this machine has disabled me

I jest, this is the year I take to wandering the streets calling out the hour and riddles and news, because I can no longer type at machines or rely on this internet to help me access what I need. Part of me is joking and part of me wants to avoid foolishly foretelling my lot.

New Year’s Day this year seemed taut. Other faces around town seemed as checked out and mirthless as mine felt. For the train has reached the final terminal: It’s 2025 and the 1980s Hollywood cyberpunk imagination is realized.

I’m not joking.

I’ve had this URL since 2003 and have been logged on since 1995—I have perspective. Nobody used to care. It was niche, occult.

I keep trying to take stock of what exactly it is those before and behind me are interfacing with today. This internet and its grip on society. How we’re made to feel, how the world is portrayed on the television, the looking glass, the audio feeds, the video streams, the nascent AI and the many many people whose labor and natural resources it eats. What is being made invisible, forgotten, unnecessary, and for what purpose.

My chronic inflammation has reached a new level, and I am full of grief and deep sadness every time I sit. I think about the heart. A bodyworker told me that the arms form off of the heart. My arms are often so inflamed. I’ve spent over 25 years of long unbroken hours on keyboards at this point; my emotional social world altered by the barrier-mediums of a screen a keyboard and a high speed connection. In my adolescence, what me and my pre-broadband ilk had was largely text and typography dominant spaces. Images were rare, commodities to be traded or claimed, often took minutes or hours to download, or were very small and low resolution… like, nowadays you can DL a 600mb PDF color catalog faster than it took a single anime bitmap to load on a geocities webpage in 1998. I remember when we went from 800 x 600 pixel resolution monitors to 1080 x 720 and it felt huge.

I remember I remember I remember

The devices, the translucent plastic shells, the clickclack physical buttons with travel, the chrome accents, the lag, the surfing, the diving, the grimy fast-vastness, the anonymous thrill, the endless mystery riding on yet another hyperlink…

The arguing, the flame wars, the trolling and spamming, the booting and hacking, the private chatrooms, the predators, the masquerading, the way you protected your identity, your style, and even your image…

I can say all these words and you can read them, but they provide zero account of the whirling internal vortex of intense reactionary emotions, also present. Nor the particular kind of netizen smarts one acquires over time. The viscera of cyberspace. Memories.

About a year ago, I found myself explaining to someone ten years younger than me, for the third time, the difference between an image’s file size, pixel size, and resolution.

I’ve been showing keyboard shortcuts to my 20-something coworkers, and explaining the existence of status pages when cloud-hosted checkout software goes unresponsive at the counter.

I’ve made part of my living from the knowledge and skills cultivated in a nascent era of the world wide web, and I’ve since been watching the generations as they come online to each a different paradigm of access to our information distribution communication technologies.

It has been breathtaking to witness the ways in which knowledge is lost on the shores of new technology. How in the era of Air, the cyberpunk ethic of “information wants to be free” loses its edge, now that the Plutocrats stand tall in government halls.

As the physical toll of this machine forces me to find meaning in the world unconnected to its electric baud, I hold myself against the horrors of a population entering an information prison with no way to see outside of it. See, but this is some self-serving egotistical type thinking because even though I’m feeling this way pretty constantly and for a long while lately, I know—somewhere I KNOW—there will always be a way out, and I don’t mean by dying.

Even as this Running Man Total Recall cosplay world opens its maws upon us, even as the They Live Terminator reality is gunning for our timeline, and even if we ARE strapping in to those 1980s-90s cyberpunk dystopia visions as material reality, I stay keen on the fact that in those same cyberpunks, it’s the organized hacker rebels that disrupt the broadcast, it’s the escaped convict resistance crews who engineer underground distribution networks—it’s the people who refuse to be overwritten by mind-numbing social control who take up their own power through disciplined, unstoppable style.

“You were meant to stride with us, the living!”

All of the above has been a form of lamentations (shout out Ras who has work coming out on lamentations)—I’ve been holding on to a lot over the many months since I last dispatched, incapable of sharing my thoughts as once I did due to this loss of ability, but also due to the fact that sharing on open channels is under constant consideration now. And with that all said, as much as I entertain anxieties of a catastrophic future trajectory, I came here to remind you—we were not put on this earth to be NPC pawns in a cyberpunk dystopia.

::jester voice::

Is your imagination so deadened?!

Is that what you believe will be true?!

Back before Trump’s first term happened, when identity politics reigned, we dabbled in science fiction fantasy, manufactured consent, and claimed that science was fiction, because it is to a child of Mercury.

Now it is a time for something beyond all that, because we are in that time at the end of the colony’s imagination.

And is the colony’s dream our dream?

Must we, the dead and living of the earth, be beholden to Western reason?

Do they owe us a living?

I have watched in these recent years as sci-fi type leftist books continue to be published, attempting to manufacture utopian futures and timelines where “we win”, as if just making up a continuum of how it all went down will be strong enough of a dream. If you ask me, this technique is both misguided and late. This is the same technique the Pentagon uses, guys—fiction contests for warmongers who sit with their R&D capital at the ready. You don’t get to the fucking future beyond this hell we’re in by extending the present into it—and if you don’t understand what I’m saying there I just need you to meditate on that.

Now it is a time for something beyond, because we are in the time at the end of the colony’s imagination, where its only hope is to extend outward, on mountains and rivers of the disrespected dead, into space colonies. Shortsighted conqueror fantasy.

There is no need to keep making more, for we have all that we need.

If only more of us stopped to notice.

For what do our human hearts really need in this lifetime we have on this planet Earth?

To be run ragged by artificial urgency? For your behavior to be modified by fear of losing relevance on platforms that will never let you have it? Career and audience, reach and income, prominence and dominance of information. We need to let these things go.

It is the time for our values to derive from other sources.

THIS is the true hard work demanded of visionary fiction, liberatory sci-fi, or whatever you want to call your project of trying to find a way out.

This is the work done away from seeing eyes.

This is the work that cannot be acted upon.

This is the work that does not have immediate nor tangible results.

The work of generations.

Situate yourself.

—

This machine has disabled me.

My ligaments and nerves and bones have contacted the hard plastic surfaces, the metal and glass finishes, of these mass produced physical interfaces, to the point of refusal. Even with all of my physical aids, stretches and exercises, compression garments, anti-inflammatory food and supplement regimen, sometimes just picking up my heavy phone to respond to a text is impossible. Just 10 years ago I could spend unbroken hours in pure blissful hyperfocus, banging out a new website layout or a new zine or running promotion campaigns for the projects myself and my colleagues we’re doing in the streets… And I would still have to pay with terrible swollen-limb flares, but these days the consequences last and no longer subside.

I’ve had this URL since 2003. By the 2010s in Philly, I began to self-publish and anonymously distribute the smut-tinged #queerscifi tales that had been on my website. It connected me IRL, but it inevitably put me under the eyes of institutions, in leagues with published authors and professional artists, and put ideas in my head that I too was made to join the published meritocracy, for my talents are undeniable.

But what my talents want is the end of media consolidation and the tyrants who wield its channels of distribution.

What my talents want is for you to realize how serious this distribution infrastructure is to every aspect of our lives.

—

God willing, I will have the wherewithal to weave further words on distribution and, for example, how it makes empire possible. But the way I write these days has incredibly little interest or patience for linear, argument-based sense-making of concepts, so if you don’t have an esoteric capacity for rereading what I have laid out here and applying the various magical phrases to thoughts in your mind, I recommend my friend Leah who wrote a more concrete, actionable piece on the topic.