you lay the particles on the table like

shells recrystallized folio delicate

unafraid for love’s sake I catch the myopic dust

before it lands drifting close the pandemonium of

the…

Those who cannot self-regulate will seek intervention from the outside; destabilizing technologies indirectly produce mandates for state control, for the malignant growth of the state — for the evolving techno-state: this weird fusion of tech companies and the federal bureaucracy. Miserable, frightened, dis-regulated people will covet structure — any structure — that calms them down, makes them feel safe. Bezos owns The Washington Post for a reason; Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey just proved that the infrastructure they own can effectively censor the President of the United States. New forms of audio-visual technology breed new politics (newspaper, radio, TV between 1850–1990) — new power-hybrids. Human politics lurches towards algorithmic politics and away from forms of political self-determination. An automated society cannot be democratic — or a democratic republic. An automated society is primitive, atavistic, deeply irrational. Governments have learned that they don’t need to use (much) violence or physical force: it’s far easier to invisibly hack our nervous systems, use cognitive force to keep us under control. I don’t even mean this in a conspiratorial sense, in the sense that this is a Big Decision made by some Big Other: it’s just the net result of self-interest in the system; anyone with any amount of power naturally uses whatever means seem to increase that power. Political organisms seek staying power. We simply have built tools that decrease intellectual heterogeneity and increase conformity and homogeneity. We simply have built tools that reduce our interest in our five senses and over-stimulate our inner-sense: that hack our imaginations. Historically, comparatively — numerically — Covid-19 is not a transformative pandemic for instance, but it is the best pandemic movie ever made. The denser the Internet connection in a geographic region, the higher the level of fear — and, in sense, the more Covid there is. The supposed ‘coup’ attempt, similarly, by three hundred pathetic Q stans was not a real coup, a real revolution because it didn’t realistically threaten the federal political infrastructure — but it made for a great closing scene in the Orange Bad Man political thriller we’ve all been glued to for four years. Generally, the past year has been the first truly global VR experience; almost invisibly, a real break has occurred. It’s almost like we’ve entered a new Elizabethan age (the moment, perhaps, in which the modern state, with all its surveillance, paranoia, and centralization first burst onto the world stage) with China playing the role of the Spanish Armada. You could argue that the Shakespeare’s invention of the human was in fact an act of mourning for an older conception of the human — nostalgia for the highly individualistic, rough, and tragic aristocrat who must give way to a new kind of impersonal power. Shakespeare captures a certain loss of dignity, a certain loss of pungency, that many must have experienced in the transition from the feudal to the modern. Our moment is a fractal of that moment, a repetition of what is perhaps a basic pattern in the development of civilization. There is an ebb and flow between collective and individual, central and centrifugal. I can’t but think that Big Tech is in the position of Queen Elizabeth: a new political entity ready to consolidate its power. If the early modern killed off the autonomous aristocrat, the late modern or post modern might kill off the autonomous brain. Kant walked around Königsberg; Kierkegaard watched the first steam ships arrive in Port of Copenhagen; Nietzsche took a train around Europe; Derrida took a Concord jet around the world…. It seems hard to argue that even our best thoughts are conducted at the rate and rhythm of material change — that we are deeply responsive to the machinery and speed. My iPad pings, my phone pings; I refresh Twitter, open my Tinder, watch a few minutes of a basketball game in another corner of the screen. I’m a biological fern growing in a forest of digital machines — I myself am a hybrid… or I am a human and a hybrid — a kind of schizophrenic organism both old and terribly new. …

the unhidden indifference and

overt disconnection: a weightless state of ingratitudes and

absurdities

blue gravitational waves Thought’s vividness

is not real breathing material the circuitry

of grief is blistering but…

Habits seem to crowd our personality; automation displaces soul. Often, I’m afraid that I’ll lose the ability to forcefully communicate — that I’ll be reduced to a patois of Twitter jargon. The pointless misery of the last year only heightens the sense that the inward is withering and wingless. The snapshots I take of my own mind in operation reveal structural decay — a growing inner discord. How do we confront the terrible immanence of days that are all the same? of people that are increasingly the same — lumped themselves together in giant bands of digital affiliation? It is tempting to answer: through becoming a repetition ourselves (a repetition of ourselves) — through mirroring within the boringness of culture without. But I don’t want to give in, not exactly; I want to hack through the tangles of self back to the wellspring — back to the heart. Sometimes I do little mental drills to keep spiritually awake like astronaut in zero gravity who has to keep their muscles from atrophying. I try not to be too sincere with people who talk just like the Internet — instinctively shielding myself with irony. …

As a rule of thumb: the more homogeneity prevails over heterogeneity, the less interesting things are.

As a rule of thumb: moralism drives out beauty.

You cannot eliminate all precariousness without eliminating our animal instincts, capacities, pleasures. People enjoy taking risks — calculating and taking risks is part of being human and part of what makes being human interesting.

A lifeworld is a mesh. An apartment is not a lifeworld on its own; a Zoom account is not a lifeworld. Covid-era politics have severed the ties, the capillaries, that bind together our lifeworlds — make them vascular and robust.

Communities lose their resilience without constant, active interchange. Symbiosis is a rule of life. Left to ourselves, we lose those visible and invisible moments of overlap — symbiotic exchange — in which gifts of all kinds, at levels, are shared. …

A. and I listen to an old Italian movie soundtrack; her roommates are gone — so it feels right to crank up the hi-fi. I decide not to drink the fancy beer I impulse bought the other night when we had a little party here; for whatever reason, buying the beer was the important thing — not drinking it.

Many New Yorkers I know or observe: condemned to fatuous and compulsive self-satisfaction, trapped in glassy new condos, walled off from everything natural and intuitive and truly alive, going out only via Uber to do a quick, heavily-masked canvas of the Whole Foods snack aisle. Scared. Bored. …

The ‘new mutation’ story is so obviously hysteria, so context-free, as to be almost worthless information.

Beware the Corona-Industrial complex, which can’t let go. What incentive do politicians have to give up emergency powers? None. What incentive do politicians have to keep manufacturing emergencies? Everything.

Aesthetics had to be cleared away so that a new technocratic regime could be instituted. If people cared about the Beautiful, they wouldn’t put up with this crap — so the key is to convince them an ugly world is Good.

The horizon of moral value is too low. We must look beyond it.

We’re existential failures, we’re undergoing an ecological crisis of the spiritual sphere — because beauty has been destroyed, because tangible human connections have been severed, because our physical reality has been terribly impoverished. …