Posting, gossip and images have a function in society today–they are a form of moral-bonding. It’s to say: I too affirm this reality and want to build this world. More than informational activities, they take on a primal ritualistic function; to form some consensus around what is real. Increasingly, we’re performing this function through our feeds.

From pseudo-simulationist Elon Musk’s “There’s a one in a billion chance we are in base reality,” to the way the colloquial has embedded shorthand, catchall words with metadata to express the visceral, all-too sharp and pointed feeling of something being too real: “fr”, “real”, “chat/grok is this real?”. Everywhere, we grasp at attempts to affirm reality in a material way. In an era where human agency is allegedly displaced by algorithms, capitalism increasingly ‘lifting’ itself from its material constraints, and ecological breakdown floating as an ambient “new normal”, life persists even as meaning collapses; affect takes over as an axis around which reality is negotiated. What emerges is an “extinction image” of the world, both an aesthetic and ontological condition in which images hijack the nervous system, transmitting a feeling rather than information. Many essays in this glorious publication address this in diverse ways. In ‘Super Fake’ Günseli Yalcinkaya traces this shift through luxury counterfeits and AI generated media; authenticity is secondary to virality and circulation. In ‘Historical Fanfic’, Mohamed Al Mubarak shows how nostalgia animates a phantom historical figure whose existence cannot be conclusively verified.

Al Hassan and I started this conversation back in 2024: ‘what’s real?’ or ‘how can we tell what is real?’, and it sparked almost three years of investigation. And of course, not to bury the lede, but having combed through over 600 pages and text from 60 contributors, I think it’s safe to say that this is the most Tantalean quest; an inquiry suspended in perpetual deferral. Because the very act of initiating this question means the answer is predetermined; it’s a question that doubles as rhetoric. But I think the impossibility of determining the answer is what makes it a deeply human endeavor; and that perhaps, in an age where we are hellbent on delineating the artificial from the real, that what characterizes the real is its “impossibility”-- the very painful, embodied experiences and sensations that cannot be fully captured by language or systems of knowledge.

Asking the question and ‘painstakingly’ (pun intended) looking for answers is helpful though – it’s never in vain. What emerged through tomes of essays here is a strong thread on ‘pain’. It feels like we are all saying: “omg I felt that and it was too real.” It makes me think we are really in a Bataillean era–for Georges Bataille, pain is a threshold experience. A point at which the subject is destabilized and forced to encounter what can’t be represented. And in that, what is real will always exceed the systems built to represent it. Language, reason, order, code and computation: these are all attempts to concretize it; but pain and bodily phenomena become vectors that overflow them. (Don’t miss Yasmin Alrabiei’s diaristic essay ‘i miss pain fr(?)’ and my interview with New York-based writer Stephanie LaCava on her literary protagonists whose experiences of body horror are all attempts to ‘feel something’.)

Working on this publication also coincided with some of the strangest years my body has ever had to experience—I found myself on three intense courses of antibiotics. Two for a particularly nasty stomach infection and one following complications after a minor surgery. There is something sobering about your own insides turning against you. It feels like a canon event, marking the loss of innocence and insisting on matter over mind over and over again. What’s more, ten years before I ever even developed the awareness to ask the question of reality, I walked into my mother’s room one day as the holes on her shuttered windows left light beams on the floor just to find that she had fallen and was laying there unconscious. After struggling to lift her, to shake her, to try and get an answer that would signal any life, I remember what remained after the paramedics arrived and informed me she had passed away and that we’d need to rush to the hospital to do routine body assessments before producing documents that officially declared her death. Every organ was a witness: heart and lungs, mute. Pupils fixed, dilated, and unresponsive. Check check check. My sweet mother, who I thought was the whole world, eternal, stronger than the skin wrapping her body, became a check list of functions at the moment, on which I hedged every bet.

Experiences like these make it difficult to believe that reality can be represented by language. The question puts Bataille’s ideas at the center of contemporary debates around AI and LLMs. Is processing language sufficient for intelligence? Are the indignities of a vulnerable body preconditioned for intelligence? Does this mean machines are only conscious if they are able to experience pain or pleasure? (An aside: there’s a fabulous conversation with the brilliant Isabel Millar in this issue on this and more). This is where materialism enters the picture for me. Laura Tripaldi, Italian scientist and philosopher, argues that intelligence can’t be separated from the physical substrate that carries it. Technological systems are, therefore, not empty vessels for human intention. They participate in cognition through their own material constraints and affordances. But if cognition is material, pain seems to mark a limit. More than information processed by a system, it’s a bodily event that forces us to confront the gap between experience and representation. So perhaps what is most real is not intelligence in and of itself, but the encounter with what overflows it, as edge-lord romantic nihilist Bataille puts it in Inner Experience (1943): “Experience itself is authority.”

