FULL BLEED: DE/VOID

I’m not particularly good at this. As it’s neither a formal essay nor an informal response to a piece of writing, I don’t exactly know where to start. So I’ll just keep writing until something catches, perhaps a piece of friction between two words sparks something. Bear with me. This is essential in apprehending the subjects we’re going to take a look at in this piece.

A word of background on me, or at least some attempt at explanation. One of the areas of study I found myself enmeshed in back in my college days, was sociology, more particularly sociology as taught by a professor with a background in critical theory, ethnomethodology and perhaps most important, Zen study. I am undisciplined in all, but had my head cracked open by all three in turn. Any time I’m looking at things that people have done/made/performed, I end up in these familiar to me shoals. Ultimately, I’ve found that when you dig far enough down on most anything, you get to a nothing. I learned of it as sunyata, that meaning a primal emptiness. It’s nothings all the way down. The trick, and yes it’s a trick, is to stop at a level where there’s a something that can be discussed. This has served me well, but perhaps kept me from any ultimate truths.

Ha. Good joke. Everybody laugh.

The Devoid, as Colin Dickey has used to describe his encounters with various sets of contemporary spaces, all sharing common characteristics, is called such because an essential component (to us, meaning feeling, living humans) has been stripped out of it. This gives an uncanny aura to these places, and I’d argue even situations and whole schools of aesthetics. Now, as someone who was taught (but is not sure he believes) that you get past everything and there’s nothing, this might be familiar territory. It is and it isn’t. It’s one thing to regard everything as having been made up by humans at some point along the way, whether qualities or goals or behaviors, as made up and say that you’re clever for having noticed this. That we operate as much on social cues and repeated, learnable behaviors as much as by any cosmic goals. The moral arc of the universe doesn’t bend towards freedom. Not by itself. It must be made to.

If there are Devoid spaces, the Freudian unheimlich, Mark Fisher’s weird and eerie, it’s not because they simply are. But because they are made. They are manufactured. The feeling of the Devoid is not accidental, but deliberate (if perhaps unconscious). I do not explain Dickey’s (ugh, I don’t care for this convention. But I don’t know him well enough to use his first name in this format. Whatever.) theory/observation sufficiently. You should read it for yourself. It’s easy to find. Take you maybe twenty minutes. Without that, this writing below might not make much sense.

https://www.hilobrow.com/2025/10/31/without-care-1/

But what must be clear is that the Devoid is not accidental. It is something that is made. In that, Dickey and I probably diverge from. Or perhaps I’m misunderstanding or reworking my understanding of his observation into something else. The Devoid might even be the hallmarks of a political and economic mode, as its expression is seen in spaces made from economic and political forces. Particularly the forces of austerity and what could more or less be summed up as neoliberalism, again slipping within the borders of Fisher’s capitalist realism. I don’t wish this to be a political or economic harangue (and Dickey himself doesn’t go into this explicitly. He observed the Devoid as phenomena or feeling. I’m going to suggest it’s an end product of a process.)

Without Care

The Devoid, as Colin Dickey explores in an essay series called “Without Care” is a contemporary manifestation of uncanny emptiness in a series of spaces and even processes. From a careless storefront that’s barely acknowledging a coming holiday to a luxury hotel lounge or lobby that is designed to appear luxurious and only manages a beige nothingness, the Devoid appears in what is not at the center of things. Literally, care, a primal human action. We’ll cover this, don’t worry.

Dickey suggests the roots of this start in the Victorian sense of the Gothic, how the spaces of castles and abbeys long-ago abandoned evoke an atmosphere of fear and unsettlement. The majesty of the ancestors now succumbing to rot. That the works of these (let’s face it) men could ever fall in such a way itself inspires fear. Terror in that something is coming but not yet arrived; horror in that the feared thing is here. But Devoid is something else. The thing is only announced by its absence. The unheimlich, the uncanny, the familiar made strange by this announced absence. Something is missing, extracted, removed. Careless apartments, photographs of Zillow listings, fake luxury hotels and AI artwork. All of these things can be ordinary but often appear as uncanny, emptied of something essential. These things try to appear normal but they are not, only pretending to be. They’re the sled dog from John Carpenter’s version of The Thing. Pretending to be a dog so it can envelop and absorb us. (Interestingly, the Thing is not itself Devoid, as it mimics because it's concealing something alien inside of itself, not an emptiness, more a hunger. Hooray for metaphors!)

