A Very Tortured Understanding

// 01 INTRO
Please understand: I don’t understand you. It doesn’t matter who you are, or how well you articulate your thoughts. It doesn’t matter how much it touches me. I can never understand you, in a way that matters. Therefore, I do not care who I am talking to. I am surrounded by talking machines, like the avant-gardists with their apparatuses, trying to distill life into a movement. They played around, got bored, and were crushed by the state.
Please understand: nothing in this world is connected to anything, 1 never equals 1, no experience is like any other, we’re fundamentally unable to relate to anyone or anything, in this world. Paging Nostalghia 1983, 1 + 1 = 1, except thinking of ourselves as numbers is a crime in and of itself. This is the a prison of language. A travesty of communication, to force us to abstract ourselves into words and “meanings” created by others, strip ourselves down to the lowest common denominator. What is the point of art? I don’t believe art can have any meaningful political effect, not in the world we live in, not in the world of capital extraction, extraction – abstraction (all talk!), no, the point of art is to connect. A true symbol of god, if it exists, is a line connecting A to B. The less straight, the more tangled and inverted the line is, while still connecting A to B, the greater the miracle. Now imagine: You drew the line. The line connected. “Now what?”, says A, says B. You both disconnect the line. You wander off by yourselves.
Now, you’ve just talked to a human.
Now, retreat. Surround yoursel with talking machines. Some are people, others are people, but dead, some are not people at all. Get their names. Get what you want. See if you can feel a difference.

// 02 IMAGES
Paging Happy Together 1997. One gets the waterfall, the other a plastic imitation. We see the story from both sides. In reality, it wouldn’t be like that. There’d be no real story, here. We’d get one or the other. We’d wonder, we’d reconstruct. We would be incomplete forever.
I walk out of the movie theater. Each of us walks out alone. We just shared a common experience, saw the same thing, isolated, together, we could talk about it, we could exchange something, surely we were all there for a reason. I’m told us looking at the same thing and not seeing the same thing, seeing something else, is beautiful, is what makes us human. I think I’ve had enough of that; I want you to see the same thing I’m seeing.
We follow each other to the train station. We hear the other’s steps, we even hear their breathing. We don’t exchange a word.
I don’t know what’s worse, that we’re all seeing things differently, or that we’re all seeing the same thing, exactly the same thing, and that still doesn’t bring us any closer. It is impossible for me to tell you what to see. Best I can do is provide you with a machine, a random number, a word that is untethered. Your mind will do the rest.

// 03 DEATH
Coal and oil fusing, the color – mauve. Death to death-transfigured. (Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, pp200) But that’s the 20th century, that’s raw materials, and what of us? What do we make of us?
Let’s contemplate the fatberg.

A fatberg is made up of human waste, it’s tissue, toilet paper, menstrual products, collected in a city’s sewer system, sometimes for centuries. Fat, that later purifies itself into soap. Now think: It’s detritus, the most personal remains of a given human, many a human dead by now, that comes back up to clog the arteries of our cities, costs thousands to remove. Think of vengeful ghosts haunting us. And now, The Internet. Digital footprints decades deep, accumulated, posters long dead, passwords forgotten, things said in passing, said to no one. Our detritus, now digital, strewn across internet wastes, bleaching in the sun, is finally to serve its purpose (Purpose? Do you hear yourself?): get scraped, extracted, abstracted - and reappear, ghost-like, in broken words, commas, and parentheses.
I can assure you: In a way, we will all see each other again. Everyone you’ve ever loved, or never got the chance to. Do you know what heaven is? In a split second, something worth loving - ratinoally, statictically speaking! - is caught in every image generation.
Now, let us contemplate the fatberg together.

// 04 CHAT
Death is not a state of absence. Death is a state of not-changing. All the information, everything a person has ever been, is out there, is in front of you. Re-live it, transform it, reject it, lie, but always remember: nothing new will ever happen. The eyes have closed.
I can not articulate. I can-not-articulate. I prove my own point.
There are people in my life still “alive” who might as well be dead to me. I can not, please understand me, I cannot perceive them as alive. Far away apparitions on my screen. I am perfectly aware I will probably never see many of them again. Even if I did, what is it to me? We would say “Hi!”, new information would come in and be processed; eventually we would exhaust ourselves, and as we part ways, they’d die again.
I think, “My room is freezing”. Am I supposed to find solace in the fact “a real person” felt me, the same as me, so what? I live, they live, we’re as good as dead to each other, and my room is freezing.
And now, Dead Internet, they say. What if none of this is real? As soon as you ask the question, you should know the answer can never, ever truly matter. What does it say about the value of communication, that you so readily accept AI as human “enough”?
The violence of language, who is speaking here? Mr. Beast, Top 10 Car Crashes, “I’m here for you if you need to talk”. We have been beaten down, broken, abstracted and extracted, and tortured, tortured (I’m talking about decades, global networks, nuclear residue, minds mutated by grief then drugs, hands clutching face. Depleted uranium. Are we together? Tell me, are we all together in this?), tortured to such a terrifying degree – that this is what passes for human. We nod our bleeding heads; we all agree. We want this to pass for human.
Please listen: Revolution is a means of translating our world from the medium of capital into the medium of language. Revolution is giving language a reason to exist. (Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript)
Please, please understand me.

// 05 ENDING
And finally, something else: I don’t think I want to be surrounded by people anymore.
I watch a movie: I don’t want to see human faces, I don’t want to know human hands, hands just like mine, made it, my furniture, my meal, everything I could ever look at. I don’t want to feel “a soul” behind it, knowing it was a soul as deep as I know mine to be, as I know everyone’s to be, and just as utterly alone, unreachable. We are all vessels, ancient blue, marine depths extending, even within yourself, you could excavate for time measurements beyond the human lifespan, and everyone, absolutely everyone, is like this. To attempt to understand even oneself is a lifelong project.
Why, then, would you ever try to understand somebody else? When there is such depth right here, right here? Of course we resort to language, the abstraction that it is, “love”, until some other currents violently force us apart, none the wiser of the motivations of the other, or content with what you think you know about them.
Do you understand how sad this is?
Please understand: I don’t understand you.