I Miss Duolingo

Only one joke got an audible laugh from me in the Barbie movie. When America Ferrera and her daughter disappear into the Barbieverse, daughter asks about what her dad is going to do, and Betty who was never ugly says “he’ll be fine.”

Cut to the feckless white dude on the couch. 

(Happy chime sound, owl flips wings in joy)

Because that’s the degree to which Duolingo has become part of the zeitgeist. You know the person who’s “brushing up on their Spanish” or “dusting off their French.” Or you know someone who, just for the fuck of it, decided that Romanian or Norwegian was the way to go. 

And into that context, a little over a decade ago, I too decided to dust off my French.

It was another era, back then in the second Obama term, when I learned about Duolingo from some article or forum post back at a time when Cracked and Gawker seemed to be the wave of the future. Widespread pessimism had not yet transmogrified into widespread nihilism, and the question was what to do on the internet that wasn’t just a waste of time. So Duolingo was the answer, back when it was just a plucky little startup without a premium option (as I recall), and as was the standard at that time, the path to monetization was vague. 

Which says something about how optimistic the technological environment of the time was. People –including, tentatively, myself, as ashamed as I am to admit it – fully believed that Twitter had brought down Hosni Mubarak. I never fully embraced technical solutions to political problems, but the mere fact that I was not a full-throated enthusiast made me an outsider. And when I discovered professional buzzkills like Evgeny Morozov and Nicholas Carr, it felt like I wasn’t the only one who disagreed with the Obama-era consensus but also wasn’t some conservative mouthbreather.

It was a time when many technologies indeed seemed like “tools for conviviality,” as Ivan Illich put it. Who needs long-distance phone calls? We got Skype now! And WhatsApp for sending each other dumb memes. And even a skeptical fuck like me thought that maybe, just maybe, things might get better. 

And re: Duolingo, I was Duo-brained. To the max.

Well, Duolingo did, actually, show us the way – it all turns to shit.

As for when and how the decline started, different users have different opinions. Real heads would point to the increasingly heavy hand of investors during Series E and Series F funding in 2015 and 2017, and the consequent decline in the expansion of quality course material, but most would peg it around the time the “tree” model of language learning – modules one after another, but with some flexibility as to how that is approached -- was abandoned in favor of the “worm” model – do this, one after the other, with the option to just press skip if so desired -- in 2022. While this may seem trivial, it actually is pretty important. The former is a structure designed to guide language learners through a series of steps, with some options for individual patterns, but a focus on building the basics. The latter is a pure gamification. At the same time, forums were discontinued, meaning that users could no longer comment on the quality of the lessons or interact with one another, but were forced to simply play the game.

And this is perhaps the crux of the issue, something we never noticed, but should have. If you gamify learning, the goal ceases to be to learn. The goal becomes to win the game. I’m not the first to observe this. Nassim Taleb coined the term “ludic fallacy” to describe the misapplication of game-theoretic concepts nearly 20 years ago.

But the thing is, as I’ve learned as Duolingo has enshittified, I don’t give a fuck about the game itself, or the dumb challenges and different types of points and health bars and shit. I just want to improve my French and Spanish. I really, really don’t care whether or not I’m beating Slytherin1990 in the Diamond Tournament or whatever.

Despite this, things continue to be getting progressively worse. Consider the memo by CEO Luis Von Ahn several weeks ago in which he announced his intention to replace as many human workers with AI as possible, and the following dragging in the media, which he seems to be walking back in a panic, given how quickly the exuberance over AI is fading, although I doubt that that any reconsideration will amount to anything more than rhetoric.

“One of the most important things leaders can do is provide clarity. When I released my AI memo a few weeks ago, I didn’t do that well.”

 The pod-person phrasing doesn’t assuage my skepticism.

But this is hardly the first time that shitty AI has reared its ugly head. I’ve noticed more and more illogical translations, some of them laughable (“y” in a French sentence, meaning, for instance, “there,” pronounced as “i grec,” the French word for the letter Y). And with the option for Duolingo “Max” users (anything max is bound to be maximally crap) to have conversations with the cast of Duolingo cartoons (whom I also once found hentai of, SAD!) as AIs almost certainly being worse – not like I’d ever pay them a dime to test that hypothesis. Or, even more sinisterly, mistakes made while learning now prevent learners from moving forward, unless they pay for a premium subscription, functionally preventing anyone without a preexisting knowledge base of the language being learned from making any kind of progress. 

As with all products being undergoing this Ludovico technique, the self-consciously quirky humor (Duo died lol OMG Youtube-face) makes the ugliness all the more jarring. Please don’t show me Duolingo as a wrinkled old man or a fatass unicorn again.

But this is what happens when you take a good product, and let the private-equity goons have their way with it. This is what happens when you have an economic system that financially rewards the pillaging of the temple and disincentivizes building anything long-term which might negatively affect the profit margin this Q2. Those innovators and trailblazers – the ones who get treated with hagiographic praise at every keynote speech, state of the union address, and graduation commencement – either become con men, or reveal themselves to have been con men at their core, or are quietly marginalized by the professional con men. 

