Inspiration, from the Latin to breathe into, has always sounded churchy and false to me, dismissive of the hard work of writing. What else, though, to call what I’ve been missing? My thoughts are all scattered onto various devices and scraps of paper: books, social media feeds, Wikipedia articles, pirated PDFs, post-it notes with things I forgot at the grocery. My mental landscape is an apartment rooftop strewn with broken satellite dishes. Hardly breathed into, I feel like a windtunnel of content, inert in the rush of the world.
Perhaps wind is the wrong element. Ever since Clive Humby proclaimed, in 2006, that “data is the new oil,” our casual online language has been the stuff of delirious consumption: binges fed by pipelines of content. Last year, Forbes ran an article titled “Data Isn’t The New Oil—Time Is.” Either way, the sludge of our lives is constantly refined and redirected for profit. At times it feels like everything is. In my documentary work, the word for processing archival footage into editing software is ingestion, as if the point of collecting material is to gorge ourselves on it. Even inspiration is truncated to inspo—cute and consumerist, like a magazine ad or a swatch of fabric.
But opining about Internet culture and its effects—cf. the Times’ dubious taxonomies of “burnout”—is tiresome and often beside the point. There need not be a name for these computer-screen weeks, the way one’s thoughts become an unending queue cascading through your head, the way one’s dreams are infiltrated by a broken lexicon of static, noise processed into further noise. Sometimes it’s easier just to say that the words are gone, the inspiration, the things I had to say.
I finished a video game on Sunday. After the final fight, there was a brief cutscene and the credits rolled. A two-minute ending to a hundred hours of gameplay, as if to say that resolution was never the point, or never really possible. It made all that time feel elastic and unreal, both embedded in and detached from the rest of my life. That night, I dreamt that I was on a strange and sped-up playthrough of the game, as if my brain was processing those many hours into some codec my waking mind could never understand.
When I awoke, it was through several alarms. The dead tree out my window looked like a stick insect, frozen in prayer to its god.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
from the discourse
Rachel Tashjian’s Met Gala roundup had some great bits about fashion in general:
It’s a tough racket, making your life about beautiful things, because the impulse is often to apologize for it, even though aesthetic pleasure, self-creation, and the dueling needs of business and creativity (which is what fashion is about) are all as important as podcasts, sports, Marvel movies, prestige television, and other facets of culture that have been intellectualized ad nauseam.
from the future
Sure, it looks dystopian, but senior citizens getting into VR sounds less depressing than whatever they’re already doing with their years of atrophy and bingo and insane Facebook comments and Jerry Springer reruns.
from my incoming texts
“I’m embarrassed to admit the amount of times I’ve listened to the new bad bunny”
“Maybe you should host a joke night at your apt”
“Worst case scenario is raw dog.”
“Honestly . . . Used to slurp them down but I’ve grown up.”
“Also did u ever have a 90s raver phase?”
weekly wiki
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