What am I really doing with this Substack? Well, a few weeks in, I’m getting better clarity about what I had in mind. The sort of immediate concerns have been a) a sense of confusion about my own politics, a feeling that the cozy liberal order that I grew up in has pulled apart and that any kind of intelligent political perspective requires a wide-ranging skepticism, a return-to-first-principles, a thinking-through of how the culture has so badly frayed; b) an attempt to return to a better relationship with reading, to actually sit through books and overcome the cell phone addiction that everybody has and to examine a little more critically the sorts of books and articles that get published and promoted; c) to simply offload a number of the essays and stories that have been cluttering up my laptop for a long time.
But the idea behind this Substack really goes back to a sensibility that I had c.2005 about where I hoped the internet was heading – and which has turned out to be flagrantly inaccurate. The idea was that the internet would be sort of like everybody’s personal museum. Instead of passing through the competitive marketplace, expressions of self would simply be uploaded; and the internet would be a sort of x-ray vision of the inner life of the entire society – straight from the soul to public expression without any sort of intermediary.
That was far from just being my idea – that was kind of the prevailing ethos of the whole era, and the extent to which that vision has collapsed into group-think and algorithmic coercion has been a very bracing type of disillusionment. Most terrible of all is the sense that so much of what I was hoping would happen has in fact taken place but in some parodic, nightmarish version of itself. The idea was that there would be a democratization of expression – simply put, more people saying more true things about themselves and available for public engagement – and I guess that that’s happened, but what I read tends to be so self-censored, performative, promotional, as to really be unbearable. And, meanwhile, ‘serious’ expression has become even more closed and in the grip of various artistic bureaucracies – and, the more experience I get, the more that what I read in articles or books strikes me as not being writing at all but as an emanation of power, some institution articulating a stance and a marketing strategy and reifying it through ‘expressive’ work. I’m not necessarily opposed to that from any sort of principle – power gets to express itself too – but I just don’t find it very interesting. What appealed to me always about writing (and art, more generally) was the sense of soul speaking to soul – of dealing with the landscape of loneliness and managing it through a sense of camaraderie and fellow-feeling. Reading work that was the ‘best’ wasn’t actually so important – that was kind of a sport compared to the real thing, which was reading work that was truthful to whomever was expressing it; and, as far as I could tell, looking at things from that vantage-point, the amount of interesting work out there could really be infinite, not only would vast numbers of people have truthful, interesting things to say but each one of them would have infinite corners of themselves that they would be able to explore.
That struck me as a particularly democratic vision of art and expression that could be fulfilled by the internet – and, instead, we’ve all moved in exactly the opposite direction. Attention spans have shortened dramatically and expression – as it’s thought of in the art market – is really just sport, an attempt to overcome the successive hurdles of bureaucracy, commerce, and criticism to generate something that will be very briefly high-status until the next wave of product drives it out. This has always seemed to me a very poisonous direction and now it reaches its reductio ad absurdum. We are at the point where human beings are no longer the best at our own cherished activities. Machines are better at playing our games and are quickly becoming better at making our music and composing our art. I don’t actually see this as being particularly an existential challenge – but it should be annihilating to a particular paradigm of how we see ourselves. Simply put, the sport of life – being the best at some activity – has become ridiculous exactly at a moment when the society has shifted to a gameified model of how it views everything. But there is another way of approaching life, which is as an art and in which the standard of measurement isn’t actually how good something is but how true it is to the particular experience of the person expressing it. Somehow – and to my dismay – that’s become kind of a foreign concept even with the domain of art. And this Substack is above all an attempt towards a kind of quiet revolution, in which the goal of any kind of expression isn’t a bid to occupy some kind of a social center but simply to speak for itself, as an iteration of one of the infinitely variegated corners of the soul.
Agree with every word
first a memory of a feeling:, sitting in my kitchen in Louisville, KY in 1993 hooking up to the World Wide Web for the first time - logging into some research service where I’d finally managed an account and setting it all up, getting oriented to it, blink blink blink went the green cursor while I examined users manuals. computer language flooding the screen at intervals and then, spent, madly blinking on the tiny black screen in green - green green
and then
across my screen - the words blinking across like teletype - then stabilizing into a set of blinks, calling out the hour, “hello there! “ IT/He said. “How are you this evening!“.