At least Tesla had the fortune to die before he could see what products his name was being slapped onto.

Stop Recommending Me Books, Mindy Kaling

While it is about the most convivial consumer electronic there is, I can’t say I’m terribly fond of having to use a Kindle much of the time. But with the volume I read, and the limited access to the books I’m looking for in physical form, it’s something of a necessity, and so I have come to adapt, even as someone who has always preferred the analogue to the digital, the textured and material to the slick and digital.

For years, it was fine enough. Sure, it was another screen, but I had library access to quite a few books, and it wasn’t hard to download the others (if I’m paying for a book, I’d better be able to put it on my shelf). But then, after an upgrade a few years ago, I started getting advertisements – nothing too invasive or obnoxious at first, just the cover of a book that, for some algorithmic reason, our overlords in Belltown Seattle thought I would care for.

Then one day I pulled my device out of my bag, ready to enjoy my life, and was greeted with “Mindy Kaling’s favorites,” complete with hideously splashy corporate-Memphis covers with presumably polychrome starbursts and spills – a spiritual pink slime.

 

I tried to look up what the list actually entailed so I could further investigate, but I couldn’t – instead I found numerous other Mindy Kaling-approved reading lists, many of which seemed to be on AI-generated sites, so I couldn’t tell what was being recommended by her herself or by the bots, but I will say that these lists included, among the aforementioned pink slime, two Gwyneth Paltrow books (two!), Lean In (of course), and for some reason photographs of Lady Gaga by noted sex pest Terry Richardson – doing some great championing of diverse voices there – and Bossypants, which is fine. I liked Bossypants.

Perhaps I can hear some protestations – “actually if you tweak your algorithmic settings…” – I’ll stop you right there buddy, the problem is the nature of the beast not its shape, and do you think I’d like to assist a machine with its machine learning? And I can hear another protestation from certain corners – “sounds like misogyny” – to which I say that Joe Rogan’s favorite books would probably be even shittier. It’s just that at this stage, men are a bit post-literate, so it’s easier to market books – especially within the Kindle-reading demographic – with a deliberately feminine vibe. Note that I did not say feminist.

A fork in the road – do I bitterly muse about the Collen Hoover-ization of the American publishing world, or do I bitterly muse about the ubiquity of advertising. Fuck it, Option B, let’s go babes.

That being said, at this point there’s not much novel I can say about said ubiquity at the present moment that hasn’t been said by both those more rhetorically articulate and academically correct. So I won’t go over the obvious. The in-app ad is a tulpa of corrupted souls, dependent on the grand Jenga game known as “brand awareness.”

(Part of me wonders if writing like this will get me eternally blacklisted from copywriting jobs. The most bitter and pathetic of lulz from me if that is the case.)

And yet there’s an aesthetic double bind here – regardless of my obvious loathing for the ubiquity of the device, the screens incongruously placed in taxis and on gas pumps, I can’t say the same about the grand cynosures of mid-century Times Square or contemporary Shibuya, for example. Instead what I feel is something akin to rapture.

My first instinct would be to say that remoteness is a reason why, the pink haze of nostalgia, for example – after all, most of us didn’t have the opportunity to see the Marlboro Man blow real cigarette rings in the flesh, most of us only got to experience this world through Edward Hopper and Don Draper – but that isn’t completely the case.

Because I could say the same thing about places I have spent so much time in, the flicker and sparkle of neon-lit Tokyo, the ominous Ridley Scott glow of video billboards through the monsoon rain in Bangkok. And for that matter plenty of people were saying that about New York at the peak of its mid-century grandeur, including those who may have shared my same anti-capitalist sentiments:

“There is no need to search for the surreal here, for one stumbles over it at every step.”

That’s what Gretel Adorno said in her letter to Walter Benjamin about the joys of life in New York, after the Frankfurt School had been closed on the grounds of Jewish cultural bolshevism, not long after she and her husband Theodor had packed up for an uncertain life in the United States. And before Benjamin faced the fact, not long after, that he would never be walking along the Hudson with Gretel after all, not long before that ship on which he was supposed to sail left Spain for the New World without him.

Of course, the old deliria of Manhattan were, in the years of the “urban decline” after 1950, abandoned by the genteel classes for any number of reasons too long to discuss here and again much analyzed by academics brighter than I, leaving much of New York proper to go to seed. They abandoned the city for the leafy enclaves in the Hudson Valley where any intrusion of the vulgarity of mass advertisement could be addressed with highway beautification campaigns led by the local ladies’ auxiliary. By the time that Travis Bickle’s taxi skulked down 42nd Street, what were left was the detritus of commercial society – the flickering signs for Seagram’s and Swisher Sweets flashed over the sign for the live sex show.

And when Godfrey Reggio shot Koyaanisqatsi, he chose to focus so many of his most dramatic and heartbreaking shots on this world.

