The Best Communities are Made Up of Different People
The poet and artist Etel Adnan writes of the way we sense our own self-importance; “We can’t stop this inner flow, this river of ideas that traverses our brain, that we freeze, and call it mind, call it the bed of reality”. I imagine our eyes at the center of an axis, the universe a spin top on our table, as if we were giants.
It’s from this point of view that we form coherence out of the chaos, banishing anything that challenges this fantasy as hearsay. The mountains know this is not true, they know we are as insignificant as a fire ant collecting food for the hill — necessary for an ecosystem but not beyond it.
Our desire to escape oblivion, to remain as a permanent stamp on the social scope of society, to matter more than anyone truly can, has driven us to create beyond our bodies but also to form damage beyond what should be conceivable.
Today, the today of writing this, I feel a deep sense of melancholy. The sun is shining and yet I worry. I worry about the planet. I worry about the effects of legislations that dismiss the flu our planet is in the midst of fighting. I worry about its effects, their affect like a mourning veil over the people around me. I am deep in my grievance for others.
Its no news that Los Angeles is burning. It has been burning since I’ve known of Los Angeles. When I lived there it burned from an ongoing draught and in recent months its burned with an uncontrollable intensity as a result of data centers expediting this thirst with sheer force. The life of our host, Earth, is in jeopardy and yet the sense that we must traverse every idea, that each one of us has the potential for exceptionalism, overshadows these concerns.
Politicians ignore it in favor of profit, brands co-opt it as a form of marketing, and the majority of people place it on a plinth to use as a hierarchical conversational tool to pull out at parties, saying; I am in fact better than you because I do/think/feel x, y or z — with a garnished cocktail in hand.
In a room in Minnesota, a man asks ChatGPT for advice on dealing with a difficult relationship, in Vienna a woman asks it to generate an email template, in Glasgow another person asks it to write a poem. All these people ask a machine a question, instead of a friend.
It can think — using data that is gathered in a similar way to the human brain, connecting dots to form a resolution — so they ask it, as if conversing with another, in order to better themselves, to better their circumstances. It has become a common illness to want to be exceptional but even more so to want to do this alone. To be the individual that reaches the highest potential against the rest, as opposed to with them.
Lately, I’ve been reading 36 Exposures (a basterdised roll of film) by Dominic J. Jaeckle with photographs by Hoagy Houghton. In it Jaeckle talks about the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, and his belief that the idea of community as described by media-driven industries — of which I believe Social Media has the greatest influence — results in a lack of unity between people. In ‘a fattening ‘I’ under duress’ which generates what Jaeckle describes as; ‘A de-individualised mass looking to share in an increasingly uniform memory.’
A person who has been de-individualized lacks the self-awareness to know how their actions effect those closest to them, a mass that suffers from this can result in damaging anti-normative behaviours — meaning radical violence against those who cannot defend themselves, a breakdown of social trust and the loss of concern for our planet.
This need to create as proficiently as is demanded of us under the collective branch of capitalism, separates us more from others as it does ourselves. Consider how in order to feel more like your truest ‘you’, you must adopt a community which reinforces this idea of yourself. This idea is individualized through the farce of faux-communality as a way to access ‘the self’ that you desire.
You, we, do not recognize ourselves for fear of what we might find. For fear of realizing that we are, in fact, human. That if all of us are special, then none of us truly are.
ChapGPT lives in data centers in San Antonio, Texas. The digital monoliths these answers come from generate copious amounts of heat which require an abundance of water to control. Texas was wholly unprepared for the natural disasters from July of 2024, and will be unprepared for the disasters yet to come as a result of these question/answers. How then can we keep asking it questions when we can ask each other? When we can find it through research, through true community (not the marketable copy)?
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the impulse. I grew up in America with the looming idea of exceptionalism and the deep-seated disappointment that you feel when you realize that while your talents may be there, they’re never enough. As a result of pulling myself up by the bootstraps one too many times, I have find it difficult to ask for help.
Last night, I shared a limoncello spritz with a friend and admitted this to her and, by surprise, myself. It left me with the understanding that perhaps this fear is centered around my core anxieties. I know I am lacking on some of the aspects that are required to be a successful writer. I am impulsive and hyper-fixated on my own way of doing things and I learn by making mistakes. A lot of them. I am not pre-packaged, nor am I detached from anything I do. I am an open wound.
So when I realized that in order to do the things I want to— like start this magazine that I had been talking about for years— I needed help, I become uncomfortable by this and push the idea aside. The alternative, doing it alone, would require me to use the tools at my disposal which include A.I. Then I think back to Los Angeles, to Texas, or the purple hue of Spiral Jetty in my native Utah that every year grew less purple as the algae died off, and I’m unable to justify it.
Instead, I come back to the ant collecting food for its hill. I know that I am part of a city full of talented people. There are so many friends that can do what A.I can do and better, but unlike A.I, we specialize in only one or two areas. We need multiple brains to solve a single problem.
This is more of a strength than capitalism leads you to believe. I seek to fish in the river of ideas with you and you and you. To tangle our brains — brains that do not think in the same way — not as a way to reinforce the ideas we already have of one another, but to build without harm. To reshape the ‘bed of reality.’
P. S. I am finally coming around the idea of starting my little magazine, Rubber Fact — an experimental magazine that features written and visual work that explores the ideas around reality, truth and time in a post-modern world— so if you want to put our heads together please message me. I am notoriously bad at designing stuff and also asking for help ha.