Signal loops,
Liquefaction.
Bodies register voltage.
Observation persists.
The Voltage Of The Age
It is intolerable to be programmed in a state of lack of awareness by operators who themselves lack awareness of what they are doing. This is intolerable, not only because such programming works very well but because it works progressively better. There is no hope that the circle will somehow crack open by itself because of lack of awareness on the part of the emitters and receivers will render it absurd. On the contrary, the longer the circle gyrates, the better it functions. People were more aware of the meaning of films at the time of the Lumiere brothers than they are at present.
(Vilém Flusser – Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations?, pp. 162-163)
Facebook launched it’s Slop Machine the other week and now OpenAI has launched its own.
As I said earlier this year, I think we are living though the (first?) Information Age Iconoclasm. Like when I overdosed on AI music the endless stream of uncanny short form videos that have my friends in all sorts of improbable situations ig giving me a similar feeling. Though, I still think my observation about social etiquette of sharing AI material is a good one.
A new social etiquette for sharing machine dreams is required. I’ll happily listen to your dreams over a beer, especially if they involve me. But in general, in polite company? You don’t share dreams. And perhaps people shouldn’t be so quick to share the raw dreams of the machine either.
But nevertheless. What is going on with media, what is happening to media in this present moment is absolutely thrilling. It feels like a redux of being 14 years old and learning about the existence of Napster and the total disregard for the entire structure of recorded media. Only this time its everything. A century of media theory, and centuries of common understanding around what media is, and what it does is collapsing around me.
All of media is dissolving into a grey goo in front of my eyes and its thrilling.
I use the word thrilling because it genuinely is the only word I can find to describe how I feel about everything that is happening in the world.
I few years ago, I wrote about my over half decade long battle with anxiety and how I started taking inositol and it went away. I suspect that if I was still an anxious person I would a quivering mess. But I’m no longer that person and I’ve realised that I do still detect responses in my body to the state of the world, to things that are happening to me and around me. But I am no longer registering them as anxiety. The same sort of somatic response, just processed differently.
I don’t mean this in a positive light AT ALL, the meaning of thrilling you might be reaching for: The causing sudden excitement, pleasure.
But instead I mean the feeling of intense emotion—especially from suspense, danger, or unexpected joy.
Every single day right now it seems like I’m waking up in the morning to some new piece of bullshit. Some new AI thing, some new crypto thing happening, some new insane crypto AND AI thing, politics is mad, war is happening and only going to get worse every where, a genocide is playing out in full view of the world, biosphere collapse, the news of AMOK collapse risk, there is no end to the horrors.
The sea is so very big and my boat is so very small.
But what a time to be alive, to be living though all of this, inside the churn.
It’s not that I want any of this to happen. It’s just can help but watch. As I said to someone the other day, my body keeps registering the ‘voltage of the age‘. Translating my former feelings of anxiety into something like exhilaration from the acceleration around me.
I want to stress that when I refer to something thrilling, it’s not joy I’m experiencing, nor am I feeling exhilarated by doom. Things are very very bad indeed, and I’m as big a doomer about things as the next person.
But nevertheless there is a kind of raw charge in the air, the feeling of contact with reality as I’m experiencing it. To be alive right now is to be pressed up against the membrane as it melts. The dissolution of everything, the end of Modernity, the entire of the Post Enlightenment era is coming to an end around us.
I opened this post with that Flusser quote which floated by on the New Models Discord this week, because its a great quote. And it realised on reading it that it points at a kind of path to follow.
The only response to this whole unfolding crisis is to stay fully awake inside the gyre. To resist being programmed into unawareness even as the slop machine churns out it’s dreams. We may not be able to slow the velocity of the ongoing circle, but we can at least pay attention to the circle itself, not it’s products. We can name the feeling as ‘voltage of the age’, and refuse to forget that we are in fact still here, alive, and can care for one another, as it’s all happening right now.
On The Blog
It’s that time of year when traffic to my Minimalist A6 Moleskine Pocket Bullet Journal Setup picks up. Ahead of the curve, I updated the post with the 2026 layout spreadsheet.
BYENNE
Just broke the half way point in the 100 notes on storydwelling I’ve been posting over on my leaftlet pub
The stories you grew up inside
are still with you.
You don’t leave them.
They re-stage you.
Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online writing, podcasts, and other creative projects.
As a thank you, I’ll post a hand-made zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.
No spam. No email. Just ink on paper, four times a year.
