"When I talk to you, I want to talk to you as a person in the same world—not as someone breaking the fourth wall. Because life is not play—and reasoning that assumes that it is, is madness to me."
Is crazy prescient, and hits the nail on the head. Here you are a publisher, but I know you'll read my comment, probably "Like" it, and might even respond, as you've responded to others. It's happened to me with Katherine Dee, it's happened to me with Michael Malice, it's happened to me with board game publisher/designers. It's jarring and *does* feel like 4th wall breaking, but it shouldn't, and now you've summed it up for me. Part of it is that actually, the landscape of the platforms to communicate are indeed, simultaneously set up to appear as though a stage vs. audience, and yet also an intended method of connecting audience with author/performer/creator etc. But the extra level you threw on it was that observation that even the devices are constructed as the theater within a theater, all these levels of abstraction you never consider, until suddenly something has broken through the layers, like the artist personally telling you "Thank you for comment and appreciation! Also here's more of what I think to directly respond to your thought."
This is a REALLY different human experience from say, driving a car. I always used that as my analogy, that 95% of people who *drive* cars don't actually know how they *work,* and the car is designed that way, for ease of use for the driver, by way of abstraction. I have no clue what a carburetor does, and I really don't care, because it's not necessary for me to get to work with the car. Computers are this same way, but in incredibly underappreciated fractal levels. Mind blown, dude.
My partner had a mild cannabis induced panic attack a few months ago. She couldn't wrap her head around how computers worked and it caused h3r to spiral. She kept repeating something along the lines of, "we went from writing on rocks to computers!! How?!! How do computers work I don't understand!!" It took a bit to calm her down, but she was seriously distraught for a few hours. Her and i constantly talk about her crippling TikTok addiction (time warping, Attentional lapses, neglect of responsibilities and goals, etc). Your piece really makes me think about what computers have done to the collective unconscious of the postmodern psyche
Very relatable; that sensation of being so out-of-touch with the material reality is what drove me to reiterate everything I knew about it and get back in touch with the ground of it in some way. Which, as a social being, also meant reaching the other direction to stay in touch with the collective unconscious of the post-modern psyche which knew nothing about this stuff. It's a weird stretch, trying to stay grounded in what's real from an engineering and coding standpoint, but also the high-level illusion of lies world which computer marketers have constructed the "easy to use" commodity computer world out of. Sounds like your partner is blessed to have you around, cheers to you both!
Nietzsche was already writing about the epistemic groundlessness of modern life and anticipating the crisis which would result from it in the 1880s, well before computers were broadly conceived of.
The notion that computers interject an un-parseable layer between rational human beings and rational reality, and that this is the source of our epistemic unease, is betrayed by the fact that until the Enlightenment physical reality was as un-parseable as a computer. No amount of studying could reveal to the average medieval person (peasant or nobleman) what caused thunder, for instance, or what thunder meant. On a more functional level, people had no idea what caused disease, and reasoned about it using the same sorts of unsubstantiated intuitions we currently use to navigate computerized spaces. The luxury of understanding the world around you given sufficient effort is a modern innovation.
I just don't buy the notion that computers are at the root of the problem, since the problem was recognized of before they existed and their purported mechanism of action manifested in other contexts.
I think the big difference is embodiment. You can get away with "not knowing" how thunder and lightning work because you can _feel_ thier impact, you can _feel_ the storm coming in the air, you can _feel_ the impact and the sonic boom of a nearby lightning strike and you _know_ damn well to find shelter. They didn't know how lightning works in scientific terms but they knew plenty well how it works in practical terms and were perfectly capable of governing their lives and actions accordingly in the moment. Where the lightning came from may have been a mystery but what you _do_ when it does was as obvious then as it is now. The black boxes of digital life are not the same at all, not only do they not give the same embodied feedback of real life, they're now almost ubiquitousy designed to give /false/ manipulative feedback to coerce you into acting against your own interests, primarily by sucking you in and trapping your attention when you should rightfully be repelled if you were experiencing the impact directly, like a lightning bolt, rather than through a hall of mirrors.
Obviously there has been precedent in eras past, the printing press, the television and 24 hour news, etc, etc, no one's saying there isn't, but just as obviously the digital age has strengthened, exaggerated, and built new layers on top of the technological and cultural innovations of it's predecessors.
I don't think you can get a felt sense for germ theory though. It's intuitively obvious that diseases propagate somehow, but the fact that the actual mechanism is tiny animals you can't see is extremely unintuitive. Disease being a fact of life, the struggle to avoid it in the face of extremely unclear feedback seems like it would directly parallel the experience attributed to computerization.
