#sam kriss

[jacobwren]

“When, occasionally, genuinely significant things happen to Musk, Isaacson largely ignores them. In May 2002, Elon’s first wife Justine gave birth to their first child, a son. They named him Nevada, because he’d been conceived at Burning Man. When Nevada was ten weeks old, he suddenly stopped breathing in his sleep. Paramedics managed to resuscitate him, but his brain had been starved of oxygen. Three days later, his parents decided to turn off his life support and let him die. You could write an entire novel about this one incident. This brash, thoughtless millionaire, with all his abstract ambitions, suddenly encountering the frailty of human life. And that was only the beginning. Elon had invited his father to visit from South Africa and meet his grandson; Errol only found out that the grandson was dead once he landed. Elon, in deep anguish, decided he wanted his violent, abusive father to stick around. He bought a house in Malibu for Errol and his new family. But things swiftly got weird. Errol’s second wife, nineteen years his junior, started to develop some sort of untoward relationship with her stepson. (Errol commented: “She saw Elon now as the provider in her life and not me.”) Meanwhile, Errol was beginning to develop some sort of untoward relationship with his own fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Jana. (They currently have two children together.) This seedy drama, guilt and money and sex, all swirling around the death of a child. It’s a Harold Pinter play. It’s a Greek tragedy. Walter Isaacson dispenses with the whole thing in less than three pages. He ends the chapter with his grand conclusion, his final word on this intense human experience. It’s this: “Personal networks are more complex than digital ones.” The next chapter is about building rockets. So is the next one. So is the one after that.” - Sam Kriss, Very Ordinary Men: Elon Musk and the court biographer

#sam kriss #elon musk #walter isaacson

[inbabylontheywept]

I hate to confess this, but sometimes, when I am reading books of some kind, I'll get this very happy feeling of 'Oh! I could do that!'

Sometimes, it's a very literal 'I could do that', as in, I fully believe I could do that today. I say this while loving Frankenstein, but when I read that book at age 18 there was a very visceral sensation that a fellow 18 year old wrote it. Other times, it's this feeling of 'Eh, it's not my style, but I could probably imitate. Better than ChatGPT at least.'

And I like that, because it makes me feel like this writing this is, while not easy, something that I am doing quite well in.

But other times, I will read something and I will feel painfully jealous because I will admit that I have absolutely no fucking idea how they did that, and it was beautiful and stunning and I want it but I can't even imagine a world where I could do it.

And to name names, the first writer I know that does this basically every time is Sam Kriss. Everything that Sam Kriss writes makes me want to join a cult. I wonder how my idiot ancestors were duped into following a 14 year old farmboy to Utah just to survive malaria 5 times in 5 years by the Great Salt Lake, and then I read Sam Kriss and go oh, that's why. This is a compulsion that I always had, that was always in me, and I didn't know until I ran into his work. Like I inherited shrapnel from my father and had no idea until I stepped into an MRI machine and gave birth to this bloody chunk of rusted steel and all I could do was look at it and go "Ah, right, guess I did inherit that. Lovely."

The second is Terry Pratchett, who is not just funny, which is easy, but is relentlessly funny. Always funny. It never stops. He is a marathon of comedy, and the insane part of it to me is not that I couldn't write a single sentence as funny as him, it's that I could not possibly write three to five hundred consecutive pages of it.

Anyway: To the fellow hobbyists out there, who does this for you? Or are you wise enough to never look at some popular work and think "Eh, you know, I could do this?"

#writing #sam kriss #terry pratchett #womp womp #dont crucify me for thinking that frankenstein reads rough #theres a lot of truly amazing fiction that is kind of mid writing but gets carried through on strength of ideas #dune has some legendarily bad prose but its a masterpiece for good reason #if im trying not to get crucified i probably shouldnt criticize dune #too late

[riotouseaterofflesh]

You can wave a white flag; you can be an old woman or a newborn baby or someone else who visibly poses no threat whatsoever; you can be an Israeli hostage calling for help—if they see you, they will try to kill you. The five-month massacre in Gaza is not collateral damage, or an unfortunate side effect of the war against Hamas. There is no war against Hamas. Just this. The only military objective is to kill piano teachers and poets.