Photo 365
The Ministry Of My Own Labour
- Put the game out. Will blog about it soon!
- Had dinner and some beers with matt from webcurios on Monday. Super nice to meet and chat. Had a great evening.
- Long call about the design of fetch quests vs collectathons in game design — super interesting
- Learnt a lot about the emerging $100,000 dollar Reko Robot fight clubs that are emerging in SF. Extremely sci-fi.
- Caught up on advancements/current state of the art in world of gaussian splatting and drone mapping. Reached out to a youtube creator and we’re gonna have a call.
Terminal Access
Huw Lemmey guest posted at in the margins mag, writing about boredom and his experience walking the 1400 kilometre Camino route from Barcelona. Lovely piece.
I don’t think I found myself; and anyway, much of what I did find, I didn’t like. But I did at least see it, and the smallness of myself, which felt reassuring. Most of all, I felt myself delivered of a new kind of boredom, an active, productive boredom in which I didn’t want to reach for entertainment, for other human voices. I just wanted to pass through the world. It was in this state that I noticed a new physical sensation; a few hours into each day’s walk, my heart rate would rise, and for a short period – perhaps twenty minutes to half an hour – I would enter a euphoric state in which my perception of the world and my place in it was heightened to one of great joy. I began to think of this state as a Transcendental Boredom, in which my lifelong obsession with the consumption of mediated images and ideas dissipated. I simply was, and was bored, and was boring, and walked, and that was fine.
Dipping the Stacks
So, here’s my bugbear: the glaring deficit of writing around what millennial digital media theory would call new media practice and what I would call image technics. In short, we really just don’t know how complex visual culture is produced, which is why we feel so powerless to intervene as it is hijacked and driven into the distance by opportunistic AI companies.
I Replaced Animal Crossing’s Dialogue with a Live LLM by Hacking GameCube Memory
Animal Crossing. Infamous for its charming but ultimately repetitive dialogue. Having picked up the GameCube classic again, I was shocked (/s) to discover that the villagers still say the same things they did 23 years ago. Let’s change that.
Frontiers | Programmable reality
As AR devices become ubiquitous and indistinguishable from reality, these technologies blur the lines between reality and simulations. This raises profound questions about how we perceive and experience the world while having implications for memory, learning, and even behavior. Programmable reality enabled by AR and AI has vast potential to reshape our relationships with the digital realm, ultimately making it an extension of the physical realm.
The first evidence of a take-off in solar in Africa | Ember
This report provides significant new evidence of a very recent and sizable step-up of solar in Africa, across most countries, and of the scale that could significantly expand the electricity systems of many countries.
Who Killed the Narrative Podcast? | Rolling Stone
In truth, narrative podcasts had always been a strange business. Requiring months (and sometimes years) of reporting and an exhaustive writing and editing process, they were expensive to produce and struggled to attract enough advertising to pay for their budgets. (Weekly chat shows, with their consistent audiences and parasocial relationships between host and listener, were always a safer bet.)
Reading
I finished An African History of Africa: From the Dawn of Humanity to Independence by Zeinab Badawi. An absolutely fantastic book. I was saying to someone the other day that reading this book at 40 gave me the same feeling as reading a long duree history book when I was younger. All these empires, kings, queens, battles, myths legends to learn and find out about. Amazing.
Finishing that I decided to listen to the audio book edition of Impro by Keith Johnston. It’s been well over a decade since I first read it, and I already realise now I’m in a much older (wiser?) frame there is so much more to unpack and explore.
Still chipping away at Gordon White’s Ani.Mystic and I’ve been reading a little bit of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte on the train.
Music
Hiromoi – OUT THERE
I just got around to listening to Jazz legend Hiromi’s new album from earlier in the year. It features here Sonicwonder ensemble who played on her 2023 banger Sonicwonderland.
Whilst not the version that is on the album I direct you to this live rendition of the second track on the album ‘Yes! Ramen!’ for KEXP radio. It gives you a real flavour for what’s in store if you put the album on. Which btw is a fantastically paced affair.
KEXP is tbh my main source for new music theses days. Proper aging millennial situation lol.
Remember Kids:
So finally a writer must be willing to sit at the bottom of the pit, commit herself to stay there, and let all the wild animals approach, even call them up, then face them, write them down, and not run away.
Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg
Newsletter 📨
Subscribe to the mailing list and get my weeknotes and latest podcast episodes, sent directly to your inbox
Leave a Reply