Feeling particularly addicted to screens recently…bleh…wish I could get a dumb phone and disappear but I need like a gajillion apps for everything here. Also I have to come to terms that the act of purchasing a 150$+ flip phone made with the same slave-sourced minerals of the newest iPhone isn’t as sexy as it seems. But it seems so sexyy. I wanna put charms on it.
I’ve been reading Infinite Jest and I’m really getting into it. Around 600ish pages in all the storylines are established and the geopolitical background for the world is (I think) mostly explained. My favorite things so far include:
I don’t wanna write too much before I finish it. I’m around 40% in on my kindle, but everything after like 89% is footnotes, which I’m about 4-5% into (although I wish I was reading it physically because I think I might be missing a chunk of foot-foot-notes that I keep on being too lazy to click all the way back to see).
Anyways, this came to mind because in an interview David Foster Wallace said that rebellion against whatever shitshow is happening right now with American politics and the attention economy and iPhones and entertainment and everything (though he passed away without ever having seen YouTube Shorts), would be specifically UNSEXY. Because (I’m misquoting) living in this society of spectacle we’re taught that rebellion looks a certain way, occupies a certain image, but to truly rebel will look nothing like that. That’s what made me think “Ok yeah maybe no sexy Nokia 150$ flip phone…”
this is the full interview!! i still need to watch the whole thing.
I think that also articulated the ambiguity I’ve felt towards a lot of the stuff in the current political climate. I’ve had this unwavering belief that protest is an ultimate good. That going out physically rather than posting on your story will always be the better Praxis. But then, after the second No Kings rally, I feel those values being questioned. Protest doesn’t seem to be doing anything at all. Is protest a performance I’ve been socially conditioned to believe what rebellion looks like, but now because of how social media works, how we create and share and exist in a world of images, it lacks the same significance? And this world of images and signifiers we’ve just started existing in is already changing with AI, and even the images are even losing their significance, and it’s becoming a feedback loop of nothingness. What does rebellion look like in THAT world, then?
Idek. I’m in China, there’s AI everywhere, everyone on the train is either passed out exhausted from work, addicted to the most nothingburger vertical shorts dramas, or gambling on iphone gacha games. I have a comic to finish. Baiii