What Goes Missing in the Devoid?

I’m going to be talking about the luxury (and pretend luxury spaces) for the most part here. Though to some degree, it can be tracked through even to the shabby corporate apartments and Air B&B listings that Dickey calls out in his essays. In the hotel lobby and uncanny storefront (and even as large a space as Times Square or even Disneyland) it's humanity that's missing. By design. These are spaces made for frictionless transfer of capital. Thing is, humanity exists in a state of friction to varying degrees. Capital doesn't want to.

These Devoid spaces are manifestations of value/labor being extracted from a system and moved to another system, one that the public doesn't have access to. Yes, this is regrettably an economic/political observation. I'm very sorry. I haven't read Marx since freshman year, and that was 40 years ago. But what is the US healthcare system other than a bureaucracy designed to siphon up tax dollars and premiums and dole out care only when advantageous from a cost/benefit perspective? What was the construction of the railroads other than a way for tycoons to get federal subsidy on their speculative ventures? The Moon landing? The venture capital group itself? The thing that eats other companies to manufacture shareholder value and leave shells behind?

That public value/capital has been taken. Lost. Liquidated. But to where? Where has that literal value gone? Into private eddies of capital that don't get recirculated into the greater economy. It's a bunch of xenomorphs taking the life they've stolen and making bets with others about who's going to go bankrupt temporarily overnight. Look up credit default swaps sometime. You’ll drive yourself crazy in these trades that assume value where there is none, literally trading bits of emptiness with one another in ever-more-complicated financial instruments.

I won’t spend long talking about betting as an aspect of that hollowness, but I’m not wrong. Sport and betting have always been intertwined, only now that’s made explicit and public. The teams that people are supposed to love and cleave to chests in good times and bad? That love is now converted into a financial drive. This is on every sports network, alongside every game all the way down to peewee levels. The deliberate conversion of sport (or any event – place your bets on the election to cash in big) into a pure financial transaction based on whether or not the bettor can predict the future better than an army of statisticians who lump these together into parlays that nobody could call but everyone thinks they can.

Yes, I’m talking about economics and not human feeling. But that’s what’s been done. Spaces, thoughts, feelings, all converted into basis for economic exchange. Profit being seen as the only real motive, line go up. Why present actual luxury when it’s much cheaper to buy warehouse furniture and try to make sure it all is lined up appealingly? It looks like wealth but is simply a layer of Teflon so that nothing human sticks to it.

The Devoid and Abandonment

The Devoid space isn’t one where there’s no money. It’s one where there’s enough money to keep up appearances to cast the widest possible net. Strictly speaking, Disneyland isn’t a Devoid space, but it’s an un-place. Nobody can live there. You can only stay and leave money behind (but oh those precious memories.) The Devoid goes down a little deeper. That sad hotel breakfast? Where they’ve spent just enough money to make something happen, but it’s unsatisfying and careless and just there? Right. You got it. Devoid. You’re not hungry anymore. That service has been fulfilled. But it’s not anything exceptional.

Look at the calls, even now, right now, that consumers are not upgrading their cars or phones fast enough, that they’re holding onto them too long. You gotta keep up or you’re gonna get eaten by austerity that you brought on yourself. You have to spend, send that money up the pyramid. You have to pay taxes, but there’s only promises of less government, less service, less care.

What is Sought?

Control and reward. Surpassing the gross state of humanity and even mortality. Making places, even entire cities safe for capital. There’s that joke, if your barista has to drive half an hour to their barista job, you don’t live in a city, you live in a theme park. Theme parks are the safest places imaginable. Because it’s only safe to have fun in places that are tightly controlled. And to get that, you need to spend a lot of money. There’s no reason to spend money on public spaces. Gotta funnel that stuff upwards.

The Devoid and Friction. Friction as Humanity.

