Over time, you become someone other than yourself—a figure, a phenomenon, a trace, but not a real person. Notoriety has taught me that nobody wants to know anybody; everybody wants to have an opinion about somebody. You become a destination on the opinion map, a place to visit but not to linger.
Beauty should be protected not out of one-dimensional vanity or for the sake of Instagram, but because beauty saves souls and helps us communicate with nature. The face of a beautiful woman is a message—a symbol, for instance, that takes us to the depths of creation. It is not meant to be attached to a laptop screen or a phone screen all day, hunched over. In many senses, it is meant to be in the sun—sunlight, not blue light.
We think AI is impressive, but to build one super-intelligence you need five football fields and four billion dollars, or whatever. Costs may fall, yet the human brain remains far more efficient—and it has the benefit of ‘being’ integrated into the human body.
With the rise of industrial machines came modern athletics and the perfection of the human body, but also mass obesity and mass uglification; the same will happen with intelligence I predict: as computers perform our mental labor, some of us will become mentally beautiful and athletic, and some of us will become mentally ugly and obese. The fractal pattern will repeat.
We have two kinds of potential: animal potential, which means procreation, and rational potential, which means creation.
It’s probably true that if everyone woke up early and did thirty minutes of vigorous exercise they would be happy(er); bedrot is soulrot is bodyrot in a downward spiral.
We will never cease to be a synthesis of the spiritual and the animal; we are self-aware biological algorithms.
Desire is controlled online; and so people go crazy when they encounter it now IRL—because that can’t be controlled in the same hygienic ways; sensuality dies this way like a coral reef experiencing blight—all at once collectively, an integrated breakdown.
The only thing you can share and learn about on the internet that’s useful is how to counteract entropy, which is often sped up exponentially on the internet. Any information that doesn’t help you get healthier, wiser, or find real places of connection in the world is dead information—and dead information is 99.999998% of the internet.
To some degree, I have developed, if not social anxiety, at least a heightened self-awareness. Changes are—they know more about me than I know about them; they know something about me, while I know nothing about them. Whether this awareness is positive, neutral, or negative is beside the point: the point is being on the other side of the veil of ignorance.
… but his is all to say I went to a fun party last night—my friends’ dual birthday party on the Upper East Side in a big one-bedroom filled with books scattered across the floor, followed by the outrageous bill the group predictably accrued at Melody’s Piano Bar, and burgers and Fernet at JG Melons (where we took up three tables).
I am trying to win back the mental space for imagery gathered from reality—from impressions I experience in the world—away from the inbound stream of digital imagery. I count movies in theaters, paintings in museums, and photographs on real film as part of the former category; anything taken with a phone or created by AI belongs to the latter. Not all representations are created equal. Quantity, ubiquity, and filtering are the enemies; selection, editing, perception, vision, and depth are portals to the higher truth of reality.
Now that I think about it, the burdensome self-awareness I feel lately at parties is merely the presence of the internet: the dark matter of the unreal me that circulates in various refracted forms, while the real me carries on, looking for the mysterious secrets of the ordinary—the material, the embodied, the human: the supremely lovely music of being here.
The magnificent opening of John Milton’s “Of Education”: “I am long since persuaded that to say, or do aught worth memory and imitation, no purpose or respect should sooner move us than simply the love of God and of mankind. Nevertheless, to write now the reforming of Education, though it be one of the greatest and noblest designs that can be thought on, and for the want whereof this Nation perishes, I had not yet at this time been induc’d, but by your earnest entreaties, and serious conjurements; as having my mind for the present half diverted in the pursuance of some other assertions, the knowledge and the use of which cannot but be a great furtherance both to the enlargement of truth, and honest living, with much more peace.”
Blite! Who knew! Not a typo. TIL ...