Our cover girl, Bianca Censori, seems to sit at the center of these threads. A recursive ‘image-event’ and a throbbing affective hashtag, mediated through headlines, projection and myth. It’s hard to tell which part of her enjoys it, or even creates it and what part just shrugs and marches along. I must admit, it was cunty (in a good way) that she first agreed to an interview, asked for questions in advance and then stalled before her representative said: “We are actually not talking in public.” (Check out my conversation with Sarah Chekfa on Kanye, clones and Cinema of Subtraction). Still, her manifesto, inadvertently, circles around many of the same themes explored in these pages and in doing so, it humanizes her. She kept returning to the idea that identity and representation are always unstable and lag behind lived experience. “Words, especially written words, are sanitized in real time... flattened into evidence…Interviews structure, distill, repeat, and abridge something that isn’t stable.” Censori is making an interesting Bataillean claim about subjectivity: that she exceeds the forms used to describe her. She then draws on Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity to make a case for destruction. This becomes something generative, creating the condition for new forms to emerge. In this sense, pain as rupture, as transformation: “The outline of something new appears precisely where the old thing breaks apart.” Yet what is most evident is that Bianca is someone who has grown profoundly accustomed to seeing herself from the field of the Other. She had become her own reflection. The image produced its clones, and the clones began producing the image in return.

So I guess, the closest we could get to an answer on what is real is not what can be represented, it’s what refuses, what escapes representation and increasingly, what we negotiate together.

For the full 666 pages, order online via Public Knowledge Books or anywhere in the world here:

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The SHEIN industrial complex has allowed us to experiment in fashion with reckless abandon and at a significantly lower cost. “Women's Sexy Distressed Denim Skirt With Frayed Edge, Belt And Pocket” will only last as long as the 10-second iPhone timer it takes to shoot a picture of it. The material warmth of “Women's Camo Print Casual Holiday Comfy Dress With Round Neck, Drop Shoulder Sleeves And Dual Side Pockets, Summer” that once brushed against our skin is now frozen in time on the grid. “Gothic Imitation Feather Fake Collar Vintage Performance Dress Up One Word Shawl Party Stage Halloween Costume Accessories” has been purchased 1.6K+ times on Temu and promises free international shipping straight from China in four days or less. A sort of ‘tag cloud fashion’, it comes as the bastard child of Big Tech and a general culture of transitoriness, malignantly growing on the side of global capital.

However, this new syntactic arrangement, which has become a hallmark of the online shopping experience, is not quite a new phenomenon. Its historical roots can be traced to Roland Barthes’ book Système de la Mode (1967), in which he developed a complex analytical framework for clarifying the signifying structures behind the representation, consumption and circulation of meanings in the experience of fashion.

In the book’s first chapter, Barthes opens with a prologue that could have been lifted straight from a SHEIN listing, quoting a French fashion magazine’s description of a garment: “A leather belt with a rose stuck in it, worn above the waist on a soft Shetland dress.” He calls this ‘Written Clothing’, which derives from a system of language, vis-a-vis ‘Image-Clothing’, deriving from a system of photography, arguing that fashion is not merely material, i.e. the literal fabric; it’s a complex merging of systems of meaning, a correlation between a signifier and signified. The terms of the garment as signifier are material, numerable, and visible; the garment could be traced and underpinned by a network of metadata: time and date of creation, name and location of creator, size and source of material, technology employed in creation, as well as commercial routes and logistics. A garment signified is more immaterial, mutable and qualitative. It could communicate relevance: how and when is this dredged up on our FYP; favorability: what feelings or attitudes is this affirming and/or antagonizing, what complex network of subcommunities and spaces does it belong to; and ethics: is it morally good or bad, do we even care?

Through prosaic and tangential essays across the book, he ultimately reveals that what he considers fashion is neither the real material garment nor the language we construct for it – but the process of transmutation between the signifier and signified. It’s what a merger of two systems of logic (image and language) imbues on the garment. Barthes notes that this instituting speech is clearly not an innocent one: “The presence of words is not a passive medium that simply “transmits the real clothes unchanged to its customers,” (Barthes 1983: xi)–it does something, or reveals something, at the very least. Today, text-to-image AI may lay in sharper relief what this thing is, in that a well prompted machine will quite literally generate an image of what is culturally relevant and, more importantly, an image in concert with the attitudes and ethics that guide and determine what is intelligible within our given historical period. These are models trained on thousands of hours of recorded behavior, taking a dense history of collective input as its source material. They articulate a mood and give life to vibes that operate beneath a collective consciousness, defining a conceptual system in a given time and domain. Have you ever seen or heard something obnoxious generated from a machine? Something oddly empathetic or abrasive, perceptive or impolite? That uncanny encounter with an image of the unreflective is what I’m talking about.