The Devoid has no attention to detail or aesthetic school/moment. It is there to be frictionless, to appear like a regular space, but it doesn't function as one, because its only purpose is to serve as a transaction point or the minimal discharge of some level of obligation, or acknowledge that there used to be an obligation between those who had and everyone else. Again, there is nothing where there should be something, a sense of place of community, of connection.

The Gothic (explained as a sort of original architecture/space of dread) came from a place of culture that now inspires feelings of abandonment. The Devoid never ever had such intention or purpose. The Gothic is re/created, echoes of the decay of a society/time that is long gone, signifier shift. What was once now Victorian dread is now the basis for Spirit Halloween.

But the Devoid never had that original aura. It was never a magnificent castle or abbey that has been reclaimed by nature, showing the folly of man’s works. The Devoid space is just a place that is an un-place now, a place where aesthetic itself has been withdrawn. It's Anti-Aesthetic vs a fallen past. There is an absence of style in the Devoid, “a resistance to any kind of style.” A refusal to state any POV for fear of offense, of missing a market segment. Trying to offend no-one and instead appalling everyone. Corporate ecru design, earthtones bled to weak pastels, money shaving off the serifs from logos but offering profligate detail in constructed fantasy of film and animation. Design by committee to erase individual authorship and transfer to the corporate. To make a thing that no human could make. Blending of sensibility. A re-creation of a beloved animated favorite into a equally artificial but appearing “real” remake, living off the stolen labor of generations-gone artisans and artists.

Detail as Friction – Frictionlessness as Falseness

"The aesthetic of a thing is more than just the look, but detail, materials, haptics and ergonomics." - Can tie this into the optical/haptic talk that's going the rounds in reference to film, but those are constructed fictional realities and while they might reflect something of the zeitgeist that drives the Devoid, we're talking about something different. All the same, it's worth considering this.

Lack of Resources vs Deliberate Frictionlessness.

The difference between the carelessly made up corporate rental or BnB listing versus the aesthetic suck of the luxury hotel lobby. I’m not talking about ruin porn, a totally different subject. The Devoid is when there’s an effort to appear a certain way, but that effort is low and what’s revealed is the lack of care and effort in producing a human space. Or trying to produce a deliberately inhuman space that looks like a hotel lounge or even a corporate restaurant chain.

Or the half-assembled corporate apartment, an example that’s brought up. The shopfront with a minimal customer interface and out-of-the-box Christmas tree to celebrate the season. Few resources are devoted to it because there aren’t that many to go around. Dickey himself warns of classist interpretations of these spaces. That they’re not uncanny simply because they’re threadbare. And I’ve also seen these critical rebuttals applied to examinations of liminal spaces, which are weird and eerie only in the fact that they’re not designed to house primary public activities. They’re passageways or halls or utility access or infrastructural, used by workers only when needed. So-called liminal spaces are never intended to be primary habitation or performance/utility structures. They’re under/sub structures, not glossed up. There’s a feeling that we’re not supposed to be here, and that’s what the frisson comes from (at least it used to be that way for me and my friends exploring the hallways behind stores in malls, exploring parking structures.

The Devoid structure is a primary use structure, public-facing. It’s just that the face is blank, minimal and austere, without personality.

Authenticity Versus Falseness.

The K-Hole versus Zillow. Oh, what’s a K-Hole? Glad you asked. Go look up https://internetkhole.com/. It’s a collection of real life images, staged but un-staged, filled with friction, supremely human. Messy, dirty, careless, but not in a way that suggests the Devoid and inhumanity. These photos are of people and spaces that are alive. And of course on the other end of the spectrum is Zillow, which is about selling homes, theoretically. Instead, it’s about selling property. It’s not about people and places that are alive, but empty spaces upon which you can project yourself (or simply acquire and flip – why even have a human in the equation at all?) The personal space reduced to an economic bet.

But at what point do we have to question these appearances? Maybe those K-Hole photos were just more contemporary photos staged meticulously and filtered to look like old film, crafted to replicate a feeling that isn’t there? The Devoid goes all the way to the core of nothing. And, again, with AI, we get to question everything. How do you roast a turkey, Google? That question was once a viable path to a tasty Thanksgiving entree and now it's a forest of holograms trying to be mirrors.

