In hindsight—and it was clear then too, but less clearly—the void in our lives produced by lockdowns was filled with games and gameification, whether stocks, crypto, sports gambling, dating. We were thoroughly colonized and exploited.
Crypto prices and certain stock prices, then simply reflected the degree to which that was true—to which our exploitation was complete, our lives gameified.
Love has no higher purpose than as a moral function, something nested deep in our biology that transcends itself, and makes the body capable of self-sacrifice.
We have to understand how alien, and how horrifying, our paradigm of algorithmic morality—where digital virality determines norms, prosecutes and punishes—would be to someone from another era. One of the few things that gave people hope, one of the few unifying principles, for the last two thousand years has been the sense—and this is something that I think was secular as well as religious—that sin could be redeemed. Sin and sinning was a mark of having a soul.
All writing is code, which is why I feel a certain resistance towards the confessional mode: writing inscribes its own swerve away from both factual and phenomenological realities…