What I find really unbearable, though, what sticks in my throat like a clammy marble of rage, is the combination of mass murder and smugness. Israeli soldiers keep filming themselves committing smug atrocities. There’s one video I can’t stop thinking about: not even close to the worst thing the IDF has done, but maybe the most galling. An Israeli soldier stands in the ruins of a classroom in Gaza. He pulls a framed certificate off the wall and smashes it. He takes the time to erase the lessons from the chalkboard. Big man! How brave, this soldier encrusted in body armour and grenades! How heroically you defend yourself against a room where young children learn to read! But that really is exactly what he thinks. He thinks he’s being brave. Standing up against the oppressors of the Jewish people. Refusing to walk meekly into the gas chambers. He even writes it on the now-erased board: עם ישראל לא לפחד; the people of Israel aren’t afraid. Elsewhere Israeli soldiers posed in Gaza’s parliament building, grinning like they’d just taken the Reichstag. What a victory! This murderous ratissage into a city that’s been under Israeli occupation their entire lives, and their parents’ entire lives too. Then they planted dynamite around the building and blew it up. The entire country is mad off this stuff, and I do mean mad: saucer-eyed, loony. Israel’s foreign ministry shrieks like a funeral drunk whenever any government dares to raise an objection to its killing spree. Spain is Hamas! Ireland is ISIS! The whole world is made of Hitler! They also think they’re being brave. A lonely voice for justice. Confronting a cruel world with its complicity. At the Kerem Shalom crossing, protesters draped in the Israeli flag dance and sing and block aid shipments from entering Gaza. More famine! More disease! More stillborn children! They think they’re being brave too. The arctic glint of righteousness in their eyes. Even the more liberal sectors of Israeli society are getting in on it. Someone who was in Tel Aviv recently told me that most liberal Israelis don’t really have the emotional bandwidth at the moment to care too much about Palestinian suffering. They know what’s happening just down the coast from Tel Aviv, but it doesn’t register. They’re still in shock after October 7th, still worried sick for the hostages, still mourning the dead. It’s too early to worry or mourn for anyone else. The person who told me this didn’t think this Zone of Interest-style sociopathy was a bad thing. He didn’t understand why I found it so hideous. In a way, it’s also brave. It takes courage to let yourself really feel what you’re feeling, to sit with your grief, to admit that you hurt. It takes courage to be so emotionally complex. Not like the barbarians on the other side of the fence.

This madness is not limited to Israel. Everyone remembers being bullied at school. Even celebs, film stars, supermodels, beautiful and charismatic people, all seem to have had a hard time of it when they were kids. Some people build the entire foundation of their adult life on having been bullied as a child. You were such a misfit, you were so interesting and different… But nobody seems to remember being the bully, and I promise you that at some point in your life, you were also the bully. I certainly was. I couldn’t comprehend the senseless sadism of the kids who’d gang up on me, back when I was seven years old with dyspraxia and a speech impediment. What had I ever done to them? How could anyone bear to be so cruel? But somehow, all that stuff went out the window as soon as I encountered anyone lower down the totem pole than I was. My cruelty wasn’t senseless. Other people had been cruel to me, which made me a victim: anything I did was, by definition, fighting back, being brave. After all I’d been through, didn’t I deserve to experience the joys of power? Just a little? As a treat?

#israel #palestine #fear #against the brave #sam kriss #i read this and was immediately reminded of an especially paranoid anti-ceasefire rant i saw on tumblr earlier #what we want is not fear but the shame that leads to self-reflection

[luxe-pauvre]

We are living in an age of ambient unwellness. You need only look at how many products are out there promising to make you better. ­Nootropics to enhance your cognition, supplements for your bones and your skin and every one of your organs. Microdosing to enhance your creativity; therapy, of course, for your traumas. New and better sleep regimens. Unearthly powders and goos to replace all the actual food in your diet. Everything invites you to optimize yourself. The entire self, body and mind, isn’t just the thing you are: It’s a kind of machinery, something to be fine-tuned and set to work. The dream of a fully frictionless existence, a world of highly efficient cyborgs. Because if you’re not perfectly productive, if you let up for even a moment, you must be sick: The forces of decay will swallow you whole. The chronically ill person is a negative pole, the hidden shadow of this cyborg utopia. While the rest of us are in our manias of productivity, millions of people are imprisoned in their homes, stranded with terrible pains that have no identifiable physical cause, or exhaustion that can’t be cured by rest, or a fog that blots out the mind. Chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia are existential illnesses. The human body simply refuses to work: It ­announces itself in a way that can’t be ignored. Maybe it’s casting its own terrible veto on the sickness of the world. But I’m not so sure that these symptoms are, as the feminists of the 1970s would have it, simply acts of protest. (They’re also certainly not exclusive to women.) The bevy of new unexplained chronic ­illnesses seems to send the same message as everything else, just in a slightly different register. You are sick. You are broken. You need to get well. And when you have a discourse that’s fanatically focused on ­believing the sufferers, affirming their own understanding of what’s happened to them, all you can do is add your voice to the chorus. You are sick. You are sick. You are sick.

Sam Kriss, It’s Not All In Your Head

#Sam Kriss #It's Not All In Your Head

[torschlusspanikattack]

Had a moment, an episode, whatever you want to call it and stayed off social media (and to be real mostly tumblr since that’s all that’s left) for ~a week (can’t recall why exactly, I think it was originally over feeling humiliated at loss of self-control) but caught up on Sam Kriss until 5 in the morning (who I love reading but also usually always leaves me feeling awful) and now all I can stomach is getting the cheapest non-smart phone I can and a new sim card tomorrow and be done with being online at all, maybe that will stop the sense of suffering

—every possible thought i have or am exposed to sucks the maximum amount, i just want it to stop, i want to feel joy or pleasure or nothing (even without peace) in being instead of infinitely ruminating on agony as all my anxieties are played back to me by every stimulus ever always

#sam kriss

[grandhotelabyss]

Thoughts on the recent Sam Kriss S*bstack (lol) piece on poetry and second orality and plagiarism?

