Otherness

*first published on 24.02.2023 and removed for personal reasons*

We'd just finished watching the amazing 1998 film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, based on the book by Hunter S. Thompson which I've yet to read. We went outside for a cigarette with friends and friends of friends not long after, and I was replaying the various flairs and images in my head, all cascading nonlinearly as so many times my thoughts have been of late. I think the most central sequence of the film is the second night in Las Vegas, in which Dr. Gonzo, the rather unhinged attorney of Duke's (and therefore, for our purposes, Thompson's)  undergoes an implied ergotic epiphany, sitting fully clothed in a bathtub, after Duke is able to diffuse an extremely tense situation with him. Duke, now likewise under the influence of narcotics, begins to reminisce about the San Francisco "acid wave" of the mid 60s, which he hails as an incredibly warm time in which there was "madness in any direction, at any hour […] You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…". I think we live in similarly turbulent times, but the fantastic universal sense that Hunter describes, I do not see mirrored today. The modes through which human thought propagates itself no longer obey the traditionally accepted notions of cause and effect, and this change is affecting the insinuations of yet-to-be interpreted acts of the great play of history. Computers are saying things for us now, and it is likely that social media persons have gradually, unbeknownst to them, become the mouths of something other. We have been forced to become generalists by algorithms that do not know us, these, which spoon feed us small helpings of, for the most part, entirely inconsequential, but occasionally helpful, information. In the early days, the profit motive of platforms such as Google, YouTube and Facebook was easy to follow, but through offloading an engineering struggle - of bringing people together with content that captures them - to digital agents capable of self-refinement by design, the true driving force, the asymptotic limit of such structures have become obfuscated. Most people have accepted the idea of corporate personhood, but this very abstract concept has rather eerily lost a degree of separation from the realities of human life; these engines that make these decisions billions of times a second are, by any means, to be considered an entirely independent entity, at least theoretically, and as such, are in a certain sense literal corporate persons that don't consist of smaller subunits which are atomically constituted by individuals. The individual and the corporate person are no longer related by only a scale factor, they have become something different entirely. Something categorically different.

Naturally my next thought was on the types of otherness we experience every day, mostly the types of otherness I experience within myself. I thought of what it is to have a crush, which, if you're not familiar, is a very cruel way of torturing yourself using nothing more than the likeness of a complete stranger. I recently experienced a very painful breakup, as my last post will testify, and the newly rediscovered freedom that once again lay in my hands and in my arms was beginning to chew me up. Once again there were options, a certain air of nondeterminism had returned, I could speculate for hours upon hours, hell, I am doing that right now! But a contradiction began to form and solidify, as it had so many times before, and it is that no person, regardless of what object cause of desire may exist, could possibly live up to the representations I am capable of creating for them in my mind. This freezes me up and leads me to inaction, always. Long story short, I now consider this contradiction to be an element of the other, not of me. The thought processes I have become subject to now, are not a part of me, and they can and must be rebelled against. That is not to say that I, in a very mentally precarious state, am going around approaching various women whom I have been secretly desiring; that would be very irresponsible and disrespectful. It is just that I have to start acting in a manner that reflects my disbelief in the very idea of a crush. I cannot allow an obsessiveness, which I seem to be genetically predisposed to, to get in the way of real human connection, real conversations, real friendship. I have to reject the part of myself that makes me develop a crush on someone, the part that creates some crude, unrealistic marionette of someone and then substitutes real experiences with ones I made up. I used to talk to myself a lot more than I do now, and I think the idea of a crush is much like talking to oneself in that your apprehension for what goes on in their head could only ever be a mirror image of what goes on in your head. That way, I have been putting words in other people's mouths for a long, long time, and if I refuse to accept a computer doing so for me, then it is simply unethical for me to continue as I have.