Goddamn. It took me close to an hour. But I was once invited to write an essay for a super awesome guy who ponders really really big shit. It was on his now dormant site, huge-entity.com.
He now runs
http://machinemachine.net/Anyways, those pictures of the glowing screens of phones reminded me of this essay I was invited to write and hadn't thought of in years. (Goddamn, I once knew how to write
)
Nine Reasons Why 'You' Don't Exist...
Monday, February 13, 2006 → by Danieru
Pushbutton Automation
by JK
DunneIV (that's me)There is a mystical “I” awakening. It is being stirred by events unseen and of uncertain origin. When it wakes up what will it be?
Inexistence is a nice concept. It works in that soporific marketing kind of way because inexistence is more user friendly than its more anal sister named Existence – given a choice, people dig the bliss and carelessness of inexistence more. Existence asks of its multitudinous rapt egos that they be engaged and aware. But anymore, engagement and awareness are “tasks” to be doled onto tiny gadgets running algorithms and automated signals sent by servers via radio and rapidly focused light. Thus I submit, that at an ever quickening pace, the Ego is now and will be forever more, an automated AI, adding layer upon complexifying layer everyday, hectoring the skin of life and callousing Existence's ability to recognize her brother: Inexistence, hidden, mired behind a cloud of tough, translucent flesh. We are becoming supernatural through the silent seduction of the nascent I's cries.
It is for our inexistence that I write these randomized, pontificating thoughts in order to contribute something, anything to this “World Wide Web” we came of age in continual contact with. We are striking out into it because, at our cores, we do not exist fully, but seek communion with something as equally empty nonetheless. We are not noticed, yet are, only when we take the time to notice the other for ourselves. And we, ourselves, do not notice when we do not take the time out of our “existences” to care about the general act of “noticing” the fact that ultimately, innumerable unknowable others do as well. Thus many do not care about their necessary existence because they seek to not be noticed in and of this perceived chaos that lurks in the darknesses everywhere. For, we find, that there is nothing for us “supernaturals” to warrant being noticed for! So we hide. To exist fully in the open, devoid of inhibition and perpetually brimming with energy, is to knock yourself out of existence so to speak.
I am at a club in the cobblestoned past of a cellar that now houses Drum and Bass DJs on Saturday nights. It is dark and the marijuana and beer I have consumed, the people I have seen grimace and pose, the telltale mode of police state security through a billion lenses and miniature glowing personal screens has made the place a node for the virtualscape underworld. There are lapping tails and braying claws on the periphery. In the center there are automatons with occasional facial illumination as they check. They check they check they check. I see them check as they bob to the ever enveloping cadence. So I, like a pupil of a professor who yawns in front of class, check mine too – bobbing in time. I proceed to fire up a conversation with someone in Chicago then text a joke to someone's cellphone 5 miles away. And yet the immediate darkness persists.
The glows of various human faces lit up by uniform devicery becomes more clear and lucid as more people pile into the venue made of brick and deep blue neon. Like an ooze of a swimming luminescent jellyfish, the humans communicate into and out of networks, networking their brainwaves with the dude who stands in front of two record players – texting their thoughts elsewhere as their voices and senses have been muted. Images of flatly illuminated faces come and go, some bearing teeth like a warbuilt chimp–potential brutality, like the sounds of the launching bullets embedded within the music the body involuntarily sways to. Others still illuminated here and there by a virtualworldly LED blue, only to flash out of existence once again – with an unheard soundfile as its been swallowed by vibrations of the bigger and more powerful speakers in its vicinity. Indeed, inexistence. For $1.99 a sound and ten bucks to get in.
You cannot talk but you can text. You also need your personal and paid-up artifact to make you glow when you're amidst a noise, a net, you cannot network, let alone swim your way out of if you wanted. You are ensnared. Is this the user-friendly universe built upon the notions of packaging and traveling and refueling our coffeecards that we've been waylaid into accepting as a default limitless future? Is this the world of pushbutton automation where out dreams are but a click away? Is the universe a place now that it is represented by variously themed menu schemes? Or does it, like ourselves, not exist either, its conventional understanding of which having been “automated” out of any high soaring human relevance whatsoever?
http://www.huge-entity.com/2006/02/nine ... exist.htmlAnyways, those pictures and thread reminded me of that write-up. . . Which incidentally, dude's website is going back into my bookmarks from three computers ago.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
