I. Dagger 🗡 A man🙎🏻♂️—a boy👦—grows up in the exquisitely quantified🔢📊➡️ and gamified🎮➡️ world🌎, in the city🌆 of Cupertino, on the edge🗺🚪 of the Santa Clara Valley, in the shadow👤 of the Santa Cruz Mountains⛰. When he is eleven, his parents👪—an Ashkenazi✡️ technical💻📊 product🏭⚙️⬇️ manager🧮🤔🙍🏻♂️ and a Chinese🇨🇳 game🎮 designer🏛🗺🙍🏻♂️ named🏷➡️ “Sing” Song🎶—take him to get his Neuralink🧠🔗 at the hospital🏥 by the Super Kyo-Po🇰🇷 plaza.
Nov 6, 2022·edited Nov 6, 2022Liked by Zero HP Lovecraft
Seems like you're getting a lot of hate for the emojis, which has a faint tang of irony given the indicators of you yourself hating emoji. I have a more optimistic view on them. While it is obviously true that "despite [...] limitations [...] we can find ways to express truths in any linguistic milieu", I would submit that the light and playful symbols drive rather than inhibit this expression. Imagine an internationally-ratified emoji set that included realistic genitalia, gunshot wounds and beheadings, syphilitic sores and massive tumors. Gone would be the exuberance of posting 🍆🍑 or 🙃🔫. The comfortable irony stripped away, people could no longer say what they mean because the raw explicitness of the expression would shock and humble them in the act of choosing the symbols from a menu of horror.
Language itself always plays the veil. I can tell you "brb kms" and hint at meanings not possible if i were telepathically flashing you a vivid fantasy of climbing up on this chair and putting my head in a noose. Or again -- to paraphrase from our time's celebrity philosopher -- think of the scene in Casablanca where the camera cuts to looking out at the air strip and we are left to imagine what the characters do. Because of the ambiguity, they both do and do not have sex. The camera's gentle discretion heightens the eroticism -- imagine instead that the cut were replaced with a lengthy and completely explicit hard-core pornographic scene. It would be impossible to go on after that, the movie would be over. Not due to prudery or the Hayes code, but because the magic would be gone.
Emoji are part of a lexicon that will always be limited, and whose limitations create the surplus enjoyment itself of evading that limitation. 👅🥵 and ඞ may be frail competitors to the wine-dark sea of a man whose sighted contemporaries lacked the word for the color they saw every day of their lives, but they're all we have.
I think the emojis are great, and people opposed to it are missing the point. My interpretation is that it perfectly simulates having a neuralink that constantly flashied images in your head to "aide" your understanding. It perfectly simulates what it would be like a constant low level buzz in your head at all times, constantly attempting to alter your thinking process.
Another masterpiece. Throughout I had presumed that the Emoji were a kind of antimeme placed there to hinder understanding and increase effort as well as to simulate the intrusiveness of mental software. By the end I was glad they were there.
Throughout the piece I gleefully picked up all the bread crumbs (as the metanarrative coursed through my powerful thick veins and washed away my merited fear of lacking erudition - with memes you can go anywhere, I said to myself out loud) only to discover at the end that I had been walking on a giant highway marked Jorge Louis Borges Boulevard. I read only one of his works and it was not this one. Makes so much more sense now.
I would like to contribute some additional nuance to the discussion of the sanitized nature of emoji but we'll come back to it tomorrow.
Nov 6, 2022·edited Nov 6, 2022Liked by Zero HP Lovecraft
I confess this might have been my favorite work of yours. As visually frustrating as it initially is, the movement of it eventually folds into something like a song. By the time we get to the Amazon, the language has become as maddeningly haptic and surreal as all the best nightmares.
I enjoyed the dialogue between Bezos and Elon, it reminded me of the dialogues in medieval/ancient writing where conversations between historical figures that probably didn't really take place were used for moral teaching, and to explore the personalities and flaws of the figures as history understood them.
Perhaps one day we'll tell our tales of half-forgotten tech lords...
“Time dilation🏳️⚧️“
“Homogenizing🏳️🌈”
Haha, very funny.
:)
Seems like you're getting a lot of hate for the emojis, which has a faint tang of irony given the indicators of you yourself hating emoji. I have a more optimistic view on them. While it is obviously true that "despite [...] limitations [...] we can find ways to express truths in any linguistic milieu", I would submit that the light and playful symbols drive rather than inhibit this expression. Imagine an internationally-ratified emoji set that included realistic genitalia, gunshot wounds and beheadings, syphilitic sores and massive tumors. Gone would be the exuberance of posting 🍆🍑 or 🙃🔫. The comfortable irony stripped away, people could no longer say what they mean because the raw explicitness of the expression would shock and humble them in the act of choosing the symbols from a menu of horror.
Language itself always plays the veil. I can tell you "brb kms" and hint at meanings not possible if i were telepathically flashing you a vivid fantasy of climbing up on this chair and putting my head in a noose. Or again -- to paraphrase from our time's celebrity philosopher -- think of the scene in Casablanca where the camera cuts to looking out at the air strip and we are left to imagine what the characters do. Because of the ambiguity, they both do and do not have sex. The camera's gentle discretion heightens the eroticism -- imagine instead that the cut were replaced with a lengthy and completely explicit hard-core pornographic scene. It would be impossible to go on after that, the movie would be over. Not due to prudery or the Hayes code, but because the magic would be gone.
Emoji are part of a lexicon that will always be limited, and whose limitations create the surplus enjoyment itself of evading that limitation. 👅🥵 and ඞ may be frail competitors to the wine-dark sea of a man whose sighted contemporaries lacked the word for the color they saw every day of their lives, but they're all we have.
I think the emojis are great, and people opposed to it are missing the point. My interpretation is that it perfectly simulates having a neuralink that constantly flashied images in your head to "aide" your understanding. It perfectly simulates what it would be like a constant low level buzz in your head at all times, constantly attempting to alter your thinking process.
Another masterpiece. Throughout I had presumed that the Emoji were a kind of antimeme placed there to hinder understanding and increase effort as well as to simulate the intrusiveness of mental software. By the end I was glad they were there.
Throughout the piece I gleefully picked up all the bread crumbs (as the metanarrative coursed through my powerful thick veins and washed away my merited fear of lacking erudition - with memes you can go anywhere, I said to myself out loud) only to discover at the end that I had been walking on a giant highway marked Jorge Louis Borges Boulevard. I read only one of his works and it was not this one. Makes so much more sense now.
I would like to contribute some additional nuance to the discussion of the sanitized nature of emoji but we'll come back to it tomorrow.
Again, bravo.
I confess this might have been my favorite work of yours. As visually frustrating as it initially is, the movement of it eventually folds into something like a song. By the time we get to the Amazon, the language has become as maddeningly haptic and surreal as all the best nightmares.
Indeed, increasingly I suspect we are living through the prequel to the Borg.
Chuck Pahliniuk recommended this piece via his substack. Great read! Long - so i circled back to read it.
I enjoyed the dialogue between Bezos and Elon, it reminded me of the dialogues in medieval/ancient writing where conversations between historical figures that probably didn't really take place were used for moral teaching, and to explore the personalities and flaws of the figures as history understood them.
Perhaps one day we'll tell our tales of half-forgotten tech lords...
"How Humans Got Pwned"
Only half-way through, but (so far) this is the short story I've been waiting for all my life.
The future you describe inspires a strong sense of disgust and dread. Good work.
Holy fuck. Did my 8 year old niece hack your account?
Good read. Nicely in the flow. Thanks for the excellent catalyst.
This is incredible, thank you for sharing!
Brilliant!
a beautiful piece of work given form once more