Sunday, August 13, 2023
I revisit this thought:
the ironies of a bunch of hyperliterates using a giant text machine to bootstrap text into a thing that exceeds the bounds of comprehension and then totally overwhelms all the tools of literacy itself
I’ve spent most of my life enmeshed in language, with words as my main power, and also a lot of time dwelling on the insufficiency of language to what life is really like. These days the latter sometimes feels like the main thing about words. Or at least the main thing about the dominant culture of words, the technology and system of them.
The tools of literacy — I don’t exactly mean to run them down. We just live in a time when, for whole classes of human, a kind of hypertrophied literacy has enmeshed and eclipsed the experience of reality. This isn’t so much new as it’s just newly vast, encompassing, interconnected. The language machine is so big, so ramified, that the sheer mathematical accumulation of its products now feeds deafening oceans of noise back into the workings. Whether by this I mean the outputs of machine learning or the behavior of a few billion minds over-saturated with internet bullshit: I’m not sure it even matters.
We’ve all had our part in building this, and you can get endlessly meta about the endless meta of it, which is part of how it exceeds the bounds of comprehension. All of that is… Not really how I want to spend my time. I don’t have any grand thesis here, or at least I don’t have any grand prescription.
There was a time when I was a big word fish in a small word pond, I guess. Somewhere along the way the contemporary internet happened and also I got a job where being a big word fish was a basic prerequisite. Circa now: Sweet Christ am I ever weary of paragraphs. There’s something useful in knowing that, if I don’t chase my own tail about it too much.