_{Deepfake by @fotolog.wtf}

While machines train on our input, we are increasingly trained to communicate in machine logic. As Italian sociologist Elena Esposito argues, if machines contribute to social intelligence, it is not because they have learned how to think like us, rather because we have learned how to communicate with them. For example, scrolling through AliExpress – a hybrid mutant of the twin accelerationist dogma of globalization and transitoriness – is like taking turns with the machine in a formalized game of charades, making the entire global logistical fashion trade network go round. Entering the words ‘Caps’ and/or ‘Bicycles’ in the search bar will generate the same stringy balaclava sold for $0.39, described as ‘Balaclava Bicycle Cycling Travel Caps Dustproof Face Cover Sun Protection Hat Windproof Sports Hood Sunscreen Mask’. At the very bottom of the page, we see in real time an example of “keyword stuffing”, whereby seemingly disparate words are used to lure search engines into thinking the page has more relevance to a given search. This very balaclava will also appear under “winter mask soldier” and “tactical balaclava winter”.

Prompt logic and fashion are the base function of Dress To Impress, a multiplayer dress-up game on Roblox where users compete to create the best outfit based on thematic prompts in every round. Referred to as ‘themes’, they are words or phrases that describe a certain style. During each round, a theme is displayed at the top of the screen, and players have five minutes to make the most fashionable avatar in that style. Some themes include broad spheres of fashion, while others are highly specific; the game does not describe what the theme is or how to dress in that way, so players are required to make creative use of the items available to them. In this instance, humans operate like machines, scrambling to render a relevant and meaningful image of themes like “Famous Youtuber”, “Famous Painting”, “Avant-garde”, “Ancient Civilization”.

Out of curiosity, I enter a Dress to Impress theme, ‘Self-Care Sunday,’ into the search bar of AliExpress. Among a wall of products, I’m presented with a baseball cap, self-tanner and a t-shirt described as “Easy Sunday Morning T-shirt Funny Breakfast Club Clothing Vintage Y2k Aesthetic Short Sleeve Top Self-care Gift Self-Love Tee”. The products, albeit seemingly disparate, are culturally relevant and on theme. Any attempt at putting this into words just comes across as heavy handed and stilted because it concretizes this “sensibility” that is meant to remain ambient and free-floating. I’ll try. A baseball cap is helpful for a “silly hot girl walk”, self-tanner signals a reprieve at the beach from the grind of work, and a slogan t-shirt is, well, the most intuitive way of signaling meaning or association. I’m reminded of Michel Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (1969) wherein he argues that a grammatically correct sentence might lack discursive meaning while a grammatically incorrect sentence might be discursively meaningful in the right context. For example, Office Siren, an aesthetic that started on TikTok which borrows from corporate culture and luxury brands, is also a complete sentence, semantically meaningful in a specific context. Are these anagrammatic worlds of SHEIN and AliExpress signaling a new era of ‘Written Clothing’? A quick look at the instituting language between users and their frequently used search terms, website admins and their spammy SEO keyword stuffing tactics, as well as the machine’s process of deep learning, and we’ll notice another formalized, coherent and discursively meaningful language emerging.

We have been lamenting the ever collapsing lifecycle of trends, enabled by meme culture and fast fashion. With each fleeting folly of a trend cycle, we shed old skin and emerge with a shopping cart of thecurrentthing. Oftentimes, and even more so with massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), that doesn’t necessarily translate into Barthe’s ‘Real Garment’ that arrives at our doorsteps fresh from factories of the Global South. In gaming parlance, the term Skin is a customization option for a player’s in-game avatar, a graphic download that changes the appearance of characters. In Dress to Impress, the lifecycle of a trend is five minutes. The prompt-themes make it so that we see ourselves traversing histories of signification - both back in time (“Ancient Civilization”) and through to the future (“Future Elegance”) - compressing theses of history into tag clouds. Is the 21st century subject assuming some sort of dark Angelus Novus, which views all of history as a single event? Is this sweeping storm of transitoriness and Big Tech trapping us in a circle of catastrophe, forcing us to continue our way forward, trudging through piles of threadbare clothing? Through the skyward digital debris, I reckon Benjamin’s reading of artist Paul Klee’s painting is relevant here:

A common e-urban legend is that “we are all going through mass psychosis.” A condition of depersonalization-derealization, where the subject can see themselves from outside of their bodies and sense that things are not real. We keep seeing images of bodies refracted on screen. Indexical references of our bodies. In-game avatars. Icons. Filters. Bodies in ecstasy, in turmoil, in heaps under rubble or in packs at sold out festivals—flattened, full bleed, skin on skin, filling up screen space. Plastic. Bending what is anatomically possible. Piles of image-clothing stuck in haptic feedback. If, in fact, we are in a world where the signified – that immaterial, mutable and qualitative thing that we all sense but can’t explain – can hold its own, then psychosis is less a disorder and more an especially post-modern cope.

