Confronting the Digital Shoggoth.

Shoggoth: Fictional creatures created by H. P. Lovecraft, first appearing in his novella At the Mountains of Madness (1936). They are depicted as amorphous, shapeshifting beings who were genetically engineered by the Elder Things as a race of servant-tools, but eventually rose up against their masters.

One of my biggest blocks, and a hill I’m pretty much willing to die on:

Social media is the beating heart of the Matrix.

All the ‘lifestyle designer conscious creator’ dudes, all the ‘5D pleidian astrology’ ladies, and of course, the tip of the spear Andrew Tate & Co.—all posting carefully crafted, professionally edited reels on how to ‘escape the matrix’.

My brother in Christ—Instagram IS the matrix.

If your livelihood depends on your ability to farm attention through dubious dark patterns of videography and industrial-scale attention hijacking, you have broken free of nothing.

If your habitual instinct in any new environment is to take a photo so you can carefully reinforce an identity of being a free-spirited, effortlessly elegant human, this is the obstacle, not the expression. 

One thing I cannot overcome is how profoundly unnatural it feels to whip out my phone to capture anything.

"OK BOOMER.”

I get it. But don’t gaslight me into accepting that it’s somehow ‘natural human behaviour’. 

It’s not. If you’re espousing some narrative of ‘breaking free of Matrix programming’ and ‘rediscovering the Real World of human freedom’ while being wholly absorbed in unnatural behaviour, you’ve lost the plot.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair

Maybe it’s because I grew up in the days before phones conquered the world. Every sacred moment now underlaid with reflexive thoughts of lighting, angles, quick-witted openers, “wait, let me get a photo first.” 

We're biological bootloaders for the Matrix.

I can make many counterarguments, to be fair:

• It takes real courage to put yourself out in the world, in any capacity, including social media & digital content.
• There is truth to ‘meeting the people where they’re at’… and everyone happens to be on social nowadays.
• Yes, I believe the lifestyle afforded by being an online/digital creator is ‘more free’ than traditional employment arrangements in many ways.
• In the absence and loss of real belonging, witnessing, and community, we take what we can get in the form of parasocial relationships, virtue signalling, and likes as indicators of social worth.
• The desire & act of creating social content can come from a pure place like service, love, contribution, meaning, artistry, even the simple appreciation of who you are as a human being.
• Taking a photo because you want to treasure an experience is not a bad thing, and doesn’t deserve the level of sh*t I’m giving it here.

But in other surreptitious ways, the neurotic act and habit-forming impulse of continuous ‘content creation’ is a much stronger and ever-present chain than ‘when the bell rings at 5pm I’m done with work’. 

Capturing the experience removes you from the experience.

It throws off your nervous system and prevents the living experience from forming deeply emotional and significant impressions, and consolidating into long-term memory.

You become increasingly dependent on capturing events on your phone because you’re outsourcing your body's living memory to digital technology.

“Tell me what use is the key if you can’t see the chains.”  — Crushed, Parkway Drive

It's like '15 Million Merits’, the Black Mirror episode, a prophetic piece of art:

“I haven’t got a speech, I didn’t plan words, I didn’t even try to. I just knew that I had to get here, to stand here and I knew I wanted you to listen; to really listen, not just pull a face like you’re listening, like you do the rest of the time. A face like you’re feeling instead of processing. You pull a face and poke it towards the stage and la-di-da we sing and dance and tumble around and all you see up here, it’s not people, you don’t see people up here, it’s all fodder. And the faker the fodder is the more you love it because fake fodder’s the only thing that works anymore, fake fodder is all that we can stomach — actually not quite all. Real pain, real viciousness, that we can take. Yeah, stick a fat man up a pole and we’ll laugh ourselves feral cause we’ve earned the right, we’ve done cell time and he’s slacking the scum so ha ha ha at him. Cause we’re so out of our minds with desperation we don’t know any better. All we know is fake fodder and buying shit. That’s how we speak to each other, how we express ourselves is buying shit. I have a dream? The peak of our dreams is a new hat for our doppel, a hat that doesn’t exist. It’s not even there, we buy shit that’s not even there. Show us something real and free and beautiful, you couldn’t. It’d break us, we’re too numb for it, our minds would choke. There’s only so much wonder we can bear, that’s why when you find any wonder whatsoever you dole it out in meager portions, and only then til it’s augmented and packaged and pumped through ten thousand pre-assigned filters, til it’s nothing more than a meaningless series of lights, while we ride day-in, day-out — going where? Powering what? All tiny cells in tiny screens and bigger cells in bigger screens and fuck you. Fuck you, that’s what it boils down to is fuck you. Fuck you for sitting there and slowly knitting things worse. Fuck you and your spotlight and your sanctimonious faces and fuck you all, for taking the one thing I ever came close to anything real about anything..."

Chills. 

That speech is incredible. Daniel Kaluuya and the writers are geniuses.

The episode illustrates how quickly the Matrix absorbs any and every point of resistance.

The shoggoths mutate and adapt without hesitation.

The protagonist is swallowed up and spat back out as a contributing member of The Program. His resistance absorbed and regurgitated into the very hollowness of the entity he rebelled against.

There is a consistent voice inside me that thinks I could add some real value by creating more short-form videos, poetry, quick ideas...

...& there is another, quieter voice beneath that wonders how much people would like me if I had 25k more followers to my name...

"Let me be important."

The Machine™ preys upon that innocent human vulnerability with every bit of supercomputing power it has.

I'm not sure I will do anything about this. I thought it was worth sharing.

I quite like the pace, intimacy, and prose of email essays...

...and I'm not confident that if I entered the realm where the shoggoths roam, I could leave with my soul intact.