disgusting fucking website. appalling feed. everything i try to write in a voice suited for it feels horrible. it was nice to have a little audience but jesus, i just don’t like it at all. i don’t know what i did to my algorithm or if feeds are just all nightmares now but i fucking hate it. i’m at a point where the wrongness feels so general and obvious. it’s all so fucking wrong. these platforms are vectors; they penetrate us with their mouths and bring us social and spiritual disease. i feel like my physiological responses to it are rawer, like there’s less skin between what people say and my insides. advertisements crawl up the screen of my phone like roaches. images lodge in my skull like insect eggs.
i suppose i did this to myself by subscribing to a couple of writers and a couple of critics of technology, but yesterday on the substack app i read an article on substack mockingly making the argument that william vollmann killed his sister and his daughter, then i read one about how any kind of passive attention (to podcasts, etc.) is an abdication of the responsibility of being human. last time i fell down this rabbit hole, i read a perfectly vibes-based argument about how adhd is fake. i could feel the attitude of the person behind this — not some careful critic of the diagnostic paradigm; not some lunatic right-wing antivaxxer. a smug fucking opinion-haver. someone who probably only talks like they’re talking at a party they think they’re a bit too classy for. look, motherfuckers, it’s your goddamn party. i suppose these are the cultural critics our culture deserves.
but has it ever been good? have the magazines ever been good? the journals? the websites? i don’t know. there’s been good stuff in there. there have been people using available forms to connect with other people. but the last few times i’ve gone to write a substack post, it’s wound up manifesting as a response to the media reaction to x or y game, or about the reaction to that reaction, and then i’m sort of trying to think through my reaction to those reactions (to reactions), and every time i step back and go, jesus christ, what the fuck am i talking about. what the fuck is any of this? all this stuff partakes of such a rotten material and libidinal economy. it all makes me feel like there’s a disease inside of me.
have always struggled on sort of phenomenological-philosophical grounds with the problem of argument as such — how does a person wind up wrong? what makes the truth as i perceive it more reliable than the truth as someone else perceives it? and i’ve found long winding ways to an answer or two at various points. but at this point it feels like everyone is so insane that it’s not really an active question anymore. whereof one cannot speak. i have two hands. a thing of beauty is a joy forever.
we are animals and animals need certain things and this is not it, no way lol