_{Deepfake by @fotolog.wtf}

Watch here for the ‘BUFF: on Fashion, Neural Media and Our Bodies’ Summit at presented by the ⁠MA Fashion Media and Communication program ⁠at ⁠London College of Fashion (LCF).

Beyond impressive academic accolades, Isabel Millar is the most online philosopher, reifying and reintroducing Lacanian thought to netizens everywhere. Her Instagram grid glides between theory and thirst trap, interspersed with cute baby pics, toying with the algorithmic gaze and the codes of a symbolic world in which users (or subjects, to stay on theme here) are always involved in an Oedipal process that names and defines them to some Other–the machine, the follower, and the all encompassing eye of Megacorp. These Oedipal Processes allegedly produce normative systems that transform the very nature of sociality: what and how we perceive, relate and desire.

As our sensory experiences of reality move away from our body and into a hyper techno-semiotized realm, the body becomes, as writer Christian Nirvana Damato says “a cumbersome residue that we do not know what to do with” and thus “no longer essential for communication.” Isabel in a similar vein, writes in her 2021 book ‘Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence’ that AI emerges as a fantasy of mastery and immortality, a mirror of our own disavowed vulnerabilities–in a sense, we built a machine that can free us from the indignities of meatspace, of our own mortal coil.

Isabel is currently gearing to release her second book ‘Patipolitics: The Philosophy of Sexual Suffering’

The unfeeling, desecrated and mutilated bodies in Stephanie LaCava and Catherine Breillat's worlds become a metaphor for a modern ontology that requires a touch of detachment and numbness to survive.

In this episode: Nepo baby suffering, writing, girlhood, gossip and ghosting as communication, numbness emerging as the last frontier to hold on to power, the contemporary girl is half-cipher half-weapon piercing through the predictability of being hyper perceived, absolute nightmarish abjection intertwined with the banality of everyday life, the 'international local' niche art world, the internet's flat-earthing effect, the body as stage influenced by Giorgio Agamben's ‘Nymphs’ and Catherine Malabou’s 'unthought organ'.

Stephanie Lacava is an author provocateur. One of the last standing artisanal writers who retain a lost old-world charm in a sea of content optimized for algorithmic shortcuts. From her debut novel with Semiotext(e) to her recent works with Verso, she writes on privilege, body horror, suffering and violence influenced by or occurring in a world of cinematic references with (what I can only describe as) chic masochism. Through everything she does, the trope of girlhood appears as both strategy and trap.

A believer is nothing if not partaking in ventriloquy, animated by some Other will and force.

You ask for a lobotomy, and you get more data storage. Exoskeletal history hung around the neck. All screens light up for you. The sun punches a hole into your phone so information circles to you.

Isn’t it funny how a body is just networked information? How it’s all read on a chart?

How a woman of distinction like me has such thoughts?

Body cameras are a pair of glass eyes set backwards so that every step forward is historic recurrence, a mandate in heaven (天命).

You’ll never know if you don’t ask. All questions are surrogates and all answers are learned patterns, whispered across cables.

It’s August and it’s hot. it’s really hot. It’s something like hell albeit the feed is a massive iconostasis of tarot prophetesses telling me and those in proximity to my algorithm that AUSGUST IS THE MONTH.

There’s more things dysfunctional than working in the world. I won’t share pictures as proof because you know, and they know you know and proof was never a deterrent to their crimes against humanity.

I’ve developed an aversion for linear writing—I’ve totally forgotten how to do it. I was trained by a slew of brow-beating editors of the linear media tradition. A sentence is airtight, every character held the weight of a cohesive throughline and word count. Literalists. Nothing more or less for affect. I’m less interested in historical consciousness and want to write from the places where language breaks down, where thoughts resist meaning yet structure everything we desire. Is that something like historical unconsciousness? the sentence that follows has absolutely no hook to the former paragraph, apart from maybe its connection to a general malaise. I’m interested in how to stop my heart and spirit from atrophying.

We are thrust in an image world where the Real (that which lingers in the trauma of the subconscious) is breaking into our symbolic world. Every act of scrolling is a potential encounter. I am traumatized by what I see and I am equally traumatized by what I cannot see, the idea that I cannot see the entire arc of history. Salvation, instead of one big event at the end of history, is broken down into micro-moments metabolized into everyday life, and it’s you, the user, who is tasked with painting that picture daily—outlining the sketch, painting in the shadows, adding new details everyday.