More on this later.

Frictionlessness

"Broadway and Times Square were entirely emptied of any kind of aura." So writes Dickey of a 2013 visit to NYC. But there’s another word for this: “Disneyland.” Though one might argue that the aura of frictionlessness, of being an un-place is an aura in and of itself? We only notice the lack of aura because we've experienced the space before it became hollowed-out and Devoid. Is this where nostalgia comes in? Severing the human and familiar makes something new, which we call Devoid, but would the kids think so? Or is that just how things are? Yes, this makes things way more difficult. If signs and symbols keep slipping, then you gotta ask what anything actually means.

Cities are messy organisms, no matter how we try to control them. Where there's mess and un-evenness, there's life. The friction of uneven aesthetics, graffiti, irregular streets and buildings, different classes and colors and beliefs all in flux. All these are friction (complimentary). Of course, there’s a political crew that wants those edges ground off. It’s okay, we don’t need to say their names. Everyone knows who they are. So does that whole system lend itself to the Devoid? An pretended history that isn’t there and is wholly artificial pointing at a past that never existed and a future that’s crumbling even as the plans are laid? All signs point to “you bet.”

Borders

Dickey writes "Peter Gabriel's conception of Broadway in that album is, of course, vastly different form the world I now found myself in, but I couldn't help but conflate the two -- a world of utterly banal tourist shops, things devoid of any meaning or value, that sink even below the level of kitsch -- but which, perhaps, should one follow Gabriel's Rael, back behind one such storeferont, lead to psychosexual hidden worlds." Does the Devoid sit atop a thriving world, is it merely a forward face of bare capital? Do the corporate drones sometimes inhabiting this space have their own squishy and biological inner lives? Where's the barrier? Is it a rabbit hole or just a painting over a cliff face (or a breakaway panel over a terminal ledge? Only Wile E. Coyote knows!)

The Devoid as Capital Mode

The Aim of Capital in Transhumanism - Calvinist Assumption of All - The Death of Luxury

The weirdness of acquiring capital, accumulating, but refusing to spend it. Maybe the boards do but corporate offices do not. Is this showing Calvinist thrift. Thrift as withdrawal from the unholy material world. "We spend your money prudently, especially in this time of fiscal restraint." Though they sit on piles of capital accumulation that would beggar description. Line go up.

Controlling spending, even individual spending as exertion of social control. This is the exertion of control. Stamping out the sense of human, making an object or environment shaped only by capital for the purposes of capital, which is not a human thing at all. It doesn't have human needs for ego or immortality [it's already there, boo!]. It has no responsibility or obligation to improving a public environment past the bare minimum. Capital doesn't build signature skyscrapers. It builds investment opportunities. A faceless high-rise for every capital group to call its own. Movies aren't made by producers, they're made by six capital groups coming together and working hard so they don't offend anyone. Erasure of the human imprimatur.

The Devoid thrives in pretended luxury or even middle-class-state. And why not? You don’t want to pretend being poor if you’re trying to siphon money upwards; you go where there’s free capital to siphon up (or aim at services where there’s free capital to siphon up, c.f. healthcare, energy infrastructure, etc.) The hotel lobby is an empty attempt to invoke luxury and opulence, only without any. It can barely evoke a surface sense of what those things are, yielding a vacant space. A place to do deals, to realize value, not an opulent space. Yes, it's nice, but it's nothing. Zero personality. Deliberately a blank slate. Beige and vaguely contemporary furniture, visual content on frames politely abstract but never confrontational.

Reshaping Humanity in the Form of the Devoid

So the relationship brought up in Dickey’s original essay goes like: Terror - something is coming, horror - something is here, Devoid - something has been taken or is not here where it should be. Terror seems to suggest a relationship between the interior and the exterior landscape, a tension. The sense that a thing approaches, dread made manifest. Horror is being in the moment of manifestation of that dread, no matter the form. The Devoid refuses any engagement with interiority (aside from perhaps the suggesting that you’ve entered an uncanny space). The Devoid is that which has been ripped away. What which should be present but is not. The Devoid as sterility. Humans divorced from humanity. The body without organs. The ultimate end result of mind/body dualism and that we can take the mind out of the body or make the body and its mind live forever. Materialism ascendant, believing that the soul and the mind are just calculations (or in our cases, cascades of chemical reactions). And this leads right into transhumanism. We can surpass biology. This is the xenomorph bursting out of its final body. We leave the horrible gnostic world behind and can finally be made perfect. Not in the horrible human, but in the pure and divine. This isn’t possible in this world, only one of perfect data and of course capital (nobody rides for free). Yeah, that's some good Devoid.

