I'M CONTENT

Sick shit.  The formlessness keeps eating everything; entire audiences sit on stage before a grand mirror these days.  And the mirror grows at the same rate as the audience and the stage, it grows like a tumor and I don’t think it will stop.  Immortality exists.  It comes in two flavors–there is the eternal cycle of birth, growth and death and there is cancer.  The first kind, the kind of immortality that includes individual death, permits form, distinctions.  Things are born and they grow and flourish and eventually decline and rot and their remains nourish the next generation.  Death is the prerequisite for any form.  Individually a person will die, but he was a person.  He could be seen and described and suffer and love.  The cycle is eternal.  Cancer is the other immortality.  Formlessness.  Entropy.  The audience on stage.  Telomeres are timers at the end of chromosomes, they shorten after each cell division and eventually run out and the cells stop dividing.  You die.  Death as the prerequisite for form, for you.  Cancer cells do not lose telomere length as they divide.  Cancer cells will divide forever.  Immortality.  The healthy cells become cancer.  Distinctions erode.  An organ becomes a tumor.  Sure, you can live forever–you will no longer be “you,” you will be subsumed in a mass that eats everything.  

Life imitates art because we force it to.  The “content” you “consume” is literally called your “feed.”  Cattle.  (Getting fattened up in preparation for what?  Wink, wink, bitch.)  Porn and Reddit alike, all a feed.  All content.  Everyone lives partially in this porn-space now, choosing what aspects of their identity to “show.”  Constructing themselves, their identities no longer a dialogue with the world, but a world of its own.  A dead, inert planet terraformed with the best memes.  All “statements” now timeless and therefore, paradoxically, forgotten sooner than ever.  Death as the prerequisite for form.  No more moments lost to time and remembered.  Why remember anything when it’s always a search away?  And if memory is your identity and now you don’t need to remember anything then what even are you?  Cancer cells keep dividing.  I’m content.

I get confused a lot these days.  I was confused the first time I saw the words “content creator” and it wasn’t a joke and I thought to myself “isn’t that anything?”  (Editor’s note, “anything” could also be “everything.”)  Everything on the screen becomes “content.”  All distinctions erode.  (Look mom, a camera!)  I’m kinda freaking out all the time and it freaks me out when people aren’t freaking out and most people I talk to aren’t freaking out so I’m freaking out all the time.  Chowing down on the feed.  I’m pretty sure I see where this is going and that’s why I’m freaking out all the time.  Really feels like we’re done.  Like people are done.  Cancer is all the rage.  Constructing yourself, remembering nothing, interacting with a mirror at all times, everyone constantly looking at themselves, an unprecedented type of formlessness, and for what?  That’s what freaks me out so much.  I’m obsessed with this question.  A tumor just grows I guess, there isn’t really a what because its immortality is predicated on the formlessness.  What are people going to do?  Well, for starters, I don’t think they’re going to be people anymore.  Content creators consuming content from their feed.  Programs programming you to be a consumption program.  Why do anything?  If your reality and your self are constructions unfettered by death, if they primarily exist in the timeless virtual space of the digital, then why would you do anything?  Why make anything?  And everything on the screen can be made to your specific tastes, rendered in real time.  We’re in a unique transitional period where people still have some memory of a time before the immanence of digital reality.  But what about in two generations?  Why would a person even have tastes at that point?  Their reality will be entirely digital, in the space of no-death, completely programmed by programs.  This is not an AI apocalyptic prediction, I don’t think artificial intelligence is necessary for this outcome, I think it’s been happening and it will continue to accelerate as people have less and less grasp of a non-digital world.  A person’s identity is a dialogue with the world.  As the world becomes increasingly digital, this dialogue becomes more of a monologue–digital reality is constructed, your “self” is constructed and you are fed content which also programs your behavior in a particular way.  And not only that, but the “content” needn’t actual “creators,” obviously this will be made by a computer program.

I’m just trying to find some light at the end of the tunnel.  Some way that some people can live well in this reality.  Maybe because this digital existence constitutes a world of its own, we can expect life to evolve in some way.  (I’m coping so hard right now.  I do think life will evolve in this space and I’m very pessimistic about it.  Fuck.)  The only minor hope I have is that small pockets of people will remain human.  I don’t think most will and in fact I think most already are not.  But that’s it.  That’s all I’ve got.  Some people remain connected to the dirt and maybe they can find each other.  A new premium on localism.

The audience is on stage.  I’m creating content says the 18 year old girl taking a picture of her asshole while her younger brother masturbates to an AI generated woman with an impossible figure visible from any angle in any pose at any distance.  The girl posts the picture and it is seen by no living person but she sees a number on the screen and it completely shapes her reality and she is programmed to post more videos inserting various objects into her orifices.  The boy has been inundated with digital sexual imagery since he was 7 and he will never do anything because the first step would be to stop jacking off but why would you do that, what are you a freak?  Let people enjoy things!

And here I go making content for your feed.  :)  A shout in the dark into the wall of a tunnel.  Laughing alone.  I’m content.