But you have an objet petit (a) shaped hole in your heart that you fill with excremental objects.

What if I rendered heaven instead? what if I asked for an image of a world beyond my senses that I can’t comprehend, see, touch right now and that no AI or imagination can render. Can I surrender to the idea that it’s possible. That if I can’t see it from a Euclidean perspective, that a transcendental pre-human eye can attest to it?

Sylvia Plath wanted to die: “Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell.” Bryan Johnson, the 47 year old entrepreneur, never wants to die i.e. DON’T DIE summit, cheating death with longevity therapies and technologies, believing they will reverse age. Both are attempting to recover a lost jouissance—their lives become this stand-in for what’s missing, a lost object which can never be recovered. Excremental objects paving a path to salvation, but it’s important to remember that heaven will not be that linear nor that clear. Heaven is a blurry and pixilated JPEG. A narrative with massive gaps. An essay whose throughline is more recursive than straight. Heaven is ongoing work.

Cause every time I post

I get this feeling

And every time we post

I swear I could fly

Can't you feel my post beat fast

I want this to last

Need you by my side

I’ve delusionally plonked myself into crypto land. Landing unceremoniously in the ‘invite-only beta stage’ Friends dot Tech, this new-ish social app for web3 had me confused and generally disorientated the way Adam and Eve must’ve felt after being deposed from paradise. After all, I did succumb to the serpent's temptation by accepting the invitation. Crypto is cryptic, no shit, and my provisional entry to this world is sort of overdue, what with media giants like The Economist and Forbes declaring its decline all year. But something about Friends dot Tech bakes into its very DNA the logic of shitposting. The idea of performing to and for the network sits at the heart, allowing users to trade the popularity, likeness, and network strength of creators and influencers. Friends or, rather, their networks become ‘shares’ or ‘keys’, letting you ‘invest’ in your friend’s social network. Out here, every user is like a social token. You can buy that social token, sell it for a higher price, or keep holding it as the token appreciates. The shares give access to gated influencer-specific chat rooms, exclusive content, and more, making it a platform aimed at monetizing a user’s social media presence. The shitpost on one platform becomes a form of symbolic exchange on Friends dot Tech, radically rupturing our understanding of value. To this effect, I speak to seasoned crypto bro Vira 英雄意识 on X who says: “People on here are here for ideological reasons. It’s anarchistic and anti-establishment. Value goes up and down and the emotions that govern these markets are the same – I sell when I think it’s time to sell – it doesn’t undermine our principles but it begs the question: WTF am I doing? Did I sell out? Am I driven by money alone or do I actually have values to live by. At the end of the day, we will always have our yearning for the future...” This symbolic exchange lends itself to something distinct from, and beyond value and code. All forms of value (object, commodity or sign) are negated in order to inaugurate this symbolic exchange. 

From trying to acquaint myself with the interface through to comprehending the invisible axes that shape the market of shares i.e. ‘keys’--the novelty for me brings a welcome interruption to the general sense of ‘mid-ness’ on the timeline today. It feels like brave new uncharted tech land. And somewhere in these crevices of the online, a member of Based Retard Gang – a Remilia Corporation offshoot – uttered a prophecy: “The land of opportunity is online now. Everywhere else has become the slums,” @brg_luvbug. Amen. The search for opportunity in the darkness of the unknown is a proof of life. And when shitposting is the lifeline, one can only think of it as a love language. Easter egging the timeline with little love bombs that light the way. The proliferation of this love language, a sort of dog whistle in the feed, structures a unique linguistic reality: one that is sealed from the old forms of resistance and theories rooted in traditional metaphysical assumptions. 

The last few months saw the resurfacing of an old meme. “4HL” i.e. the Four Hour Life which is a neologism referring to the amount of personal time someone has left in a 24-hour period after working 8 hours. Sleeping 8 hours. Commute/dinner/family time for a bit that is 4 hours and so then you have around 4 hours left in your day to yourself which is generally correlated to one’s screen time. With shitposting as love language, I reckon a reassessment of this breakdown is due. Posting is life and life is a post. Last night was a movie post and, indeed, all we have is our yearning for the future as we write directly into what media theorist Boris Groys describes as “the mind of the future Al ruler-god.”