I'm confident that there were many problems people have faced throughout history– in eras where they were much more existentially confident than today– which wound have been completely impenetrable to the average person's problem-solving. The movement of ocean currents carrying fish and ships, how and why crops grow better or worse, how vermin propagate; and all the interpersonal enigmas– what causes war, how people fall in love, how to battle addiction, etc– which we still don't understand today. I think that the default state of human problem-solving involves fiddling with black boxes producing unclear outputs, and that the advent of modern rationality has made limited inroads towards alleviating it.
Frankly, the access to information facilitated by computers has probably helped the situation enormously, even if the computers themselves are obtuse. The number of times I Google to understand a problem I'm facing in the course of a week is sufficient to offset any confusion those computers cause in my life. I don't think that life's degree of understandability has much to do with people's distress about it.
It's not computers, it's electronic media—including the front-page of the telegraph press. All the world's news in text and wire-photo had been streaming into major cities twice a day for decades by the time he was writing. The groundlessness I'm describing is entirely media-created, a 20th century phenomenon of propaganda and public relations.
Nietzsche had it that it was a mimetic virus inherited from Plato which caused us to value truth for truth's sake. I can see how a McLuhan-esque substitution of medium in the place of said virus would achieve the same effect. Whether the desire for self-consistent rationality is inherent and obstructed by the ineffability of computers, or mimetic and doomed to be unsatisfying, the idea that the inability to slake this thirst would lead to existential dread is a logical conclusion.
Personally I'm not convinced that there IS a problem of existential uncertainty affecting the conduct of everyday life. Rather, I think that existential uncertainty is an intellectual tool people use to distance themselves from more local interpersonal problems which they CAN rationally comprehend, but choose to hide from because they fear the pain of changing themselves to face them.
I will say though that your notion of the computer as a black box is thought provoking, and it is motivating me to scrutinize my own behavior to determine whether I'm attributing to them uses or powers that they couldn't actually have.
The role analogy plays in perception and thought is central to McLuhan's criticism of most propositional, rationalist thought. He studied poetry, after all. Poetry doesn't rely on consistency—and that's well and good since Gödel exploded the attempt at formalizing logic. I completely agree about people distracting themselves from their own responsibilities by chasing down larger existential lines of thought. I'm guilty of navel-gazing myself.
So glad this post directed me to Less Mad. I'll pay when I can. I lived through my partner's psychosis. It's hard for me to imagine the way you went about working through your experience intellectually and it looks to be immensely useful for understanding our predicament. I'm so grateful you were in a place that you could do that work while in it. My first click over there was "Rituals of Change as Used on You". I have pretty shallow engagement w McLuhan but I do get the picture in kind of fuzzy. I graduated dartmouth in 2007 w lit theory friends so I come by it honest, but since went into always quite physically grounded work, especially since I moved back to KY-- farm, handyman biz, now yes organizing team and comms work, but also building a slaughterhouse. The idea of grounding the bulk of the current world a la "I am walking across the surface of this planet with you other humans amidst a tangle of metal and wires" by diving into 'the stack' and then to realize that the disjunctions in the stack are the source of the ungrounding that is postmodernism. This is genius. My kids are 13 and almost 15. There eyes are directed exactly where someone wants them and I do not have equal redirect power. The eye-directors are just so relentless and well resourced. Rituals of Change Used on Us. Planning to devote some of the precious hours to your blog for sure. I'd read you guest-posted here before but somehow didn't make it to LessMad. Anyway THANKS
The people I got on with best as I was socially rehabilitating myself in bars (haha) were those in the trades or or construction or day laborers. Having always been so online and cerebral, it was very helpful and, yes, grounding to get to see the world through their perspective—or even just the room we were in. By contrast, people who read the world of symbols and signs, manipulating figures all day on a screen or interpreting fashion and ornamentation or aesthetics or stories and myths are living in a different kind of world. I wanted to see the world of electronics as materially as construction workers saw the design and build of the rooms and buildings around us.
I'm very glad that you're getting so much out of my writing, it really means a lot to me!
that is very kind of you. I am having a thing where my debit card won't let me pay creators and keeps acting like its fraud at my tiny credit union bank. I was going to fix it to paypal. But I will take a free script too. This is really feeling amazing to me to find your blog as far as well just wildly relevant to my experience. Have been appreciating you Katherine Dee for a while, can't remember how I first found you but it always reminded me of cool college friends. I think you are about the same age as me (born in 84), where we sit on the horizon of the total internet world.
I only gave your essay a very quick read because it's very long and, well, time... I just want to say that I am writing on a similar topic. "A theater in a theater", "Russian dolls"--I call this "infinite mirroring." In the French world, it's Baudrillard who wrote about it for the first time. Of course, one can conceptualize the same phenomenon in many ways. You say "postmodernism is cyberspace." I call this "techno-progressivism" in which the political ideology of those known as "progressives" is intermingled with the belief in Technology as our Savior.
DUDE, that last bit,
"When I talk to you, I want to talk to you as a person in the same world—not as someone breaking the fourth wall. Because life is not play—and reasoning that assumes that it is, is madness to me."