The End of Time

"The existential terror created here comes in part for the absence of history. Here, there is no past, no future, or even a present." The Devoid comes to consume time itself. Maybe here we’re edging into Mark Fisher territory, where the past is continuously recycled in an attempt to stretch out the neoliberal moment into something longer than civilization itself, where history ends and the last man stands triumphant, stamping on their own face forever.

"The Devoid is not a scene of explicit violence," Dickey writes. Of course it isn’t. The evisceration was in the past, in the construction of the Devoid space. The violence has been externalized. The value has been minimized and collected by the owners of the space. In money/business we can see this in externalization of business costs in environmental costs, tax-funded bailouts, passage of costs to consumers by way of labyrinths of customer service lines and walls of license agreements, enshittification, the ongoing process of degradation of products and services in an effort to squeeze better returns out of calcified markets.

"The 21st century gothic... consists not in what has happened but what might happen -- or, even worse, what might never happen." - The future is stillborn. The last man, the end of history, just endless collection of shareholder value without interruption. Because that’s how you get control.

The past and the future are severed and stillborn respectively (at least that’s the aim.) The long now. You've watched the movie but that's not enough, here's what's coming next. The art object is only a thing that exists to be discussed, not experienced. Not even purchased, but access rented from month to month on any number of exclusive platforms. And that money goes to not the creators of the work, but to the distributors, the streaming platforms and sometimes even the studios. It gets removed and placed into a portfolio, a tiny little nugget of stockholder value. But it does not circulate.

Now there’s only the processing of money to create a private heaven. The purgatory is made public.

There is no blood in the Devoid. It's bloodless because it's lifeless.

Blood and other genre markers safely bound horror. The monsters and special effects and folkloric dread signal alignment with a genre and expectations, but those are also constraints and markers of safety. Just like the visual shorthand of Gothic has been reduced to safety markers now. These are fun spaces. You can’t be harmed, only thrilled.

"The Devoid offers no such safety," Dickey writes. Because it's our world. We're in the enclosure with it. The world is not your own, you're just passing through. Capital isn't. It's disembodied. We're soaking in it.

The Devoid is something to move through not live in. It is not for humans. It’s antithetical to humans and the human experience in all of its chaotic and messy glories.

Art, Authenticity and Intention in the Devoid

The devoid lacks intentionality or agency, according to Dickey. And I somewhat disagree on this. It might not be the intended effect of these spaces, but comes from their design all the same.

But does art only come from intention? What about the accidental/subconscious in art. Minor disagreement here. Art can come from the random, the night shift/subconscious mind. Maybe planning art to the nth degree sucks the life out of it, though we're used to heavily-constructed art. Does a film, constructed from the intention/direction of hundreds of makers save itself from the Devoid? Does franchise actually have anything in it other than the discharge of value?

Can there be a planned Devoid space? Yes, clearly. The example of the hotel lobby. Curated to resist being lived in. Psychic no-sleep/sit bumps on benches. Hostile architecture. Denial of public space by making roads and tiny sidewalks where unprotected humans should not be. But they're not wholly hostile. They're designed for commerce, frictionless commerce. If you make it too cold, nobody will come here. Again, is it planned to be Devoid? That’s a different question. But it seems pretty clear to me that people can and choose to make spaces that are aesthetically blank, that can pass as a human space but have nothing beneath the surface, and that is a sort of corporate shorthand for “do your business and move on.” Anything else would be inefficient. Authenticity is inefficient.

Authenticity and the Devoid

The Devoid in real estate listing photos is the Devoid idealized. Because they're made strictly for commerce. Spaces are reduced to strictest functionality (Or how easily you can flip the property.) The space itself is a real place presented in a way that strips it of attachment or sentiment.