Both Kriss and Smith-Ruiu always make the Borgesian gesture of opening with an exotic historical anecdote-exemplum ("In 1437, the Aztec Empire's emissary to the Great Ming composed a Nahuatl aubade for the most beautiful of the court eunuchs" etc., that was a parody). The effect is sometimes too precious, but the first-paragraph portrait of Dede Korkut in his most recent essay does merit serious comparison to the Argentine master. Maybe I found it especially charming because I was assigned to read parts of the Penguin Classics Book of Dede Korkut in a college class (Introduction to Islamic Civilization).

Anyway, Kriss's is a well-rehearsed argument, and Ong and McLuhan and Derrida, whom he duly cites, were already making it over 50 years ago for the age of radio, cinema, and television. This is why I'm not persuaded when it's made almost word-for-word about the internet, too.

Kriss's analysis of Gay and Oxman and the perennial medievalism of the university is entirely persuasive, but the rest of the essay is the usual culture-apocalypse narrative, scarcely updated since The Waste Land, here blessed as our deliverance from liberal individualism, since Kriss is nominally a communist and not a conservative. An honest communist, in this case, one whose avowed mission is to dissolve us back into primal hordes in the night of time. I appreciate that he doesn't waste our time denying it.

As longtime readers of this site have learned from Staloff, communism's secret desire is to return us to the womb-comfortable dyad of peasant and priest, never mind the horseback warrior with the onion-rope of decollated heads dangling from his saddle who cantered in from Nietzsche as a misleadingly strenuous Marlboro advertisement for the whole situation. See also Judith Butler's musings on "communist ontology," at which even Cornel West, who understands himself in part as the heir to Emerson, seems to recoil. (The true dialectical understanding of Marx is that he began as Prometheus and ended as the vulture.)

Meanwhile, a million girls, gays, and theys on BookTok may not be as original as they think they are, given that they're all telling us to read The Secret History, but I promise you they're individuals to their parents and siblings and friends and lovers, and this turns out to be message of their favorite book:

How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.

Yet the irony here is that any novelist reading the Iliad and the Odyssey can detect, without having to be a philologist, that their folkloric and formulaic substratum was assembled by a novelistic sensibility—the tension between tradition and the individual talent always pertains; the existence of the former does not disprove the existence of the latter—since you don't arrive at a narrative as intricate and braided as Lord Jim, which the Odyssey is, simply through the formularies of orature, majestic as these may be in their own right.

And a further irony: the birth of individual consciousness out of the steppe-horde is exactly the tale the Iliad has to tell, as it narrates Achilles's initiation into humane selfhood through first his murder and then through his mourning of the beautifully civilized Hector, an initiation recapitulated in the dialogic form of the epic itself, which almost seems to side with Trojan over Achaean despite its Greek provenance, surely as so many of Dostoevsky's own sympathies are vested in Ivan. Unless we begin by understanding that Homer was a novelist, we won't get anywhere at all.

As for the relevance of the novelistic today, I would argue, very much against Kriss, that it takes a Balzac, not a steppe-singer, to even begin to explain what's going on with the jostle and scrum of the politicos on X or the influencers on Instagram. Even a figure as superficially ludicrous as Ian Miles Cheong belongs, in the sheer social and psychological density of what he represents, in Lost Illusions, not in the Lais of Marie de France.

I won't go as far as Saul Bellow, who once compared those insisting the novel was dead to Nazis and Stalinists, insofar as each group slated whole peoples, classes, and ways of life (the novelistic being a way of life) for destruction, but there's something to it—and even something important to notice in the fact that Bellow was saying this decades and decades before we all had phones or went online, was saying it before Kriss or I were even born.

For a certain kind of person, the world is always ending. In the spirit of the steppe and its cultural cognates, I can accept that this is their dharma or their astral destiny, but in the spirit of the city and its cognates, the novel chief among them, I mistrust their influence. Here is a reply to Kriss's essay on Substack:

Agreed, but a step too short.  More pretense needs to be dropped.  Ideally, most  also need to explicitly admit that they are really the (socially awkward) heirs of steppe bullshit artists, whose life’s work is tediously rearranging fragments of other’s ideas in the service of crafting mythic justifications for the narrow values of their social class.

It's a dishonest reply, and I'm glad it is, because if its author believed it, he would surely kill himself. There is something obscurely evil in Kriss's kind of writing: it signs off on the immolation of whole worlds with the excuse that it only describes what it actually seeks to enact. I fear it—and I fear it all the more because its description-enactment is so beautiful—so sirenic—a song.

#sam kriss

[bambamramfan]

This is only the last in a back and forth series between Sam Kriss and Scott Alexander about “what is a nerd” vis a vis media consumption and hipsters and the MCU.

