FULL BLEED: SUBVERT NORMALITY

"Ten-four, old buddies. De-stroy. Kill all hippies."

Spent a little bit of yesterday watching a video on the dead internet. Which is a kind of silly thing on its face, right? The Internet's more lively than it's ever been, at least going by numbers and money flowing through it. And the talk. So much talk. More stuff being generated and archived so long as its profitable than you could possibly conceive. Of course it's not dead.

And then you look at closer and well maybe. We don't have an internet so much as we have platforms that utilize the internet for their communications base. And the big ones are big targets for anyone trying to make a buck, primarily with bots or engagement bait or reaction videos or other outrage chum. Like its less-savory kin, link chum, that stuff that really keeps things like CNN and MSNBC alive in ad money online. One weird trick. Stuff that'll be hitting NextDoor. Celebrity news and what you'll hear about the next time you're at family dinner. Lowest-common denominator stuff. Not even slop but stuff that might become slop one day.

So, yeah, maybe there's something to the whole dead internet thing. Peopleoids who are trying to be as safe and calculating (they've all got calculators) to get the most possible eyeballs and not only act like wind-up monkeys, but get everyone in their thrall to act like wind-up monkeys. Reactions to reactions. Fan outrage videos and AI-generated title card art with dumbfounded expressions like you won't fucking believe what they did to the Predator this time. Dead-end content to keep you scrolling.

Anyways, this video went on about the above and added in things like the endless scroll and how there's never going to be catharsis in any of these online deathmarches. (To be clear, I think that meaningful catharsis is something that's vastly overpraised in online discourse surrounding books and movies and the like. I won't say that it doesn't exist. But the kind of life-changing catharsis that most people are looking for is a one-time event that puts them on a different path completely and we're just not wired for that sort of thing living in the set of nested systems that we're in.) Anyways, there's no Final Boss of Facebook. It's always mutating. You knock the life bar down and a second one fills up and the boss monster's corpse sprouts tentacles and extra mouths and you have to fight it all over again only this time it's spitting goddamn poison between attack routines so you have to change up the patterns of response. And now it's AI slop shrimp wishing the troops would come home so that we could all celebrate zombie crustacean Jesus and pretty soon nothing means anything anymore. But that's what happens when you train a machine that's primary yardstick for success is to convince viewers of its output that they've just participated in meaningful output. Which is a low bar because that's what human brains are hungry for. Patterns. Plans. Please for the love of the Maker tell us that there's a plan when these terrible things happen so that it's not just the universe becoming but that there's a plan, a designing intelligence that isn't just random because that though would be unbearable. As if knowing that there was a rational plan behind all the bullshit that's being exploited is a comfort. If it's a plan, it's a terrifying one. And, yes, I use this argument in theological discussions as well, don't worry.

So yeah, the Cold War bunker that instead turned into a block party, as Bruce Sterling once said of the DARPAnet Internet becoming a host for weirdos and freakazoids and other folks who were going to use it to bootjack a utopian age (okay, he probably didn't think that, but there were others who did) onto the normies. Instead it's become a host of platforms who pry and observe and sell your interactions to anyone who'll pay over a handful of nickels, or to train their own algorithms to deliver the stuff you want to see day in and day out. And, honest question, who sees only stuff that they want to see (even excepting ads) on any platform from Facebook to YouTube to Twitter (lawl) to Bluesky. Right. You see the stuff that's pushed on you, even though Bluesky isn't an algorithm-driven feed (which is the only reason why I'm still there and that's a fight sometimes.)