In Slavoj Žižek’s unwittingly hilarious documentary film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) he says something about the decryption of symbols that make up our realities: “The choice between the red pill and the blue pill is not really the choice between illusion and reality. Of course, fictions already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself.” Dramatically, and through some slapstick dolly zoom shot, he exclaims: “I WANT A THIRD PILL! Definitely NOT some kind of transcendental pill which enables a fake fast-food religious experience. But a pill that would enable me to perceive not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself.” What he is alluding to is our incessant narrativization and fictionalization of reality as a cope. The choice between a red or blue pill is tired anyway. That stuff has been memed to death and plus the film from whence it emerged, The Matrix (1999) - the rendition of which Žižek critiqued but didn’t even watch, - had a great run. It’s time to drop it and do away with the social and political urge for an ultimate truth, the pursual of which is deemed the only right and good.

Approaching Cinema and TV in general as neither reality nor illusion is, what three cycles of memes ago would call “a secret third thing”. There’s no reason cinema or TV should be the bearer of truth anyway and to place that moral expectation on this medium is besides the point. When I hear people say things along the lines of “GIRLS is so real because it’s the voice of millennials” or “Succession and White Lotus are so real because their projection of desire is SO RAW,” I scoff a little. This brings to mind the Third Cinema manifesto For an Imperfect Cinema, written some time in the late 1960s in Cuba by film director and screenwriter Juan García Espinosa. An aesthetic and political cinematic movement from “Third World countries” (mainly in Latin America and Africa), it’s billed as an alternative to Hollywood (First Cinema) and aesthetically oriented European films (Second Cinema). Espinosa champions an imperfect cinema because, in his words, “perfect cinema—technically and artistically masterful—is almost always reactionary cinema.” He states that imperfect cinema overcomes the divisions of labor within class society and merges art with life and science, diminishing the boundaries between consumer and producer, audience and author. Thus creating a grainy middle in which illusions are less top-down and are freely traded, allowing for multiple illusions that reveal multiple realities. My words, not his. Mostly, he argues, that Third Cinema is full of artifacts; symbols.

In Baudillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death, he mentions that we have to sacrifice ourselves to subvert bourgeois values in the market, an idea that has sinister implications in an era of suicide bombings and terrorism, and like, literal rising rates of mental illness-driven suicide. But we don’t have to die to be sacrificial — we can just sacrifice the part of us that is accustomed to searching for the One Ultimate Real, which is an inherently politicized journey anyway. Instead, make peace with the real baked seamlessly into illusion, that is to recognize that no one is telling the truth, but that also, no one is necessarily lying. At the end of Žižek’s film, he says: “When we, the spectators, are sitting in a movie theatre, looking at the screen — it's a black, dark screen, and then light is thrown on. Are we basically not staring into a toilet bowl and waiting for things to reappear out of the toilet? And is the entire magic of a spectacle shown on the screen not a kind of deceptive lure, trying to conceal the fact that we are basically watching shit.” — well, the toilet bowl as a metaphor is not off if you think of the screen as a basin that collects what is consumed, digested and regurgitated in an endless recycled sewerage system of illusions.

Sure, I’ll consume the third pill and I’ll rewatch Žižek’s film for the third time in the last year and maybe, in his own way of offhandedly asserting his own truth, while he clownishly stands against the backdrop of scenes from popular American films, I’ll somehow be comfortable with the fact that there isn’t anything to be discovered in the first place. Third time’s a charm anyway.

god commanded prophet Zakariya to a fast of silence. Zakariya said: "O my Lord! give me a Sign." "Thy Sign," was the answer, "Shall be that thou shalt speak to no man for three nights”. And that’s how he was granted the miracle of fathering Yaḥya at ninety-two years old. Yahya was tasked with renewing the message of god, which had been corrupted and distorted. a meme of biblical proportions. the mutations in a game of chinese whisperer. the meme is not the message. transmission chains no longer hold.

silence is beseechment.

on that note, no message. no text. no tweet. no air. next screen. next light. hit send. log off.

Shitposting is antithetical to polite society. That’s why we Finsta. The rush of an admin reveal is an exhilaration likened to scandal, the way busybodies rush to the scene of an epic car crash, the way they inquire and attempt to identify the body. The urge to post, that minuscule and mutilated form of writing, is an affirmative visceral act: to say I’m alive and I take nothing back. Horrifying.