Is crazy prescient, and hits the nail on the head. Here you are a publisher, but I know you'll read my comment, probably "Like" it, and might even respond, as you've responded to others. It's happened to me with Katherine Dee, it's happened to me with Michael Malice, it's happened to me with board game publisher/designers. It's jarring and *does* feel like 4th wall breaking, but it shouldn't, and now you've summed it up for me. Part of it is that actually, the landscape of the platforms to communicate are indeed, simultaneously set up to appear as though a stage vs. audience, and yet also an intended method of connecting audience with author/performer/creator etc. But the extra level you threw on it was that observation that even the devices are constructed as the theater within a theater, all these levels of abstraction you never consider, until suddenly something has broken through the layers, like the artist personally telling you "Thank you for comment and appreciation! Also here's more of what I think to directly respond to your thought."
This is a REALLY different human experience from say, driving a car. I always used that as my analogy, that 95% of people who *drive* cars don't actually know how they *work,* and the car is designed that way, for ease of use for the driver, by way of abstraction. I have no clue what a carburetor does, and I really don't care, because it's not necessary for me to get to work with the car. Computers are this same way, but in incredibly underappreciated fractal levels. Mind blown, dude.
mind blown indeed
My partner had a mild cannabis induced panic attack a few months ago. She couldn't wrap her head around how computers worked and it caused h3r to spiral. She kept repeating something along the lines of, "we went from writing on rocks to computers!! How?!! How do computers work I don't understand!!" It took a bit to calm her down, but she was seriously distraught for a few hours. Her and i constantly talk about her crippling TikTok addiction (time warping, Attentional lapses, neglect of responsibilities and goals, etc). Your piece really makes me think about what computers have done to the collective unconscious of the postmodern psyche
Very relatable; that sensation of being so out-of-touch with the material reality is what drove me to reiterate everything I knew about it and get back in touch with the ground of it in some way. Which, as a social being, also meant reaching the other direction to stay in touch with the collective unconscious of the post-modern psyche which knew nothing about this stuff. It's a weird stretch, trying to stay grounded in what's real from an engineering and coding standpoint, but also the high-level illusion of lies world which computer marketers have constructed the "easy to use" commodity computer world out of. Sounds like your partner is blessed to have you around, cheers to you both!
Nietzsche was already writing about the epistemic groundlessness of modern life and anticipating the crisis which would result from it in the 1880s, well before computers were broadly conceived of.
The notion that computers interject an un-parseable layer between rational human beings and rational reality, and that this is the source of our epistemic unease, is betrayed by the fact that until the Enlightenment physical reality was as un-parseable as a computer. No amount of studying could reveal to the average medieval person (peasant or nobleman) what caused thunder, for instance, or what thunder meant. On a more functional level, people had no idea what caused disease, and reasoned about it using the same sorts of unsubstantiated intuitions we currently use to navigate computerized spaces. The luxury of understanding the world around you given sufficient effort is a modern innovation.
I just don't buy the notion that computers are at the root of the problem, since the problem was recognized of before they existed and their purported mechanism of action manifested in other contexts.
I think the big difference is embodiment. You can get away with "not knowing" how thunder and lightning work because you can _feel_ thier impact, you can _feel_ the storm coming in the air, you can _feel_ the impact and the sonic boom of a nearby lightning strike and you _know_ damn well to find shelter. They didn't know how lightning works in scientific terms but they knew plenty well how it works in practical terms and were perfectly capable of governing their lives and actions accordingly in the moment. Where the lightning came from may have been a mystery but what you _do_ when it does was as obvious then as it is now. The black boxes of digital life are not the same at all, not only do they not give the same embodied feedback of real life, they're now almost ubiquitousy designed to give /false/ manipulative feedback to coerce you into acting against your own interests, primarily by sucking you in and trapping your attention when you should rightfully be repelled if you were experiencing the impact directly, like a lightning bolt, rather than through a hall of mirrors.
Obviously there has been precedent in eras past, the printing press, the television and 24 hour news, etc, etc, no one's saying there isn't, but just as obviously the digital age has strengthened, exaggerated, and built new layers on top of the technological and cultural innovations of it's predecessors.
I don't think you can get a felt sense for germ theory though. It's intuitively obvious that diseases propagate somehow, but the fact that the actual mechanism is tiny animals you can't see is extremely unintuitive. Disease being a fact of life, the struggle to avoid it in the face of extremely unclear feedback seems like it would directly parallel the experience attributed to computerization.
I'm confident that there were many problems people have faced throughout history– in eras where they were much more existentially confident than today– which wound have been completely impenetrable to the average person's problem-solving. The movement of ocean currents carrying fish and ships, how and why crops grow better or worse, how vermin propagate; and all the interpersonal enigmas– what causes war, how people fall in love, how to battle addiction, etc– which we still don't understand today. I think that the default state of human problem-solving involves fiddling with black boxes producing unclear outputs, and that the advent of modern rationality has made limited inroads towards alleviating it.