Oh, but the discussion threads. Those are great! You can learn so much. About people who want to impose their view of everything on anyone in every forum they enter. Yeah, I already got my fill of those starting on USEnet and when I created/admin-ed a bunch of music-related mailinglists in the second half of the nineties. Even there, there were folks who were going to get it through your thick skull that they were right and you were wrong. And that turned into top ten lists and rebuttals and engagement bait and grievance videos all monetized so why wouldn't you do that? Beats the hell out of working. And then we're all Hobbes in the discussion threads and yeah. I'm not here to discuss anymore, mostly because lots of folks aren't here to do that either. Sure, it might happen on invitation-only Discord servers and the like, but the bigger the platform, the less good the discussion is. It can't be helped. People out there to profit (whether ego-related or money-related) are going to make public discussions hellholes. If you don't curate hard, it'll happen to you (and it many places you can't curate hard enough, again, Bluesky lets me mostly do it). Instead of weird folks just posting their obsessions (RIP sandwichesalone and infravisions and intrapanel on Tumblr), by and large, it's all coup-counting and not discussing but stating postion over and over and Hell Yeah I'm The Best One. No, it's not all that, but that's an overwhelming drive. It's like trying to keep morning glory from taking over your yard. The best way to do that is never to plant it in the first place.

So, back to dead internet. I dunno, there's some food for thought, but then there's a deep-end-dive into how it's all Russian trolls just trying to demoralize everyone. And, yeah. That's a tougher pill to swallow when the truth of it is people just love to feel superior and dunk on others all on their lonesome, no compramat required. No troll army necessary. Which, again, we're back to "it's all a terrible plan unfolding" and nah. It's us, just us, just like that unfortunate and doomed psychologist said after trying to analyze Rorschach in Watchmen. When the thing is, that's not doom, that's liberation. It's just us. So we can do better. Only maybe lots of folks won't. Or are just happy to consume that stuff they're getting for free and feeling like they're choosing their the shape of their destruction. Or wasting time.

Along with all the other bots trying to boost certain responses or sell something or porn links or just idiots trying to get you sucked into a fight that doesn't need to happen because there's no stakes because they don't care. Yeah, it's a series of minefields out there. All you can really do is take care of your own space and probably cut back on the time you spend there. Which sucks if you're in a place where you're isolated. Which I am. Don't get me wrong. It's a beautiful neighborhood in a beautiful and quiet town and I'll see five cybertrucks in a day of errands. GW Bush spoke at the country club nearby on his re-election campaign. There's not a lot of weirdos. I'm a weirdo. Not the kind of weirdo that announces weirdness because that's a violation of Miles Davis' Coolness Paradox. That which is cool has no need to announce that it is. That which isn't desperately tries to be. I'm just a weirdo who likes weird things and has done that all my life, like back when reading comics at school got them ripped out of hands and crumpled to bits. Oh well, we had arcade games too, so I guess it all evens out.

The internet is as dead as you make it. If you go onto Facebook, yeah, good fucking luck in the hellhole. Same with Twitter. There's even still weirdos just publishing stuff to their websites, not on big platforms. You don't need a fuckin' Substack or YouTube channel. Though these other options are more expensive and a little more tech-knowledge intensive. They'll also net you tens of viewers. If you want to make the line go up then you gotta play that line go up game and then all you've done is make the line go up. The discussion never ended. You'll just have to put out another gobsmack-faced reaction video about how this spin-off show wrecked the original or how Everything Sucks And Just Leave Me Alone. Not everything sucks. New Pertubator single just dropped. There's a whole page of a label on Bandcamp putting out music you'll love that you haven't heard yet. There's books to read that you missed when they came out thirty years ago or yesterday. There's a whole-ass Internet Archive filled with short historical videos or gaming magazines. Or you can go to a coffeeshop and leave yourself open to conversation (and not impose conversation on anyone who doesn't want it, yeah I saw that whole curséd thread this weekend.) You can go for a walk. Can't touch grass. Grass tariffs. Too expensive.

It sucks if you want it to suck. And believe me, there's a lot about the Internet that sucks. There's good in it. And there's good people in it, too. There's folks you can learn from and grow from that. Folks putting up pictures of amazing meals they're eating in amazing places and maybe you can go there one day. Or just get reminded that a cat might come up to you on a walk. But that discussion? It's never going to end. Even when you can't go on but must go on (that's not encouragement but a curse.) It sucks that art's been turned into something to triumph over in a three-hour video. It sucks that people won't lose themselves in anything because feelings and those are cringe.