Enjoy this clip of one of the very rare moments where Derrida is relatable:

When I think about the construct of time, I become violently aware of how Hallmark marketing executives probably map out the year. There’s a surge of sales as emotions run high around the new year, followed by a dip with the very last pieces of confetti falling to the ground from when the clock struck 12 the night before. Around Valentine’s Day, a swirl of activity animates the aisle where cards pile like sad stacks of unpaid bills. Throughout the year, quirky wedding invitations come through, family’s grow or contract, people come and people go. The year becomes this charged and self-suspending vortex in motion, punctuated with imbalances. The spikes and the drops sculpt time, leaving imprints on an otherwise infinitely billowing force. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who has unwittingly become a mascot of “it-girl” dejection, makes the case for time as a bleak canvas on which projection, and psychoanalysis in his case, is the brush that paints our deeply volatile and purely Freudian love lives. In a proclamation, riddled with a bunch of somatic tics and twitches, he once said: “There is actually nothing. The universe is a void. But then particular things appear when the balance of that void is disturbed.” After some longwinded dabble in the quantum physics of time, he emphatically continues: “What we call creation is a cosmic catastrophe actually, a mistake and the only way to counteract this is to assume the mistake, and take it all the way to the end. This is called love. Isn’t love a cosmic imbalance? An extremely violent act? In this sense love is evil.”

It’s this very romantic realism that drives one to walk straight into the fire, to “take it all the way to the end”, that makes Žižek a fool for love, a jihadi even. One that has waged many wars in his consistently failed string of marriages. He is not a sleaze. In fact, he famously never had any one-night stands and has repeatedly made the joke that, in his city of Ljubljana, one can tell exactly which women he’s slept with, because he married them. He is simply synchronized with the violences of the void, propelled by an ever-omnipotent death drive that can only be activated via a sort of extreme love. The use of extremism here is not hyperbole – this flurry of cardiac activity throws the chemistry of the vortex into chaos. Even the state of love itself is described in aggressive vocabulary. We fall in love. It becomes this predicament, a condition of urgent need for action. Lacan, too, in his seminar Transference (1960-61) adopts this vision of love as tragedy: "Imagine you see in front of you a beautiful flower, or a ripe fruit. You reach out your hand to grab it. But at the moment you do, the flower, or the fruit, bursts into flames."

If, as modern science posits, feelings are but chemical imbalances, meant to be tamed, measured and regulated, then perhaps it’s true that love is a touch of crazy and indeed, an evil dimension of narcissism.  And it’s these moments of narcissism that perhaps make us not only want to fill the void, but also predict its fluctuations. There are two types of people who accompany us in these moments, who can read the future of our love lives: tarot readers and gynecologists. Both are also in the business of ripping us off, ripping us open and/or ripping us apart.

The Arabic language has at least 11 words for love. The Ancient Greeks distinguished three notions that can properly be called “love”: eros, agape, and philia. Most songs are about love. Only such extremes that mutilate chemistry are capable of producing art. So it sure ought to be a positively sadistic force to fill the void.

I emailed Žižek to ask him if his views on love have changed with time. He never responded. I’m sure he would find an oedipal explanation to the casual hostility of ghosting. I’m not hurt though. I would walk into the fire again. I would wade into the violence. After all:

Birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love

Anywhere but here. In essence, that’s where the internet takes us. The closest some of us will ever get to heaven, actually. The way it works is arcane. Through some elaborate entanglement between the abject failure of nature and the vicissitudes of magic, we are transported to a different reality, the architectonics of which are shaped by desire for alternative ways of existing as ourselves. The euphoria of being online  – that fragmentary, delirious, rapidfire succession of symbols and states of being that anyone outside of our time can only conceive of as occultic – can’t be viewed separately from a long history of psychoanalytic and postmodern thought. American literary critic Fredric Jameson’s entire schtick was that many aspects of the media culture today simulates schizoid experiences, completely eroding anindividual’s sense of temporal continuity. How could it not? the endless rapid eye movement, the transmission of information, the ADHD-addled brain fog, the doom-scroll race to a bottomless pit of byte-sized flashing light, contained within rectangular embers of glass like little lighthouses in a sea of collective (sub)consciousness. 

In his groundbreaking essay Postmodernism and Consumer Society(1983), and borrowing from Jacques Lacan, Jameson writes: “Schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence.” Jameson speaks in the context of a subject’s identity formation within late capitalism. He continues: “The schizophrenic thus does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the I and the me over time.” On the internet, this persistence is hampered. You don’t even have to be human or perceived as one. Metamorphosis is central to its design and survival. Isn’t that how memes function? In Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari introduced the concept of the rhizome, basically the internet imagined before the internet: “The rhizome has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle (milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills, having neither subject nor object. When a multiplicity of this kind changes dimension, it necessarily changes in nature as well, undergoing a metamorphosis.” When the ego experiences dissolution and the body is no longer a question, everything is possible online. What is taboo in real life, can, by some measure of dexterity and testing the community guidelines, find a safe space on the internet to live and die.