Frankly, the access to information facilitated by computers has probably helped the situation enormously, even if the computers themselves are obtuse. The number of times I Google to understand a problem I'm facing in the course of a week is sufficient to offset any confusion those computers cause in my life. I don't think that life's degree of understandability has much to do with people's distress about it.
It's not computers, it's electronic media—including the front-page of the telegraph press. All the world's news in text and wire-photo had been streaming into major cities twice a day for decades by the time he was writing. The groundlessness I'm describing is entirely media-created, a 20th century phenomenon of propaganda and public relations.
Nietzsche had it that it was a mimetic virus inherited from Plato which caused us to value truth for truth's sake. I can see how a McLuhan-esque substitution of medium in the place of said virus would achieve the same effect. Whether the desire for self-consistent rationality is inherent and obstructed by the ineffability of computers, or mimetic and doomed to be unsatisfying, the idea that the inability to slake this thirst would lead to existential dread is a logical conclusion.
Personally I'm not convinced that there IS a problem of existential uncertainty affecting the conduct of everyday life. Rather, I think that existential uncertainty is an intellectual tool people use to distance themselves from more local interpersonal problems which they CAN rationally comprehend, but choose to hide from because they fear the pain of changing themselves to face them.
I will say though that your notion of the computer as a black box is thought provoking, and it is motivating me to scrutinize my own behavior to determine whether I'm attributing to them uses or powers that they couldn't actually have.
The role analogy plays in perception and thought is central to McLuhan's criticism of most propositional, rationalist thought. He studied poetry, after all. Poetry doesn't rely on consistency—and that's well and good since Gödel exploded the attempt at formalizing logic. I completely agree about people distracting themselves from their own responsibilities by chasing down larger existential lines of thought. I'm guilty of navel-gazing myself.
The first telegraph message was sent the year Nietzsche was born!
So glad this post directed me to Less Mad. I'll pay when I can. I lived through my partner's psychosis. It's hard for me to imagine the way you went about working through your experience intellectually and it looks to be immensely useful for understanding our predicament. I'm so grateful you were in a place that you could do that work while in it. My first click over there was "Rituals of Change as Used on You". I have pretty shallow engagement w McLuhan but I do get the picture in kind of fuzzy. I graduated dartmouth in 2007 w lit theory friends so I come by it honest, but since went into always quite physically grounded work, especially since I moved back to KY-- farm, handyman biz, now yes organizing team and comms work, but also building a slaughterhouse. The idea of grounding the bulk of the current world a la "I am walking across the surface of this planet with you other humans amidst a tangle of metal and wires" by diving into 'the stack' and then to realize that the disjunctions in the stack are the source of the ungrounding that is postmodernism. This is genius. My kids are 13 and almost 15. There eyes are directed exactly where someone wants them and I do not have equal redirect power. The eye-directors are just so relentless and well resourced. Rituals of Change Used on Us. Planning to devote some of the precious hours to your blog for sure. I'd read you guest-posted here before but somehow didn't make it to LessMad. Anyway THANKS
The people I got on with best as I was socially rehabilitating myself in bars (haha) were those in the trades or or construction or day laborers. Having always been so online and cerebral, it was very helpful and, yes, grounding to get to see the world through their perspective—or even just the room we were in. By contrast, people who read the world of symbols and signs, manipulating figures all day on a screen or interpreting fashion and ornamentation or aesthetics or stories and myths are living in a different kind of world. I wanted to see the world of electronics as materially as construction workers saw the design and build of the rooms and buildings around us.
I'm very glad that you're getting so much out of my writing, it really means a lot to me!
I’ll cover your subscription!
Clinton, comp her then send me a PayPal / Venmo request for the cost of a year :3
that is very kind of you. I am having a thing where my debit card won't let me pay creators and keeps acting like its fraud at my tiny credit union bank. I was going to fix it to paypal. But I will take a free script too. This is really feeling amazing to me to find your blog as far as well just wildly relevant to my experience. Have been appreciating you Katherine Dee for a while, can't remember how I first found you but it always reminded me of cool college friends. I think you are about the same age as me (born in 84), where we sit on the horizon of the total internet world.
Awesome piece!
I only gave your essay a very quick read because it's very long and, well, time... I just want to say that I am writing on a similar topic. "A theater in a theater", "Russian dolls"--I call this "infinite mirroring." In the French world, it's Baudrillard who wrote about it for the first time. Of course, one can conceptualize the same phenomenon in many ways. You say "postmodernism is cyberspace." I call this "techno-progressivism" in which the political ideology of those known as "progressives" is intermingled with the belief in Technology as our Savior.