The Fetish Fades

Much of Substack is a lot of hot air these daze. Many writers just repeat themselves in new ways. You can see them struggling for something original to say now that they’ve exhausted their main topic. Those that write about politics will always do best as there is always some new crisis that the writer can elucidate for you. That being said one occasionally runs across a banger of an article and for that reason I still frequent this place - this place which has no place, upon which I scribble invisible things on an imaginary wall for no bodies to see. One gets the niggling feeling that all this scribbling into the void is somewhat solipsistic and even the interactions with “others,” on accounts of the nature of algorithms and siloed hangouts, feels like an unfamiliar fragment of one’s own mind. No one ever comes out of left field and starts ranting at you about the Penny farthing. It’s always on topic and even, because you know we move in the same algorithmic circles baby, a little familiar. Uncle Bill’s ramblings are strange but he’s still family.

Once the fetish fades and the topic de jour is on the decline, we turn to the lesser discussions - still interesting mind you; like how we are being replaced, how the control grid is being implemented around us, how everything is poisoned and dysfunctional. How there is now more debt than actual money. They’re spraying the skies too it seems. Everything is going down hill. The great enshitification of everything. The big picture looks disastrous and more and more people are swallowed up by the heaving, lumbering plod of humanity. No one has a clue. We just wake up and go to war, set ourselves on fire, bomb a hospital, rape and eat some children, get arrested for typing hurty words, watch a billionaire tell us what they think about the climate in 30 years, watch a world leader tell us how the things they do are really evil … when someone else does them, ad for a car that makes no sense - she had nice hair, something with a talking giraffe, friends somewhere doing something, nawww dogs …

It’s really bizarre considering a few decades ago I was flipping-out about watching “Back to the Future” ON MY TV. Great Scott! It all feels like too much. So many of us who grew up without internet want to go back and those of us who have never known any different just carry on with a kind of collective sigh - not a sigh for something lost but a sigh that realises the world is just BLAH and this is the way it’s going to be so you may as well celebrate the BLAH because the alternative to not celebrating the BLAH runs the risk of social exclusion.

The other day it was underwater chess and today the discounted variety pack of condoms at the shop was called a party mix. A party mix?

Who wants to party with me?

If you’re old enough you might remember the embarrassment of even attempting to buy some. Now it’s party time! And I’m not placing a value judgement on that. It’s probably a good thing that buying a packet of condoms is no big deal. All I’m saying is wow, how things is different.

And now the internet is being censored into oblivion, which appears at first glance to be an impossible task until you realise that everyone is on only a handful of platforms. So much for free speech. Then some successful parrot says “speech has consequences” which sounds good until you find out that the consequences they are talking about are them shutting down your speech. Some people even think you shouldn’t be allowed to say some things and some people even think words are violence. As a side note - I only found out the other day that in Australia if you do a Nazi salute - that’s an offence punishable by law. Got to hand it to them Jews, they run a mighty powerful PR campaign. Anyway … Heil Hitler.

Outside social media the internet is just annoying. So many sites are riddled with pop ups and ads that the experience of “surfing the net” - remember that old expression? is more like being dumped by a wave. I have, on more than one occasion, shut down the browser because the page I was attempting to read was actively colonised, in real time, by sliding adverts. The text underwent a genocide. I just wanted to learn to make chocolate brownies!

We seem to be exhausted by it all. It’s too frenetic and senseless and the hypocrisy is off the charts - they'll literally condemn violence as a hospital blows up in the background. The human brain can’t make sense of that. You just blink, glitch out a bit, a small puff of smoke comes out of your left ear and you continue to scroll. Too much of that, and we’ve already had too much of that, and your moral circuitry gets fried. You give up on principles. How could you believe anything when four hundred civilians in a tent encampment are slaughtered because terrorism or retaliation for the … ahhh it doesn’t fucking matter …poof … more smoke. You’re already defeated anyway - you just purchased some bricked up air in a sprawling outer suburb. Your bricked up air looks very much like your neighbour’s bricked up air. You paid so much money for that enclosed air that you’ll be working well after you are dead. But that’s life. Celebrate the BLAH. You’re off to Bali soon for 6 days. At least there is that. Could be worse. Am I right?

So the question that plagues my mind is how one deals with all this? I mean I’m a sucker for it all too. I love the doom. Give me a story on government censorship and corruption, give me migrant stabbings, give me technological control grid infrastructure… I love it all and it doesn’t keep me awake at night anywhere near as much as it should because these stories are mind blowing. They make you numb. You wouldn’t believe (well you probably would) the absolute devious shitfuckery these people get up to. There is no depth to which say … the CIA will not go. Operation Gladdio - look it up. The Vatican - yeah the holiest of holy via the CIA and the mafia used the proceeds of the heroin they were selling Blacks in America to fund anti communist operations in Europe. They killed jazz musicians… you mutherfuckers. And that’s only a fragment of that twisted tale.

Anyway I digress … Heil Hitler.

And that’s the problem, a lack of nuance is fostered by all this rapid information. Nothing stands out of the crackling pink noise. The result is a homogeneous field of experience and the only way something can pierce through the chaos is to be extreme in its perversion. This doesn’t solve anything of course for now we have the banality of the fray and the jarring, disorienting spikes of those anomalous outliers. Still no subtlety, still no contemplation leading to reflection.

So how does one deal with it all? I’m mighty tempted to unplug from Substack - the only social media I actually use. Even Substack is rotting my brain I fear. And now with the digital ID thing becoming more prominent. I didn’t get asked to age verify which I think is worse - it means they already know who I am.

But …

What’s that old quote misattributed to Twain -

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.”

Or perhaps a more contemporary version would be -

If you read Social Media, you’re transformed into a soulless ghoul who haunts the earth in the shape of a man but is only a facade, nothing more than a mindless vessel full of conflicting thoughts and images with no creative instinct of his own. If you don’t read Social Media you’re not joining in.”

Okay, not as snappy.

Now that Covid is “over” and it’s clear that no one is going to be held responsible and that they all got away with killing millions and making vast sums of money, my main interest in Substack is gone. Now I’m just doom scrolling or the equivalent of for the Substack universe - Notes. Notes is probably the worst thing to happen to Substack … it keeps feeding you the slop. Nomnomnom.

I’ve got ideas for longer form works of fiction but where would I ever post them if it weren’t for Substack? I guess there are other online writing platforms and it would be true to say that fiction isn’t really at home on Substack as much as its twin. So I’m not sure if I should keep paying attention to Substack. Certainly if ze Substack vants to see ze papers … I’ll be gone.

DB/

Please enjoy some music -