And we are all, little by little, day after day, willingly putting it on the market. You don’t realize it, but every day you’re giving away a piece of yourself with no gain. You’re signing your life away to the book of corrupted souls who vomits ones and zeroes. Somebody gains, but its not you.
It leaves you looking at first like perforated paper. Still solid, still usable, still a whole sheet. A few marks from use don’t hurt the durability or the purpose of the sheet that’s a little weatherbeaten. We have all crumpled a sheet of paper over and over mindlessly, ticking away the boredom clock as school children. When you keep crumpling and straightening, over and over, it effectively turns the once crisp sheet into a piece of tissue paper. After many cycles of wadding, almost obsessively, you have changed the makeup of the original item.
The paper is a metaphor of course. We aren’t talking about paper. What I speak of using the sheet of paper is as an allegory to your substance, your essence, your identity. It is the original and unique form of who we are as individuals that is at stake as we are crumpled and straightened day after day. The shaded irony of all of this is that we are several steps removed from the gnashing of our spiritual paper. We aren’t the ones who are doing all of the crumpling of our lives, we are most often merely giving permission for somebody else to do it and smiling, thinking that we are being simply cheeky or trendy. We wonder why we go to bed addled with anxiety and depression feeling like a hollowed out watermelon rind, the thing that once made us delicious consumed by a tongue that doesn’t belong to us.
At first our sheet is merely aged, only transparent when held up to the light. A little worse for wear, but just as we feel whole, the next round of crumpling comes, and as all erosion does, eventually you lose so much of the original form that you can never make it whole again. You’re forever changed. We have been weathered our whole adult lives, and it is taking its toll.
Every facet of our lives is at the behest of an algorithm. I see it every day in “trends”, and “topics” and “triggers”. Currently if I were to look at social media, the clownish, over saturated HDR cartoons of people that I know and love are flowing across the screen in increasing amounts. Representations of real people formed through a prompt. Cartoon imaginings of people that are very real and unique eyes and minds. I know that the motivation is aesthetic and trendy, and rooted in generating temporary glee. That’s how they get us. A little bump of the good stuff here and there, you know, just to keep us going. I see it, and like any drug I fear for the things being taken from us. When will the crumpling result in an irreparable object with no hope of serving its unique purpose.
Like most things that are generated by software and digital code, it is just a small whisper of its insidious nature. This is anecdotal relating to a particularly current viral event. We have seen it before with the spread and inescapability of profile pictures and online interaction, but now it is becoming more egregious and the stakes are irreversibly higher. Maybe they always were. History being linear means we had to be there to get here. Every generated prompt, we are crumpling the paper that is who we are. We are feeding our faces, our identities, and our dreams of what makes us unique into an algorithm that is learning from it and dulling the sharp edges of our true form and our true identity. Taking pieces of ourselves and feeding them to a machine that is architected and wielded by people whose sole endeavor is profit and power. I know that perhaps I am a broken record, shouting into the void, but shout I must, because my voice is my own, and I merely mourn the loss of what we are giving away daily.
We have been numbed to all of this. It has been happening since the advent of social media, maybe even online community as a whole. Like all things human, these algorithms inevitably get distilled into one of two pursuits: profit and power, and the ones paying the cost are rarely receiving either. Your face, your identity, your ideology and your dreams are all being filtered through a generative algorithmic machine that not only dilutes and dries up the overall deep well of humanity, but poisons it in the process. It’s stealing what makes us human and using us as a tool, a cog in the machinations of profit and control.
Artificial Intelligence, influencer culture, post virality, the ever waking insidious machine. Paid for with the legal tender of our identities and sovereignty. Souls on sale to the lowest bidder. Blurred identities and manufactured alliances. We are led like cattle from one thing or another to the next. When the AI generated cartoons have lost their appeal, the next thing will be looming in the shadows, waiting to seize our attention and lead us further into the abyss of diluted sameness.
It’s not just our likenesses being stolen either. Our emotions are being seized and held captive, focused in directions that aren’t in the best interests of our welfare. We all see it. We all wonder how this person that we once knew, who we once shared a table with has become a parroting parody of the social climate that we inhabit. Daily outrage and disgust directed like a laser beam toward a very specific target. Each other. Manufactured righteousness worn like a two dollar patch, feeling a sense of authority because we agree with the right people. The rants and ravings of manufactured lunatics echoing through the digital halls of public discourse and identity, poisoning the aforementioned ever drying well of our humanity. And the cow moos and the horse bays as the sheep follow blindly.
It’s all on purpose. Every time you like, every time you click, every time you engage, you are filling the tankards of engagement and crumpling your paper. We are losing ourselves, metastasizing the foreign objects that we have willingly consumed for the sake of a little joy or a momentary “gotcha” of virtue. Our morality is being mutated into something that picks a side, arbitrated by on screen personalities and influencers, and ultimately absorbed into a cancerous identity who shrugs away anything that feels foreign or out of our control. We are being sold down the river, hollowed from the inside, crumpled into tissue, and left used up and with nothing left to give.
Who are you? Can you remember? Before you sold so many parts of yourself and crumpled your paper for the first time. Can you remember who lies underneath the cracked veneer that inevitably inhabits all of our skin on the quest for survival and wisdom in a broken world? Are you allowing those cracks to be filled with someone else’s grout to make you feel whole again?
Chuck Palahniuk said something relative back in 1996. I’d love to hear if he would amend this statement in modern terms with the scourge of the viral and corrosive algorithmic internet seeping into every crevasse of our fractured lives.
“You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”
Crap is beautiful. Crap is the foundation of life. Remember when you fertilized with your very personal and unique mixture of crap? Without it we are all living in a desolate hellscape, devoid of nutrients and truly living beings. I want to take a stab at modernizing what he said for our current times.
“You aren’t your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You aren’t how many likes you generated, or how many clicks you produced. You aren’t the uniform given to you by somebody else who designed it, meant to blend you into a world of linearity and predictability. You can’t be labeled, so quit allowing them to put one on you. Don’t be defined by the brands you like. You have your own voice, and it doesn’t require a keyboard or a smartphone. You are unique. You used to sing. You used to dance. You are sterilizing yourself. Be the crap. Fertilize culture, enrich the things you can touch.”
The kids say: go outside and touch grass. How long has it been since you have done that? How long has it been since you allowed yourself to feel uncomfortable? We have forgotten ourselves. All for the algorithm. I am merely asking you to remember what you were like before it existed. Compare that nostalgia to where you are and who you are now. That person is the one that we sorely need speaking out, shrinking the void, coloring the landscape, and fertilizing the soil of culture and life.
Unique voice among the many in this choir, I beg of you, tune into each other. The real each other. Don’t settle for someone else’s definition of who you are. Take real pictures, make original things. Be weird. Act out of the turn you were given. Break the algorithm in the way that only you can.
Remember dopamine? You can still have it but it’s going to be uncomfortable. So be uncomfortable. The world needs you now more than ever.