In contrast, the K-Hole as an extreme and deliberately rough version of family photo albums. But also surprisingly sentimental and even sweet and human. Also totally nutty and looking for teenage kicks. There's friction there.

We’ve talked about unheimlich - the familiar made strange. The Devoid says why it is strange, or how its strangeness has come about (or even been the result of a design). Something has been taken from it, something that is essential. Humanity. The familiar made empty. The hollowing out is what makes things unsettling. This is the essence of the Devoid.

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.” Or so says Brian Eno. I don’t know, he seems pretty reasonable. This is getting to what we might call an aura of a thing, particularly a photograph. "What is an Aura?" asks Walter Benjamin. Immediacy plus distance in time. The ability to bring the subject into the present and real for us, but it will always be distant even though we can touch it (or at least the photograph of it). And that distance in time is often reflected in the limitations of the technology: film grain, light flares for improperly-handled film, the color response of old film as opposed to digital, blurs and lens flares and halations. Cameras with their aura-recording are time machines. Now, this aura of the past from photographs can be simulated usually in Photoshop (and yes, in AI, but still, we’re not quite there yet). A popular thing with many retro music genres or genre simulations is presenting a new album as a lost and recovered favorite, complete with sleeve wear or scratches or other signs of aging. All this trying to give something the aegis and authority or even the aura of being a real thing, from the time that we made real things. We are fleeing the devoid in the present. And have been for some time.

If we can run a new photograph through any number of processes to yield the simulation of an old one, did we trick anyone? Does Walter Benjamin and his observation of the aura, of a photo’s sort of weight actually hold up? Only if we demand a certificate of authenticity along with each internet post. If that authenticity can be faked, then were does trust lie, or does it become another victim of being absented and a space left behind. You guessed it.

Dickey notes “We can't trust an image to have its own time signature, time of creation.” But that’s been true for a long time, going back to Woody Allen’s Zelig and Fred Astaire dancing with lightweight vacuum cleaners thirty-five years ago. Besides, there’s the three separate times within even a photograph: the time of being taken, the time it represents (if not the same as the time it was taken) and the time in which it is observed (which also changes with the reader: you can never step in the same river twice). Even as false nostalgia conveys an intentionality a sensibility, a deliberate set of choices being made (take my own work in springing from the gauzy 4AD/Envelope 23 aesthetic/period for books in the 2020s, that take place in the eighties.) Historical reality might be cut out here, but that’s not the worst of it.

The most unsettling images are those with no intentionality. That's AI. These systems can’t have an actual intentionality, even if there is an intentionality in the writing of the prompts to generate the visual content output. Of course, one could say “Make a photograph of a waiting room that demonstrates the concept of the Devoid as imagined by Colin Dickey” and you’d probably get… something. Would it be Devoid? Would the hand of intent make it swerve from that?

Motion Smoothing the Body

Today we have the deliberate curation of Devoid coming to represent transhumanism. The techbro lives light, empty. Paucity of exterior, indicating "well he must have a rich interior life" and the truth of that is they do not. We see it on Twitter every day. The richest men on the planet got lucky, not smart, or not smart more than once. And now their actions are in service to acquisition, not improvement of their lives or anyone else’s. That’s some Devoid made flesh. They’re sublimating to capital.

And in doing this, they’ve taken on a mien of rich pennilessness. Billionaires appearing on camera in what seem to be generic clothes, not branded. As if they were the Cayce Ballard in William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, suffering from her debilitating brand allergy. The techbros have taken this as inspiration. They live in barren apartments that aren’t even minimalist art pieces, just bare. They're above our petty squabbles of branding and brand names. They've become pure capital. They're transhuman baby.

AI and the Devoid

Whew. Where to begin. First, let’s agree that AI is a marketing term, deceptive at the very best. There’s no intelligence behind the constant stream of content we see spewing from these systems in imitation of actual human art, made with the intention to at least make something. As these systems are designed only to convert text into output by way of sophisticated manipulation of huge probabilistic chains, they aren’t intelligent. Any intelligence we attribute to it is coming from us and our ability to put together patterns (a blessing and a curse that makes us easy marks). There’s a suggestion, and certainly a belief, particularly in the marketing of these systems, that a human-like intelligence is at work here. But absented. Again, Devoid.