The initial Sam on All the nerds are dead.

Scott’s response: Contras Kriss on Nerds and Hipsters.

Sam’s 3-comment response below.

Scott’s highlights and responses to the best comments, including that one.

I found it fun reading, but don’t blame you if that looks like a lot to read. However, I’m not going to pretend I can summarize it in just a couple quote blocks. Possibly the most controversial part is Sam claiming the definition of nerds is “they like things that are bad”, which he later backs up to “orthogonal to quality.”

Not my favorite discourse to weigh into, and most of my feelings on the subject were covered by SMG nearly a decade ago in his SomethingAwful thread of gamergate (copied in one place here.)

But I guess I disagree enough about the relevance of art being good. Sam says

this is a nice account of things, and it very neatly gets around my tendency to make a lot of invidious judgements about quality. instead of talking about good things and bad things, you can use the much more parsimonious and quantifiable categories of popular and obscure. it makes a lot of sense. but i’m still not fully convinced.

Which I sympathize with. I definitely agree that some art is *better* than other art, even if we have trouble defining it. But I don’t think we can rely on that to identify different sociological groups. Indeed, if some groups entirely don’t like “good art”, then good is really just a relativist term. My feeling of quality is that it is something everyone can appreciate, at least if they have the context for it. Quality resists boundaries and labels and predictability because it is just too powerful to deny.

The tragedy is not that “nerds like bad media and not good media” but that don’t know why they like the good things they see, and chase after that high down the wrong paths. SMG in the above thread says:

What fans really want is the nominal success of this stuff being declared great art and being perceived as great art, without the actual effort of subjecting it to analysis and otherwise being artistic. Like, remember Watchmen? Watchmen sure was deep, huh? Now let's bulk-order crates of Applebees Presents: Alien Meets The Jetsons and Infinite Continuity Minutia Volume 8.

Is there something sublime when Vader tells Luke he is his father? Yes. Is this in any way enhanced by rattling off the technical specifics of the fleet of super star destroyers or whether one could defeat the Enterprise D*? No, not at all. (And obviously the Enterprise would win.)

Now, is the hobby of detailing the technical minutia of a fictional world inherently unhealthy? Of course not. But if you really believe that way lies the “good part”, you can spend a very, very long time digging for more “good” and become increasingly bitter in the process. A personal example: watching every episode of Buffy season 6 hoping this episode will have something happen or otherwise be a good use of my time.

And the problem is the bitterness and resentment at the franchise as it drags on and takes newer, even more commercialized forms, and so you start looking for something to blame. Oh sure it’s commercialized, but the problem is it’s commercialized for the wrong people, not that 70′s Lucas and Timothy Zahn were artists who caught lightning in a bottle and you shouldn’t expect that to last forever.

... between there and godliness, only 60% as bad but still not great, are the Trope Hunters. They realize what makes art great is not how many laser batteries can fit on a Corellian cruiser. It’s tropes, like whether the main character is a Mary Sue, or the love interest is a “Baroness” or a trashfire? Are the women in it fridged, or are the men all Homer Simpsons? Does a character die in one of a hundred different ways that are all neatly categorized to sum up what the cultural bias of the work is? Ew, how can you read that book it’s just another Chosen One narrative. It’s about literary analysis not diagetic technical specifications, so it must be on the side of God.

Turns out any interpretative tool that is one step up from what you were using before, can still be a prison. You can miss the forest for an entirely new set of trees.

The way that kind of nerd goes wrong is they get excited for a new franchise solely on what tropes people says it has because they never see them (except for all the times that trope has appeared in previous media if you went looking for it), they watch four episodes because either a) it had another trope you could match it to, and that was bad or b) they just kinda lost interest.

This doesn’t mean monitoring your media for certain trigger warnings is bad, or there aren’t indeed some over used tropes in media (find a recent television show for me *not* about found family and trauma.) But if it’s your only lens, you’re still falling into the trap of not knowing why you like some things and leading yourself astray.

#nerds #sam kriss #slatestarcodex

[thejaymo]

This is, far more than New York, a vertical city. NYC has tall buildings, sure, but the ground they’re built on is basically flat and monotonous, griddable, domesticated. In New York, every ten-degree gradient gets called a hill. Meanwhile, Chongqing has two entirely distinct height maps: the geological piling-up of high sheer hillsides around the Yangtze, and the anthropogenic piling-up of skyscrapers. The two series seem to relate only by accident. It’s almost meaningless to talk about any building having a ground floor here, where the ground twists and whorls around you; a block might have one main entrance on the lowest floor, another on the third, another on the fifth. A two-dimensional map is worse than useless. Walking anywhere means heaving up the omnipresent staircases that mark vanished cliffs; driving is done on a perplexing maze of ramps, looping everywhere like a lifesize game of Marble Run. 