Anyways to the nut here, that being that I gotta figure out how to deal with this environment because it can't go the way it's been. I walked away, absolved myself of the responsibility of regular publishing, just into the sea with it. Now to do the same with identity. Reject Internet, become monke. If only it were that easy. Or maybe it is. I dunno. I've never actually tried. Sure, I've walked away for a whole week at the time when the Scream Factor got too high. But every day? Yeah, it's too much and it's been too much for some time now, but I've been able to talk myself out of that because what's left? Being in your own head all day long? Intolerable. Even when it's being in my own head not knowing I'm there 'cause I'm writing, like I talked about last week. That's only a couple hours a day thing though. Or maybe it's more.

"Oh well what's so bad with being in your own head all day?" Well, ya get it or you don't. But partitioning my head into a thousand other mutant consciousnesses like Charles Xavier in an X-Men comic, that's not healthy. Or maybe it is for you but I'm stretched kinda thin. Yes, it's fun but like cocaine or videogames, you can go too heavy into it. I certainly did and am and can I actually step back and not exist for everyone else for awhile? I leaned on existing for others for a long time. I'd talk about the exact moment that it flipped, but I already agreed to not discuss that subject on the timeline as it were. So, let's just say for many years because I was coping with something I couldn't look at directly and it became a lot easier to just be whatever I am out there in the dead internet. Sure I'm a firebreather here but do I have the strength required to be that without an audience?

That whole change and neuroplasticity thing. Yes you can change, but will you? Reminder that the shotgun in question is being pointed at me.

I've known a few other folks of late who've had to stare right at that horrible thing, whatever it is, that elephant's foot at the bottom of the dying nuclear reactor or gorgon that popped up in their lives. Figure they're handling it better than I do. At least it sure as hell seems that way. Maybe I'm not seeing it or I'm selling myself short, which I'm very good at after a lifetime of practice.

Yeah, went from dead internet to dead heart. Okay, that's a little much. A lot much.

I'd talked myself out of writing for a good couple years, for a variety of reasons, 'cause it was easier to get up there and dance, dance, dance. Taking those shots and dancing with a sweating desperation because it's crashing down, or I'd convinced myself of it. Because it was easier than knowing the reward was stepping up every day and working on something that was for me and sixty other people. Only I'd convinced myself that the sixty other people weren't there. In spite of that, I put a chunk of words into a novel that I still don't know the final shape of. Which I wasn't sure of two weeks before that.

I can't disappear completely. But I can't be out there much as I was. Still figuring out that balance. Office hours? Maybe. Just meter it. Time's up, go think about what we've talked about and I'll see me next week. Not sure I can even take that.

Does this solve the problem of the dead internet? Hell no. Does tuning out of news that I have absolutely zero control over short of yelling at my representatives mean surrender? The dead internet guy sure seems to think so. Yeah, but I've been hit with bad news since the seventies. The way it's got ratcheted up now is next-next-level. Mostly because posting and, to be clear, trenchant yet entertaining analysis, is about as effective as a meringue pie dropped from the top of a six-foot aluminum ladder, to quote Vonnegut. Yeah, I can log in and see reminders to watch that amazing PBS thing on the history of funk but for every good thing, there's an awful lot of awful. It’s not lobsters in a bucket pulling each other down. It’s lobsters in a bucket screaming at each other that they’re enjoying music wrong or doing posting as praxis wrong or cooking rice wrong. I don’t know what’s happening but until I can manage it and be ruthless enough to cut out more garbage including no longer following people I’ve followed since Twitter, just not sure what there is to be done about it. But that necrosis has to get controlled somehow or it’s gonna eat the whole arm and then some. And I need that arm. I type with it.

Yeah, sorry. No answers today. Hell, I don’t even have questions anymore.