I immediately jumped up. I had a chill run through me like a wire. a new terrorizing fear emerged up to that point, unprecedented
after the initial jump, akin to finding a spider on your hand, I am momentary paralyzed by an utterly unfamiliar anxiety. This this “greeting” where I was walking no where, where I was alone. This unbidden penetration of my prosaic life, this moment characterized by the realization of a new madness within myself. This : “Will I dissolve into some sort of newly created smoke ?” the immediate appreciation of a kind of personal desecration that apparently had always been there but was now just furnishing itself in the “real” world.
My circumstances at that moment deserve a bit of stage time-in here. that Kentucky kitchen in which I’m quite pregnant, quite co-incidentally barefoot in a terrible floral robe which had been roughly cinched over my absurdly prominent belly, a glass of orange juice gingerly set on top of that whole apparatus
Just a drop in to say that before this interstellar greeting I was already in the mode of being fascinated by my body, that my life, my curious life. that at that moment, truthfully, looked nothing like any life or body I had intended to have or even imagined I might have but interestingly was quite like the lives and bodies of most people demographically similar to me at that time.
Yes, I am not immune.
Despite its cheery and polite beginning, my overall experience with Stranger On The Internet has been as terrible as that first immediate immanence portended. My central nervous system, beginning with my eyes, warming my blood and then trembling through the extremities, immediately understood this -whatever THIS is - is no good.
What is it I became afraid of ? What did I sense was involved in this benign greeting? Did I intuit that it represented The Collective Consciousness? The “ID”performing in a sort of mode of the dervishes - where one’s spinning on it turns the next dancer faster and faster into some sort of profound kinetic oblivion.
Myself at that time. As I said, I was deeply embodied for the first time after a lifetime centered around books, movies, art, conversation. Then So big with child, at the huffing and puffing stage with it, so aware at every moment of my body breath gut bladder tummy ankles hips feet. I was in the body, I was always monitoring myself how big are my breasts and how tender, noticing my mouth felt constantly dry my breath coming often labored and overdetermined, a constant reminder that I existed in the world, this reminder too often felt unfortunate. I did not breath a word of these dissatisfactions and disturbances. Joy was consistently expected of me and, for the most part, I delivered.
Motherhood: a retreat from the world? It was for me. The way I coped with it was deciding I was abandoning the world for a time. I couldn’t contain this body, this child, this new life and deal significantly with the world. the World has to go. At least temporarily. Who knows how long? I was far too exhausted to prognosticate.
Now - as I sat barefoot pregnant in the kitchen of Kentucky in 1993 - here is the world, anyway, whether I like it or not, coming for me. With all its dreck, it’s bubblegum, tarts, bad writing, jumble screen, yelling, wrestling, leering. Women with some urgent and absolute rules for everyone. men their relentless and quotidian sexual desire free floating sometimes landing like dust in a radial field that unfortunately includes you.
For me, I gathered from that uninvited greeting that there would be no retreat. The whole world would now be able to find me. Seek me out eventually to pillory me. yes my immediate notion of the threat of was the threat of embarrassment. that innocuous greeting hinted that I would be - in time- subject to subordination, or worse, banishment, exile.
All this in a instant. which I continue over the years to unpack for meaning and reference, and what connected to here
for me with this personal moment is a talisman or a guide. It’s meant many things Over the years. The recognition of the power dynamics it unleashing. No wonder there is so much performative “yelling” on the internet. You want to break through because there are simply so many of us. The tendency towards “push” not “pull” communication also aligns with the terrible power simulations on the internet. The hyper ness of it all. The flagrant lying and “amped” quality of discursiveness, heroic effort filled sexual threats, preposterous grandstanding, scams of all sorts and all out assault on the body, and by extension nature.
It was all there from someone I could not see, would likely never see and even if I did even if I had bared my soul to him (yes, I assumed it was a “him”) or simply shared with him my then humdrum life. Even if we had said all the profound things you say to lovers or dear friends, even if he had told me he had committed terrible crime and had never confessed it to a living soul , what does it matter? If we, meaning our bodies, did run across one another our bodies would not be able to recognize one another.
It is clear now that there will be no retreat. We are stuck now with the whole world : all it’s relentless suffering, stupidity, greed, it’s deliriousness, it’s sanguinity. Or more specifically, it’s unwinding irrationality visible everywhere on the internet that in its accumulation begins more and more to look like a collective breakdown. Our bodies can’t deal with it. our souls are hungry for some substance that doesn’t turn out in the end to be poison