trailers, breakdowns of series, then switch to more random stuff, like philosophy or history, or video game playthroughs. Then more obsessive scrolling. The question is WHY? What am I looking for?  Well obviously I am looking for some sort of answer, something that holistically puts things together and makes the endless, turbulent, oceanic mass of media make some kind of short hand sense.  But there is also the hope that I will just find nice, intelligent people that are a joy to be around, who are always producing insightful, reassuring, uplifting content. I would say to find a community, but that is just not really true.  Being in a community in IG or YT just means consuming one person's media and then reading the comments to find that many people think what you think, so you are all "together" on it. 

Sometimes I watch a popular show and then go devour as many YT takes on it as I can find, to see if others liked it as much as I did or alternatively to see if others hated it.  Why?  Social calibration.  Taste moderating? Not sure.

Some takeaways - consume only original content. Meaning go read good books or watch interesting films. Think about them. Maybe write down your thoughts. Once you have thought about them yourself you can search to see what other films this director has down or what other books this author wrote.  Later, much later perhaps, check and see if there are some good essays (not reviews, not explainers) about it that address the themes or topics that appear. Integrate your thoughts about this film or novel into a broader understanding of novels and films from this period, etc. Then start correlating these thoughts with other thoughts, not on the film or book, but on the themes found in the work.  Tie them to other films or books that address the same topics in similar (or dissimilar) ways.

I lack confidence and I lack a voice.  I listen to other people for far too long.  Most people on YT etc are shallow, some are not. But I guess I am hoping to find someone who exactly articulates my view or feelings about a media.  It is weird that we refer to this stuff by vague generic collective terms - media, content, branded corporate platform-name, tweets, tiktoks, posts, etc.  Why do we call them this - because there is no them?  There is nothing, no catagorization that can encapsulate all the different types of human speech or audio-visual action that can be posted to these platforms. Media is a short-hand of saying multi-media presentation. A multimedia presentation includes text, audio, video (live action, cgi, animated, etc), music, performance, etc.  Just far too much to fit under one umbrella. Tweets and mostly, usually just text, but can also be image, video.  Same with IG, mostly photograph, but also text and video. FB can be text, audio/video or still image, but also often links to other pages that also include these things, mostly text, or mostly video or image. What is it called that we see with our eyes and hear with our ears? Inputs? Stimuli? 

If I am watching a 15 minute replay of a mod of Total War called the Zulu mod that re-enacts a fictitious battle in the Zulu War of 1879, with redcoats and Zulus, I am not listening to a concerto by Stravinski, nor am I reading an essay by Calvino or a short story by MR James. Reading a wikipedia page about orbital dynamics and the configuration of the Artemis moon mission of 2022 prevents me from reading a Robert Aickman story or a Cordwainer Smith story. 

Each one of these things becomes a thing I am exposed to briefly, whether I read it or watch it, it is momentary and then it is gone.  I may recall it some time in the future or perhaps not.  Some things that we enjoy reading or watching stick with us, some are forgotten. (What if somehow you could only be exposed to media that you would like.  If everything that popped up in your feed was tailor made to excite ro satisfy or reward you in some way.  Every interest or affinity or vague, unstated desire was governing what showed up next in your feed.  Would this be heaven or a nightmare?  What would it actually look like - being comatose, staring slack-jawed at something as dopamine spikes in your brain over and over. (In fact I am using the dopamine language because I just watched a video this morning about lack of motivation and how we have allowed ourselves to be narcotized by constant dopamine 'instant gratifications.').

For sevel months this past summer, I woke up and looked at one specific FB group, the Borges discussion forums (there were three then, now two). I used it as a randomizer to present me with a large number of snippets or textual extracts from Borges, but most of the posts were in Spanish, not English.  Yes, FB would provide a translation, but often the translations were not perfect and especially bad with titles.  So I would need to take a few minutes and try to identify the text, then which collection it was from, then which story (they were often unattributed except to George Louis Burgos).  In doing so, I would learn something about the Spanish language (Sombra means shadow) and also something more about which texts were originally found in which collections, who translated them, when were they published in English, how different translators rendered the same passages... All of this activated me and in the process of finding these things out, I would also be impelled to reread the poem to get the context and the flavor and the feeling again.  But also because his work ins referentially dense and cross-referential reading anything by him, suggests immediately reading something else.  One story about memory or time, or complexity may suggest another.  One poem about Hecalitus or a mention of Virgil or Bernard Shaw suggest a=or implies another.  There is the possibility of creating one's own feed, a scrolling loop through intelligent works of a respected master.  Reading more suggests other similar or parallel texts, by Calvino, or Eco, or Kafka, or Cervantes, or Coleridge, or Sir Thomas Browne, or GK Chesterton, or the 1001 Nights. I was actively curating my own stimulacrum (William Gibson called is 'simstim' but was focused more on the simulated nature of the stimuli.) 

Borges talks about the infinite a lot and also about infinite media - the library of Babel for example containing all possible books. The Encyclopedia of Tlön is rewriting all of human history, culture and knowledge into an alien form.  The Labyrinth of Ts'ui Pên (and the writings of Herbert Quain and Jaromir Hladek) contain texts that cover all possibilities. The Book of Sand has infinite pages that are infinitely thin. The Aleph is a small object that contains all other things in the Universe inside it.

All of these conjectural artifacts reproduce the concept of the internet, with its infinitely branching paths and its combinatorial explosions, its proximal and apocrypthal encyclopedias, it's recursive and recombinant feedback loops, as brought to us by our own personal Aleph that brings you a view of anywhere to the palm of your hand. 

I tried to play the glass bead game with an AI chatbot, but it was especially poor at making connections.  It was good at coming up with the most probable and likely descriptor, but it continually resorted to just describing what I siad in other terms or in more vague generalizations.  It does not like to get specific and prefers catagories to instances.

Despite AI being a connectionist device, finding the non-trivial connections between the flotsom and jetsam in the stream remains a distinctly human skill. Perhaps it is meshed within our pareidolia, (I needed a spelling assist from Google on that one) our need and urge to see patterns, even where there may not be any.