And yes, we don't know where human intelligence and consciousness comes from. There may be no center. It may be sunyata, as my Zen-trained sociology professor suggested. But the center of AI slop is not to make a thing, but to make the appearance of a thing, one without care. Because the system making it does not care. It doesn't want to get rewarded. It just makes output. There's no there there. But keep it tight. Don't have a lot of room to mess around. Computing cycles are expensive.

The real horror of Dickey’s essay boils down to, for me, something like "’Is this real or fake’ has been replaced by ‘By what means could I even ask such a question.’" Are fake and real even meaningful categories? Certainly for the machinery of the Devoid, the question is the furthest thing from the point. But then so is any human question. It only can produce content in imitation of what it’s been trained on. “Does this content get hits?” is not even a question for that machine; only for the guys writing the prompts in an effort to get content convertible to money. In punk rock, it used to be a question of does every hardcore punk band need to be scrappy and authentic? What if an ersatz bunch of rich kids makes you pump your fist. Is that authentic?

What if there’s neither rich nor poor nor any kids at all involved in that crunchy fist-pumping anthem? What if all the feeling is coming from you? Can a Devoid object in fact inspire an actual emotional response?

The Devoid is a realm of complete ambivalence. We can't determine how much human intention is involved in the creation of these things. The Devoid becoming an expression of machine emulation of consciousness. Just like the Thing’s dog. It’s not a dog at all. Just pretending. The AI prompt evokes the Devoid by trying to create a human-responsive piece of output, but it’s nothing all the way down (until it’s seen and maybe becomes something.)

The terror now isn't ruins, but an inability to determine intention or motive. It's not human effort reclaimed by nature as in the gothic, but the imitation of a human drive in creation. "It is an online world created without intention, without aesthetic, without care," Dickey writes. But the AI makes assumptions (based on an algorithm, not an intelligence) of what a thing means, assembling contents of a memory bank to mix elements up in response to a prompt. There is intentionality but no awareness or substance. Unless we convince ourselves there is one.

The Devoid becomes even more frightening because humans, at least contemporary humans in what gets called the West (talk about a thing where there’s no there there) get very upset at the suggestion that there is nothing without explanation. That there’s reason for everything, even the absence of a thing is because of something. Everything has a core. Drill down far enough on something and not only does it become really interesting but entirely reasonable.

Unless that proves not to be the case at all.

In a bit of synchronicity as I was finishing off this essay or whatever classification this falls into, I was watching a piece on the writer JG Ballard. He spoke of his time in Shanghai and of the comforts he found there before the entirety of things became uncomfortable during the Japanese occupation. All of the things he’d come to trust were stripped away. “Nothing is to be trusted,” he says. And that was a lifetime ago, in the forties, twenty years before my birth. We talk about the forest of mirror/holograms offered up by the content machines, themselves spewing out incarnations of the Devoid, of what appears to be human work but is as meaningful as Brownian motion in a cup of coffee, as significant and as intentional as that. And we talk about how what we’re surrounded with is not trustworthy.

None of these are old problems. We can argue that there’s a difference between the primal void, the Buddhist sunyata, and the Devoid, that which is ripped away when making spaces and content that are maximized for shareholder value. But whether the void is created by an action of creation, in making a frictionless space or by the fact that at some level of perception there’s an acknowledgement that there’s nothing beneath the surface, the fact remains that there’s still a void. That our rules and knowledge is more imposed than innate. That we are in a landscape that we can’t take at face value and never have been able to. Yes, there’s a difference in the means of automation, and the drive to turn that into profit to be whisked away.

Maybe it’s easier to argue that the Void is natural and something to be acknowledged and lived with, made a center of some kind of peace. That the Devoid is something that’s a warning, that you’re in a space not to take at face value, that something else resides there, something a little bit hungry and always will be. And you’re feeling tasty.

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Thanks to you the reader for having made it this far. Thanks to Colin for writing such an engaging piece to begin with. I can only hope I’ve done it some justice and not simply reply guy-d in the most exhausting way possible.