postmodernity

Chronicle

I here chronicle the events on Twitter of the 13th July 2024. I here chronicle the implosion of an industry, and the sociological deaths of at least three well know personalities. I here chronicle schadenfreude, accidental implosion, carelessness and fuck you, deserved comeuppance, and vicarious retort. I here chronicle 13,777 tweets, totalling 1,804,787 characters, being lived as 3,444 (and a quarter) human life hours. I here chronicle at least 956 subtweets, of various levels of passive aggressiveness. I here chronicle the sad tweets, alone in a desert of talk, who made comment without the full context, isolated in history, who post to advertise their blog, the promoted tweets to satisfy curiosity, to satisfy revenge as the dragon is tempted with a sweaty maiden. I here chronicle the vastly greater lurking viewers, the aeons worth of unsent messages and multiple thousand revised drafts. I here chronicle spelling mistakes noticed and unnoticed, atoned and unatoned for. I chronicle three burned meals, a stubbed toe, the faded white and blue afterimage decaying and pushing sleep, cats and dogs and fish unfed, general malaise, unlocalizable unease, no one feels like they won except the machinelike who continue to believe they have never made a mistake even as they pile up like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I chronicle the year following where 13 lost their jobs in ways directly or indirectly linked to particular tweets sent in this period. I chronicle the further deterioration of the environment over the next 100 years, the anthropocene, then the anti-anthropocene, the post-anthropocene waste. I chronicle the advent of generalised affordable commercial spaceflight whilst those with easily curable diseases continue to die due to the fact that some object by force of arms to the principle of charity. I here chronicle the sun, the sun, the sun, as it grows, as it grows, as it grows. I chronicle the messianic advent of immense power. I here chronicle that it came too late.

I here chronicle the field, in the sun, the grass waving in the warm breeze. There is no one here. The insects are silent, or gone, and occasionally a bird flies through heading elsewhere. The warmth of redness in your eyes, and the cold air’s caress of your back. The waft of your t-shirt, and the smell of spring. You look up and see immense superobjects of water vapour interact in the stinging blue

Aphorisms II

There is a joy of history in the fact that the totalising force and the absolutist will always be dogged by those with a voice, a blog. The might of the word, of knowledge, is similar to the might of the ocean. You may divert its force for a time, but it will flatten all land eventually. You may think you can divert it. But once something is realised, it stays realised.

You can’t stop someone being right, even if you take everything else from them. And that is beautiful. The pen is longer than the sword.

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When I hear someone exasperate about the internet, I always think – which comment annoyed you today? Which site fractured your sense of comfort in knowledge? Because of course, there is no such thing as the internet. There are only individual users, and groups… But then, that’s not quite right. The word – internet – like the word – society – has an image or sectional meaning whenever used in this way. It comes accompanied with – a comment section filled with drivel – the endless mass of opinions – lists of reviews, one to five stars, each with their set of entries… And I can’t help but think of this, whenever someone says ‘what’s wrong is the internet’ or jokes that… If it weren’t for the internet, we’d all be happy. The internet, they say, like a compulsion, their fingers itching to pick up a dustpan and brush, or an EMP device. I wonder if they know how they seem to us? We who have lived in the internet. They merely adopted the internet. We were born in it, moulded by it…

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To rehash an old philosophical kick – It is an image with a great inner weakness that is destroyed simply by the existence of difference.

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Since the old world is dead on its feet, we need only to keep living how we want, in order to push it softly into its grave. Culture is dead, long live culture.

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