TRTAII - blog

Stuff/objects are not just totems or trinkets

They are the primary means we have for interacting with the world outside ourselves, and if we can comprehend nonbiological external things or technologies as being *part* of ourselves, then they are clearly the primary method for tangibly making ourselves *part* of the world. All living and nonliving objects part of the same universe, as a selfless or self-integrated principle of aspiration.

I have a coffee cup, that I bought on the Internet from a pizza shop in Connecticut, printed with their image and contact information, to fondly remember a place where my wife and I had a very nice and meaningful meal early in our relationship.

To me, this is not a nostalgia object. It is a representation and an example of how we (quite literally) navigate the world and place ourselves into it.

How we build/attain/interact with these things, these tools, these objects of intense expression of ourselves, pieces of ourselves … these elements of the material nonliving world that we invite into our homes and our selves … that process of selection and choices is elemental to understanding who we are and have always been.

We are cyborgs, in the sense that we use and deeply/inextricably depend on technology, but we always have been. It’s one of the main distinguishing and distinctive things about us as people (maybe *the* thing that defines a person?). Adept creation and use of tools to mediate the world and our selves is a major sign we’re aware of our surroundings, that we are distinct from those surroundings, but that we also want to be a part of that world, and to be it ourselves. To repair our separation from it.

This Focus Features promotional photo of Oscar Isaac, from this year's The Card Counter, is savage. So textured it goes right past looking like a painting and into sculpted puppet diorama territory. The chair, with the cover on it, is mind blowing. A damn ghost of a chair. Bright orange bag. Friggin giant empty void of a fireplace. Kudos to director Paul Schrader, and cinematographer Alexander Dynan, who doesn't seem to have a Wikipedia page.

A Website is a place

As a 90s boi, I encountered and got to know the Internet as it was being both built up and sculpted at the same time, as it was making the transition from a novelty that everyone seemed to understand would become mammoth and panoptical over time, into the ubiquitous framework for the functions of our lives it is now. And for most of my adolescence and young adulthood, it very much did feel like a physical construction--first it seemed like there were very few (and very mediocre) newsstands, then there were many. First it seemed like there were very few stores, then there were many. The constructions of eBay and PayPal and instant messaging were very big deals, even if they seem quaint now.

The point is that these things didn't exist, and then they did, and it felt to me like they were built as tangible structures and tools, with their own heft and dimensional footprints and shadows.

The Internet doesn't really feel that way to me anymore, which is mostly fine but also sometimes a disorienting change. The primary way that I, and most other people, access The Online now is through the social media feed, which consists of endless scrolling streams of right-now information, often difficult to distinguish in terms of importance or value. We can customize and dial in the aesthetics or the quirks or the ideologies of our feeds, of course, or even slow them down, but those choices (if they even are real choices) present their own anxious entanglements.

This has many effects, one of which is that it makes most content feel temporary and disposable. Ideas diminish in value as minutes and days pass; our thoughts are all brand new cars being driven off the lot.

I crave an Internet that is a more balanced and honest representation of how I think we operate best as conscious actors in a dynamic, diverse society--it is thrilling and necessary to travel amongst and alongside our cultural rush hour traffic at very high speeds, though it is restorative and vital to also have a place for us to be and think and process and stage ourselves and our vibes.

Homepages for all of us. GeoCities but with, like, Youtubes and higher-res dancing mushroom gifs. That's all this is, with a friendly tone.