Intertwixt 13: Do You Want Me To Scream?

A lunch with a friend the other day led to a suggestion that I push my voice more, maybe be even more shoot-from-the hip. Rant a bit. The world likes strong opinions. Let your voice carry.

I don’t want to. 

I am here this week to talk about the screaming and the not screaming. The bitter hell of our communal noise-soaked existence. Our social obsession with viral takes. The bullying of people who spout off fiery shit. And the attempted joys of trying to be quiet, observant. Hi, I’m in a state of agony this week, fueled by the state of the world, and I am reckoning with my voice and my mind.

Not gonna promise this will make a lot of sense. Instead, just listen. Or don’t listen. You may have other things to capture your attention, dangling sparkling screaming things in this overloaded world.

Have you seen Pluribus yet? The Apple TV show? I have. I’ll try not to spoil a lot. Actually screw that, I’ll spoil it, sorry. Carol finds herself in a world where everyone has suddenly become One. And things have gone oddly silent. Those people don’t seem to need to speak to each other. They are also peaceful. Or subservient? Or maybe just happy. It scares Carol, who wants to scream. But the noise, the world’s noise…it’s gone.

I had a weird thought, a spiraling paradoxical thought. Our world now is built to reward noise. The loudest, the pushiest, the strongest, the best, “this,” hit the viral load, compete for the SEO, amp up the superlatives, be spicier, get those takes razor-sharp. It’s a soup of takes, feeds of disconnected, dangling bits of bait. I’ve lost the thread. I can’t find any threads. 

If AI somehow spills into all the gaps and eventually eats up all the SEO, all the social media, all of the internet, flattening it, sucking up our voices and muffling the world in a blanketed shroud, would things be quieter as a result? Would we stop screaming, because our voices wouldn’t carry anymore? Because they wouldn’t even matter?

It’s a terrifying thought too, because then how would we speak, how would we send a message? If our means of communication become subsumed, overwritten, by layers and layers of intervening AI? All roads blocked, all intersections snarled. Drains filled with cement.

Or, would those in control of the algorithms just funnel to one thing, silence another? Like what’s already happening?

I think Pluribus is playing with this. It’s digging these fantasies and fears up in my mind. I have no mouth and I must scream and also I don’t even want to scream. And I do want to scream.

There are days I want to rip everything apart. I remember the plays I used to write, aggressive, edgy, trying to push at the boundaries of the world. I still find that drive, but it also feels absurd. Me, an old white man, yelling. The world doesn’t need more yelling. It needs listening and healing. These are the same feelings I had leaving Twitter a year ago for Bluesky. Moments striving for connection in disconnection.

We are not in a world built for listening. And my work, which is writing, often means producing into a void where I can’t see who’s reading.

But I’ll tell you how I generally tend to work, how I function, or cope.

I gather ideas, see things, try things. I collect, and try to observe, and then communicate as best I can what resonates off that observation. I really don’t want to be loud and takey and sharp and annoying, because I feel that spice will ruin the delicate truth of the observation. I don’t want me, but I want what reflects off me.

I think of what I get to see and use being translated to words, and then I want to communicate that taste. I don’t want to miss the mark. I hope to transmit the experience and not oversalt it. This is how I think of how I work on all my reviews and stories, tales from things yet to come.

I get pissed off when I see extreme takes in the world, because they’re usually wrong, pushed too hard. Life is a muddy mix, complicated and full of loops. The deeper I think the more I find myself getting intertwined in knots. Ouroboros. Who’s dreaming of whom.

Frankenstein, the Mary Shelley 1818 book, is something I just finished. It surprised me, touched me, haunted me. For the first half, I thought, this is about the inherent good in the world. The second part turned me around and delivered vengeance via those same burnt emotions. Did good cause evil, did revenge come from the source of love, who is the monster, why did any of these things happen. It’s so incredibly complicated. Frankenstein’s creation, in the end, just goes off and burns himself on a pyre. Frankenstein dies. Everything consumes itself.

I’ve had moments this week where I’ve felt like the burned-out wick at the end of Frankenstein’s candle. I wonder: do I even continue this newsletter? What’s the point?

I guess the question is, indeed, what is the point?

This week it’s just a moment of reflection on the absurdity of communication. I don’t think things will get better as AI extends its deep fungal threads and continues to transform the internet. They could eventually be rescued. I don’t know. I don’t have strong answers here. Just a bit of anguish. 

Side note: losing myself in games is fun and good. Kirby Air Riders, for the Switch 2, has been pushing me into loops of aggressive joy-slash-frenzy. I can’t explain it, but as I wrote my review, I wanted to capture a sense of the feral. That’s how I felt this week: feral, reflective.

This newsletter is me sharing even if nobody reads it. And so that’s my continued state. It’s what I do.

Also, I finished Black Hole, by Charles Burns: a graphic novel that’s been on my shelf since about 2004. Traveling between shelves, as I’ve moved. The stark haunted illustrations capture some sort of lost adolescence, a sexually-transmitted mutating illness, alienation, body dysmorphia. Now I’m on to The Antidote, by Karen Russell: a memory witch, dust storms, 1930s Nebraska.

Have a reflective Thanksgiving. Talk to your friends and family. Try to not scream. I’ll do the same.