Me
Still so unsure about how to write about myself when that’s literally all I do. I’m a burnout ideologue in Vancouver BC Canada who doesn’t ultimately understand his intention in anything and is therefore rendered immobile and unfinishing. I work hard in spasmodic bursts at creative arts but never properly come. I’ve written a lot and I’ve filmed a lot, however I resist ever completing these pursuits with some magnetic repulsion.
Here one might find some of the more finished video projects I’ve made and almost exclusively unfinished writings. I must note I don’t publish these things on this website as an insistence of their merit, but as a catalogue of my meandered thinking for the general public to admonish and criticise as they see fit.
I work as a bartender and a burrito roller in Mount Pleasant and hold my community very dear. Many of my videos laud friendship while much of my writing emphasises solitude. The significance of this use of mediums is lost on me.
This Website
Winter 2022 I quit Instagram in an attempt to set a boundary for myself with the ubiquity of technology in (my) life. It felt too much like a parasitic appendage growing on me that was feeding someone else down in California. This is a perfect excuse for my procrastination and laziness, but since quitting instagram it’s been a challenge grappling with modes of expression and communication. I’m able to convince myself that without the use of this new dominant form of self expression and communication, which ultimately I don’t believe in, I have no chance at progressing my life forwards upwards into growth whatever you want (this sentiment felt regrettably in spite of wanting no part in the state of the future that we’re being dragged into). I’ve hobbled myself on principle and am willing to suffer it to not participate in the divorcing of the identity of my self (this is a self-serving delusion that allows me to veg out on the couch). I feed on my self-pity for having done this like a hummingbird feeds decadently on nectar. I hoard my creative work and leave it unfinished for I deny the existence of an avenue to tangibly release it. It’s a combination of spite, shame, and fear probably god knows why. (Read my writing, analyse, and tell me please.)
These feelings about social media are just a crumpled patch on the swath of human (personally self-identifying me human apologies for subjectivity) fabric in which technology has woven itself indelibly. In electronic/digital technology’s infancy it gilded this fabric (of humanity, see: the world) finely and added stunning but subtle embellishment which increased the efficiency and communicative ability of the fabric (social life). (The mere notion of efficiency presupposes the need to generate more capital for the fewest people, damning but kinda beside the point.) It represented the next stage in human’s domination over the material circumstances of the world we seek to rule, and because we’re a proud and ostentatious species, with a flair for self-aggrandisement, we gilt this fabric in as much of this new fine material as possible, centralising its abundance around the already most luxurious parts of the fabric (see: rich people in the west).
Jump to now, and the fabric of humanity is buried in massive clumps of tangled gold wire, nary a stich free of it. The wire no longer embellishes the fabric but composes a new structure, a new mass, of which the fabric is its underpinning. Social media is a king among clumps, it is the nervous system of this new mutant mass of gilt. Its goal is to forget the fabric for its own replacement. Each stitch will be unequivocally represented by the gilt thread, not by the initial thread composed throughout history by a constant cycle of biomass (apologies for this threadbare metaphor I am unpractised in the formal exegesis of my thoughts). This is the goal, because all value (see: information) that flows through the newfangled technological thread flows in large part to the centres of density, established long ago around the rich. ANYWAY the point is we are now confronted with a proverbial Gordian Knot. There is no untying the mess of interlinkages between technofeudal capitalistic interests; the algorithm; the deprogramming of social interaction for technologically mediated interaction (online shopping; food delivery; chatrooms; online gaming; etc.); neurochemical habituality driven through the psychic power of digital image and sound. It is also too big and too powerful a clump/knot what have you, to just slice through à la Alexander (hell, I’m just a lowly loser).
That gets me finally to the notion behind this website. By decentralising my desire to be social and share my expressions of reality away from the larger chunk of the clump that I see as being insidious (see: Instagram (we won’t talk about me creating this website on Google Chrome or linking youtube)), it hopefully detracts in spirit at least from the huge knot’s attention, this little knot of my own. Perhaps others will make websites to distract their time from feeding Mark Zuckerburg their content for his own purposes in designing a future tailored for their alienated digital selves. Perhaps people on this website will follow some of the links and remember the deep potential the internet had before it became a deep skatebowl designed by techbro idiots that nobody can conceivably escape from without an abandonment of potential social gain or communication with their friends (there are other ways, they just take work (memo to self)). I also made a website in the interest of participating in what was once (cynical) a grand project, as I do believe in the unifying and egalitarian elements of the internet (see: all technology.) I just believe it has been deeply and concerningly coopted (from the very beginning) by greedy capitalist interests.
Hey, I made it that whole way without even talking about politics. But that too.
Thanks for listening to my pandering and condescending TEDx talk and welcome to my website.