It’s perhaps this magic and altered temporality by which the internet is hallmarked that yields it the forgivability to shock. Kanye West routinely tweets up a storm. Julia Fox is opining on the feminist revolution in Iran - both are deemed too vulgar for polite society yet have millions of followers — haters and lovers alike. A society marked by this level of disparity, who disapprove but can’t look away, is no doubt a schizophrenic one, arrested perennially in a state of alterity; a duality between who they are and what they can be or can get away with. 

Legend has it that there is no great genius without some touch of madness. And the internet has that magic touch. Perhaps this is the invisible hand of the market we keep hearing about? What if the only response to late stage capitalism is the schizophrenia of techno-feudalism? We should embrace the schizophrenic, the multiple, and the edge of the limit over the doddering established truth. So tonight, I’ll melt into the heavens cupped in my hands: my iPhone 11.

This essay appears in the November-December 2022 issue of Canvas Magazine.

My knee-jerk reaction is to call things “lame”, but I know that’s lazy critique and probably remnants of an especially adolescent irreverence. It’s also usually when things haven’t ripened in me and have only started poking out of my subconscious, lingering in the subterranean of thought, before blooming into a full-fledged hot take. I use lameness as a placeholder for opinions the same way liberal art hoes chime in with a “this lacks depth” and think that is worthy of broadcasting. I never think of cultural value in those binary terms, though: worthy/worthless. Rather, it’s a sliding scale. Some people should be deplatformed or shadowbanned, while others, exiled from the public sphere, for sure.

This weekend, I couldn’t stop thinking about the engineering of the cultural experience. You know, like exhibition making, film screenings, haute couture fashion shows that intersect with the established art world - the institutional broadcasting of thoughts, if you will. Here, the concept of ‘worth’ takes on a different dimension because a number of stakeholders enter the picture, each with a set of expectations and in many cases, literal investments: the patron and the commissioned artist, the collector and the gallerist, the fashion designer and the fashion buyer. These cultural experiences are commodities, and my opinions shape how they are lived. What a thrill. If only I could charge per subtweet.

So are these cultural engines, of which I’m a cog, shaping consciousness? English writer and cultural critic (a real one) Mark Fisher argues that consciousness raising is a collective horizontal act that goes in each direction. It’s, and I quote him “knowing someone in this life is as desperate as you.

Consciousness raising is partly about the discovery and production of subjugated knowledges, but it is also about the immediate production of socialisation, of forms of subjectivity antithetical to the always lonely mode of contemporary capitalist individuality.

Consciousness raising opens up the possibility of living, not merely theorising about a collective perspective.”

What cultural engines are doing by inviting my thoughts is what Fisher describes as “creating times and spaces specifically dedicated to attending to one another: not (yet more) conferences, but sessions where people can share their feelings and ideas. Those with access to educational or art spaces could open these up for this purpose.

we should use these as a means of dissemination, communication and distribution”1

Subtweeting and shit-posting were not identified as such to Fisher, but he recognized the potential of the platforms on which these modes of socialisation are carried out, by running a blog himself – one full of disgruntled rants that, no doubt, pushed the frontiers of discourse and raised consciousness.  

“The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.” 1

This already feels like Tumblr for old millennial doomers. Is Substack the pinnacle of ubilapse? Everything is incredibly cyclical and parodic, yet daybreak and heartbreak are always felt in earnest and anew. The rush of novelty paints this experience with the promise of learning something new, of acquiring knowledge that will offset some agitation - towards and about the world or myself, perhaps - the same way Tumblr sated a big hunger in 2008-2013. But like binge eating, I’m both bloated yet hungry again - it was a tourniquet that only limited the gush of blood, not stop it. We turned to Twitter and each other and created complex systems of collective intelligences only to build them with a sophistication that backfires and turns against us.

This is why knowledge is the greatest expression of freedom, and not, for example happiness. But the abyss of the unknown is all-consuming, like a volcanic rupture, it shoots up in a frenzy and collapses everything on the surface. That’s why ultimate freedom is a mirage that evaporates with dusk and enlightenment is the filthy parody of the sun, it only emerges to tuck itself back into darkness. I don’t think we are enslaved, I think we are searching for freedoms that don’t exist in material forms.

When my captions on Instagram sound like pithy epithets generated by an intelligence engineered to ‘know me’, that’s the system parodying the equator that divides the parody of me from the parody of the other.

Paris Hilton is back to perform her noughties self in Cooking with Paris. Britney Spears is occupying headlines. Kim Kardashian is single again. Lindsay Lohan dabbles in Sharia Law. The culture is lit, the forests are on fire and history is lined with propped up carcasses of cultural markers that mean different things to different people who all swear it’s true.

So let’s cosplay the incessant return of freedom as I grow from angsty Tumblr shitposting to Substack serial killer manifestos because the one thing that we won’t kill is the cycle.