Sam Kriss on visiting Chongqing, China

#Chongqing #china #sam kriss #newsletter #cyberpunk #future #nyc

[evamysteria]

People will cheerfully admit that the internet has destroyed their attention spans, but what it’s really done away with is your ability to think. Usually, when I’m doing something boring but necessary—the washing up, or walking to the post office—I’ll constantly interrupt myself; there’s a little Joycean warbling from the back of my brain. ‘Boredom is the dream bird that broods the egg of experience.’ But when I’m listlessly killing time on the internet, there is nothing. The mind does not wander. I am not there.

- Sam Kriss, 2022

#the internet is already over #sam kriss

[arcticdementor]

According to one theory, the internet is made of demons. Like most theories about the internet, this one is mostly circulated online. On Instagram, I saw a screenshot of a Reddit post, containing a screenshot of a 4chan post, containing a screenshot of Tweet, containing two images. On the left, the weird, loopy lines of a microprocessor. On the right, the weird, loopy lines of a set of Solomonic sigils. Caption: ‘Boy I love trapping demons in microscopic silicon megastructures to do my bidding, I sure hope nothing goes wrong.’ In other versions, the demons themselves are the ones who invented the internet; it’s just their latest move in a five-thousand-year battle against humanity. As one four-panel meme comic explains:

The king’s pact binds them. They cannot show themselves or speak to us. 1) Create ways to see without seeing 2) Create ways to speak without speaking

Pictures of more Solomonic sigils, progressing into laptops and iPhones. The fourth panel, the punchline, has no words. Only a giant, mute, glassy-eyed face.

This theory is—probably—a joke. It is not a serious analysis. But still, there’s something there; there are ways in which the internet really does seem to work like a possessing demon. We tend to think that the internet is a communications network we use to speak to one another—but in a sense, we’re not doing anything of the sort. Instead, we are the ones being spoken through. Teens on TikTok all talk in the exact same tone, identical singsong smugness. Millennials on Twitter use the same shrinking vocabulary. My guy! Having a normal one! Even when you actually meet them in the sunlit world, they’ll say valid or based, or say y’all despite being British. Memes on Instagram have started addressing people as my brother in Christ, so now people are saying that too. Clearly, that name has lost its power to scatter demons.

Everything you say online is subject to an instant system of rewards. Every platform comes with metrics; you can precisely quantify how well-received your thoughts are by how many likes or shares or retweets they receive. For almost everyone, the game is difficult to resist: they end up trying to say the things that the machine will like. For all the panic over online censorship, this stuff is far more destructive. You have no free speech—not because someone might ban your account, but because there’s a vast incentive structure in place that constantly channels your speech in certain directions. And unlike overt censorship, it’s not a policy that could ever be changed, but a pure function of the connectivity of the internet itself. This might be why so much writing that comes out of the internet is so unbearably dull, cycling between outrage and mockery, begging for clicks, speaking the machine back into its own bowels.

…

Back when I spent half my days on social media, I did much the same thing. I would probably have also celebrated a murder, if the victim had once tweeted something I didn’t like. Now, looking back on those days is like trying to remember the previous night through a terrible hangover. Oh god—what have I done? Why did I keep saying things I didn’t actually believe? Why did I keep behaving in ways that were clearly cruel and wrong? And how did I manage to convince myself that all of this was somehow in the service of the good? I was drunk on something. I wasn’t entirely in control.

…

As more and more of your social life takes place online, you’re training yourself to believe that other people are not really people, and you have no duty towards them whatsoever. These effects don’t vanish once you look away from the screen. The internet is not a separate sphere, closed off from ordinary reality; it structures everything about the way we live. Stories of young children trying to swipe at photographs or windows: they expect everything to work like a phone, which is infinitely responsive to touch, even if it’s impossible to engage with on any deeper level. Similarly, many of the big conflicts within institutions in the last few years seem to be rooted in the expectation that the world should work like the internet. If you don’t like a person, you should be able to block them: simply push a button, and have them disappear forever.

In 2011, a meta-analysis found that among young people the capacity for empathy (defined as Empathic Concern, “other-oriented feelings of sympathy,” and Perspective-Taking, the ability to “imagine other people’s points of view”) had massively declined since the turn of the millennium. The authors directly associate this with the spread of social media. In the decade since, it’s probably vanished even faster, even though everyone on the internet keeps talking about empathy. We are becoming less and less capable of actual intersubjective communication; more unhappy; more alone. Every year, surveys find that people have fewer and fewer friends; among millennials, 22% say they have none at all. For the first time in history, we can simply do without each other entirely. The machine supplies an approximation of everything you need for a bare biological existence: strangers come to deliver your food; AI chatbots deliver cognitive-behavioral therapy; social media simulates people to love and people to hate; and hidden inside the microcircuitry, the demons swarm.

I don’t think this internet of demons is only a metaphor, or a rhetorical trick. Go back to those sigils, the patterns of weird loopy goetic lines that signify the presence of demons in online memes. Most of those designs come from the grimoires of the sixteenth and seventeenth century—and of these, probably the most significant is the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, or the Lesser Key of Solomon. Unlike most old books of demonology, the Lesser Key is still in print, mostly because it was republished (and extensively tinkered with) by Aleister Crowley. But despite its influence, the Lesser Key is mostly plagiarized: entire sections were simply ripped out of other books circulating at the time. Most prominently, it reproduces much of the Steganographia, a book of magic written by Johannes Trithemius, a Benedictine abbot and polymath, around 1499.

The Steganographia is a blueprint for the internet. Most of the book is taken up with spells and incantations with which you can summon aerial spirits, who are “infinite beyond number” and teem in every corner of the world. Here, the purpose of these spirits is to deliver messages—or, more properly, to deliver something that is more than a message. Say you want to convey some secret information to someone: you compose an innocuous letter, but before writing you face the East and read out a spell, like this one to summon the spirit Pamersyel: “Lamarton anoyr bulon madriel traſchon ebraſothea panthenon nabrulges Camery itrasbier rubanthy nadres Calmoſi ormenulan, ytules demy rabion hamorphyn.” Immediately, a spirit will become visible. Then, once the other person receives the letter, they speak a similar spell, and “having said these things he will soon understand your mind completely.” A kind of magic writing that works like speech, instant and immediate. Not an object composed by another person, but a direct simulation of their thoughts—and one that’s delivered by an invisible, intangible network, covering every inch of the world.

Trithemius was a pious man; in a long passage at the start of the book, he insists that these spirits are not demons, and that “everything is done in accordance with God in good conscience and without injury to the Christian faith.” But readers had their suspicions; he does repeatedly warn that the spirits might harm you if given the chance. And while his internet can be used for godly ends, it can also be used for evil. “For though this knowledge is good in and of itself and quite useful to the State, nevertheless if it reached the attention of twisted men (God forbid), over time the whole order of the State would become disturbed, and not in a small way.” Today, a broad range of sensible types are worried—and not without cause—that the internet is incompatible with a civic democracy. Trithemius saw it first.

But the Seganographia held a secret, and its real purpose wasn’t revealed until a century after its publication: this book of magic is actually a book of cryptography. Not magic spells and flying demons, but mathematics. Take the spell above: if you read only the alternating letters in every other word, it yields nym di ersten bugstaben de omny uerbo, a mishmash of Latin and German meaning “take the first letter of every word.” This is a fairly simple approach; Trithemius warns that Pamersyel is “insolent and untrustworthy,” and that the spirits under his command “speed about and by filling the air with their shouts they often reveal the sender’s secrets to everyone around.” Others are subtler. The book’s third volume wasn’t decoded until 1998, by a researcher at AT&T Labs.

…

Exactly how long have we been living with the internet? There’s a boring answer, which gives a start date some time in the second half of the twentieth century and involves “packet-switching networks.” But the more interesting answer is one that considers the meaning of the internet, rather than its technological substrate: the thought of a world lived at a distance, a dream and a nightmare that has been with us for a very long time. The internet dates back five thousand years, or five billion, or it hasn’t been invented yet. In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, Justin E.H. Smith pleads for the interesting answer. The internet is very old; it is “only the most recent permutation in a complex of behaviors that is as deeply rooted in who we are as a species as anything else we do: our storytelling, our fashions, our friendships; our evolution as beings that inhabit a universe dense with symbols.”

Smith is a philosopher of science at the University of Paris, an occasional Damage contributor, and one of the most interesting public intellectuals of our age. He’s one of the few people writing on the internet who manages to avoid writing like the internet. Online writing might be about birds or Proust or the Kuiper Belt, but always in a way that’s optimized for the endless, tedious war being fought on social media. Occasionally, Smith will even write about cancel culture or wokeness or Trump, but always in a way that points away from the squabbles of the day, and towards a more genuine fascination with the things and the history of the world.

In this book, he shows us prototypes for the internet in some unexpected places. Like me, Smith finds demons at the origin of the digital age: here, it’s in the Brazen Head, a magical contraption supposedly built by the thirteenth-century scholar Roger Bacon. Like a “medieval Siri,” this head could answer any yes or no question it was given; it was a thing with a mind, but without a soul. Bacon’s contemporaries were convinced that the head was real, and that he had created it with the help of the Devil. Seven hundred years ago, we were already worried about the possibility of an artificial general intelligence.

If it’s possible to build a machine that has a mind, or at least acts in a mind-like way, what does that say about our own minds? Leibniz, a pioneer of early AI, insisted that his gear-driven mechanical calculator did not think, because the purely rational and technical operations of the mind—adding, subtracting—are not real thought. “It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours like slaves in the labor of calculation;” a calculating machine would allow us to spend more time fully inhabiting our own minds. Today, of course, it’s gone the other way: computerized systems form our opinions for us and decide what music we enjoy; dating-app algorithms choose our sexual partners. Meanwhile, the pressures of capitalism force us to act as rational agents, always calculating our individual interests, condemned to live like machines. It has all, Smith admits, gone very badly wrong. But it could have gone otherwise.

…

It’s a fascinating argument, and a tempting one. Like Smith, I’m fascinated by very early computers, which are ultimately far more interesting than the machine I’m using to write this review. The Jacquard loom, the Leibniz machine, the Babbage engine: these devices seem to point the way to an alternative internet, something very different to the one we actually have. At one point Smith mentions Ramon Llull, a hero of mine and a major influence on Leibniz’s first doctoral dissertation, who invented a mechanical computer made of paper which he imagined could help us understand the nature of God. What would our internet look like if it had kept to its thirteenth-century purpose? Well, Smith suggests, maybe it would look like Wikipedia, “this cosmic window I am perched up against, this microcosmic sliver of all things.”

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is is, well, not what you think it is. Some online reviewers have been surprised by this book: they expected a pointed screed about how the internet is ruining everything, and instead they get an erudite, quodlibetical adventure through the philosophy of computation. They wanted to be told that the internet is a sudden, cataclysmic break from the world we knew, and they get a “perennialist genealogy,” an account of how things are “more or less stable across the ages.” It’s not as if Smith has failed to properly consider the opposite position. The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is grew out of an essay in The Point magazine, titled “It’s All Over,” which was also about the internet but struck a very, very different tone. “It has come to seem to me recently that this present moment must be to language something like what the Industrial Revolution was to textiles.” The piece was, he writes, “the closest thing to a viral hit I’ve ever produced.” Strangely, one of the things the internet likes is essays about how awful and unprecedented the internet really is. Online essays feed off rupture. Maybe the sustained intellectual activity that comes with writing a book reveals the connections instead: the way things all seem to hang together in an invisible net. Theodor Adorno describes thought as a kind of hypertext, a network, a web:

…

This doesn’t mean that the boring answer was the right one all along. Thinkers of the past have plenty to teach us about the internet, and the world has indeed been doing vaguely internetty things for a very long time. But as I suggested above, our digital internet marks a significant transformation in those processes: it’s the point at which our communications media cease to mediate. Instead of talking to each other, we start talking to the machine. If there are intimations of the internet running throughout history, it might be because it’s a nightmare that has haunted all societies. People have always been aware of the internet: once, it was the loneliness lurking around the edge of the camp, the terrible possibility of a system of signs that doesn’t link people together, but wrenches them apart instead. In the end, what I can’t get away from are the demons. Whenever people imagined the internet, demons were always there.

Lludd and Llefelys, one of the medieval Welsh tales collected in the Mabinogion, is a vision of the internet. In fact, it describes the internet twice. Here, a terrible plague has settled on Britain: the arrival of the Coraniaid, an invincible supernatural enemy. What makes the Coraniaid so dangerous is their incredibly sharp hearing. They can hear everything that’s said, everywhere on the island, even a whisper hundreds of miles away. They already know the details of every plot against them. People have stopped talking; it’s the only way to stay safe. To defeat them, the brothers Lludd and Llefelys start speaking to each other through a brass horn, which protects their words. Today, we’d call it encryption. But this horn contains a demon; whatever you speak into it, the words that come out are always cruel and hostile. This medium turns the brothers against each other; it’s a communications device that makes them more alone. In the story, the brothers get rid of the demon by washing out the horn with wine. I’m not so sure we can do that today: the horn and its demon are one and the same thing.

#sam kriss #damage magazine #justin e.h. smith #book review #internet #social media #food for thought

[jacobwren]

“Walter Isaacson is the perfect writer for the biographies of our times because he appears to be a born sycophant, and fate decreed that he would be in the right position, at the right moment, to spread as much propagandistic bullshit as possible. After stints at Harvard, Oxford, the Sunday Times and Time magazine—Christopher Hitchens called him “one of the best magazine journalists in America”—Isaacson was appointed CEO at CNN in July 2001. During the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, he sent his staff a memo, warning them not “to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” Every mention of people being vaporized in their homes by U.S. bombers had to be “balanced” with reminders that these were the people responsible for 9/11. “You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” Later, he told PBS that he wasn’t really so jingoistic: CNN initially tried reporting on the casualties in Afghanistan, but then they received some pushback. “You would get phone calls,” he said. “Big people in corporations were calling up and saying, you’re being anti-American here.” So he caved. What else was he supposed to do? Follow the demands of human dignity even in the face of mild, non-life-threatening opposition? Don’t be ridiculous.” - Sam Kriss, Very Ordinary Men: Elon Musk and the court biographer

#sam kriss #elon musk #walter isaacson

[earendilsass]

Did some more tmagp sketches

#my pen ran out of ink before i got to draw lena :[ #tmagp #the magnus protocol #tmagp fanart #alice dyer #sam khalid #colin becher #gwen bouchard #art #kriss's art #somehow alice STILL didnt turn out exactly like i wanted her to

[inbabylontheywept]

All that remains: Part I

In the land just past the Decapolis, by the tombs of the city's most ancient forebears, there lived a man called Legion. Some days, he howled like a beast, laughing as he savaged his own flesh with the jagged edges of stones. Other days he wept like a child, teeth chattering even as the sun blazed overhead. But more days still, he lingered in the quiet spaces, haunted but lucid: A stranger to the land and a stranger to himself.

He called himself Legion because he was made of many parts. Memories without attachments, stories without endings. Fragments. Worse, he felt like he could only hold a few of the pieces at a time. Trying to assemble himself felt like an endless effort of cupping his hands together tight, filling them with details, reaching up to his mouth, and realizing they had already slipped through his fingers. An endless thirst for which he had no cure. 

The town called him Legion, because they remembered what he often forgot: That he was a Roman, as well as a former soldier. If he’d been anything less, they’d have driven him away. Instead, they fussed over him endlessly, all too aware that to harm a single hair upon his head was to invoke the wrath of the largest army the world had ever seen.

(Which was a problem, because he was all too willing to harm himself.)

On Legion’s good days they simply gave him space. He’d tried describing once, all the things that could bring his demons out: The clash of metal, the twang of a bowstring. A scream of pain. Those were easy enough to remember and avoid, but others were not. Certain phrases in Latin, ones related to marching, used for giving directions. Certain smells - the roasting of pork, the burning of sulfur. The way some men from distant lands braided their hair. 

So many little things. 

They were a lot to keep track of, and the cost of failure was high. It seemed easier for the people of the town to simply avoid him altogether. That it let them ignore his suffering was simply a pleasant side effect. 

On his bad days, they had to intervene more directly. He was strong when he was well, but his sickness could make him almost invincible. Whole teams of men would be sent into the tombs while he screamed and roared, and it could take them hours to tie him down and pry the rocks from his trembling fingers. To put a rolled up rag into his mouth and silence the phrase he shouted over and over, summoning more demons into himself with each incantation: TORNA MIRA, TALIS EST COMODUM MILES BARBATI. 

Sometimes, it took more than a day of being restrained that way for him to find himself again. They’d send children out to the edge of the town to listen, and when he finally went silent they’d travel back to free him from his chains. It was a beastly, shameful task every time, and Legion made it worse by never being angry. Without fail, the first thing he said every time the rag was removed was:

Συγγνώμη, δεν ήθελα να σε τρομάξω.

Forgive me, I did not mean to scare you. 

Everyone knew that the way things were being handled wasn’t enough. Everyone, even Legion, knew how things would end. They just weren’t sure when. 

It turned out that it was longer than six years.

#historical fiction #weird theology #thanks sam kriss #i liked writing this but i am mostly relieved that its done so i can write something else #bible fiction? #cant believe i left mormonism just to keep writing bible fanfiction lol #its like my peoples legacy to keep doing this #the ol' family tradition #theism

[luxe-pauvre]

Just learn how to code, and you’ll be fine. But something’s missing. Code what? To do what? And why? […] None of these start-ups are doing anything new or interesting. Which shouldn’t be surprising: how often does anyone have a really good idea? What you actually get is just code, sloshing around, congealing into apps and firms that exist simply to exist. Uber for dogs, GrubHub for clothes, Patreon for sex, Slack for death, PayPal for God, WhatsApp for the spaceless non-void into which a blind universe expands. The constant recombination of worn-out elements. Companies that make useless products to help other companies make useless products that help other companies make useless products. There are start-ups that spend tens of thousands on names and branding before they even come up with a product or see if anyone might want it. This is called innovation, but what it actually represents is a culture that piles up the garbled detritus of the old in lieu of creating anything new, and a morbid economic order drowning in its own surplus liquidity and willing to invest in any bubble that comes along. […] Time is not moving us forwards. There has not been progress. The tech boom is not the first trembling steps of a new era. Its growth and dynamism is the halo of rot spreading over the globe.

Sam Kriss, The long, slow, rotten march of progress

#Sam Kriss #The long slow rotten march of progress

[antiquery]

The more Russia modernises, the more it reeks of the past: your past. When you talk about Russia, you are always talking about the parts of yourself you’d rather forget. Here is Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian, world-history in an armoured car, the hot dog man who went to war against Heaven. And who made him? Who ordered the shock therapy? Who sold a superpower off for scrap? Who pimped its women? Who built this beautiful Russia of the future?

#bookshelf blogging #Sam Kriss is f*cking fantastic. he makes me so mad. I would kill to write like him

[grandhotelabyss]

—Sam Kriss, “The Internet Is Already Over”

Kriss’s Substack debut—ironically, self-consciously so. It’s an aesthetically unified performance, true essayism, so a nitpicking “actually” objection would be a category error. And yet I do think it’s a mistake to conflate social media (to which Kriss’s argument does apply) with “the internet” (to which it may not). I can easily imagine Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. being regarded in the future as a bizarre society-wide vice maliciously promoted by irresponsible elites, like cigarettes or medicinal cocaine, especially when it comes to their unconstrained use by minors. I find it less easy to envision our going all the way to back to print, terrestrial radio, and cable TV as the sole conveyances of culture. The blog qua literary genre, for example, has been a positive development, as Kriss’s own work attests.

#sam kriss #cultural studies #media studies #internet #social media