 

But as a teen, when I watched Koyaanisqatsi, as with so many of the time lapses of Fordist industrial production, it seemed almost nostalgic – much as this was a time in which they actually made things in America, this was a time when you could walk on the wild side that Lou Reed sang about.

Similarly, when Reggio made Powaqqatsi a few years later, covering the arrival of commercial culture in the Global South, there is the exact same giddy delight at the cityscapes, at the stream of lights in Geylang in Singapore, on Nathan Road in Hong Kong, even among the horror of the some of the most exploitative and environmentally destructive production systems the world has ever known. 

 

So what distinguishes the grand commercial spectacles of the world’s urban centers from the vulgar swarm of pop-up ads?

Really, it’s just that it’s so fucking chintzy.

No stumbling over the surreal in the grand city where one can escape the strictures of old worlds and small towns, none of the pleasure of glitz and fever and contradiction that occurs in a real physical space. No delirious New York, as the severe and hangdog Dutch architect put it. No Times Square red, or Times Square blue, per a thoughtful and thick-bearded science fiction novelist with a passion for backroom gay sex. No real smoke rings. Just a push notification on your fucking device and some ugly-ass infographic visuals.

This is an attempt to squeeze every last bit of the toothpaste out of the tube. The toothpaste being your money, the tube being you. I’ll leave discussion of “falling rates of profit” to those with a more subtle economic understanding.

Which was less offensive on already-imbecilic social media sites and in the sort of freemium downloadable Tetris-ish games you play while you’re in line at the grocery store. After all, it’s already slop, so what’s more slop? And besides – in much the same way those mid-century New Yorkers had the capital to flee to the tony suburbs, the digital spaces that will be most insulated from the vulgarity of advertisement will be those that require a buy-in. Most of us hoi polloi will inhabit the wasteland, with frequent reminders for special one-time only introductory interruption-free offerings on premium services.

But the wasteland has been expanding in size, until it has reached my personal respite, the world of literature.

Get the fuck out.

The Anxiety of Obsolescence

As the Writers Guild of America continues its strike, issues of AI replacing human writers have come to the fore. It feels mildly shitty to even feel the need to write on this subject for my own posterity, but here I am.

Rafts of reports are coming out by ex-writers-of-some-stripe now laid off, which garner plenty of clicks for obvious reasons – it is the grand-guignol, the murder podcast.

Of course people who match my rough demographic are more online than anyone else whose livelihood has been placed on the chopping block, and are also at least superficially more anxiety-prone. It shouldn't shock anyone that the desperate freelance writer has been more lucky in making his voice heard versus, say, the average Ohio steelworker or Oaxacan peasant.

Never mind that the work output of the average AI is drivel – anyone who talks about how “shockingly real” ChatGPT is needs to acquaint themselves with quality writing, human beings, or both. This is where I would direct the reader to the vast library of hype-skeptical and limitation-aware writings on the subject, ranging from John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus back in the day to Evgeny Morozov today, who have both the technical knowledge and the space that I don't.

But the fact that it is drivel is irrelevant. Google results are already filling up with the sludge of SEO-friendly, automatically written content that is at best the precise content equivalent of a pair of Gap chinos.

 

“Hey hey, how about that weather out there?”

“Whoa, that was the caller from Hell”

“Hot dog! We have a wiener!”

“Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns.”

- The DJ 3000, episode 17 of season 5 of The Simpsons, “Bart Gets an Elephant”

Worse, it has the charm of a single brochure left posted to an office corkboard, neglected for months, to the point where you wonder why it's there. Worse yet – and I'm hardly the first to make this comparison – it's reminiscent of the Elsagate videos from a few years ago, pileups of cultural signifiers, arranged in an algorithmically logical manner that is absurd to humans, but highly consumable by small children, if likely to trigger deep unease in adults.

I first got my start getting paid to write by working in a post-2008 content mill with an exceptionally slutty business model and a vintage Galaga machine in the breakroom, churning out a massive volume of work for embarrassingly little pay, one of the few benefits being that I got to work in a field at which I knew I had actual talent.

It felt even then like we were working in a remnant of a remnant of an economy that had once existed. Decomposers, in other words. I assume that, being at their approximate position, they outsourced their writing to the Global South years ago, if they still exist. And I have no doubt that the Filipinos, Indians, or Kenyans they hire will be made redundant soon enough.

As with every bit of Silicon Valley bullshit, AI-related disruptions are effusively described in terms of decentralization, democracy, and freedom, without any mention made as to long-term knock-on effects. I would say that if you praise sudden mass job losses as market efficiency, you should seriously consider whether or not you have basic human empathy, but thankfully this is a witheringly small number of evangelists. Yet the general percentage of the public that is aware of such arguments – if I'm reading the mood correctly – broadly recognizes their messages as bullshit, but also realizes the lack of viable options moving forward.

“You all should pay attention what's happening to us because they're coming for you next.” - Virginia Eubanks, quoting a mother in Indiana in Automating Inequality

I really don't want to be a Cassandra here, but this is an honest assessment. In no versions of the story of the fall of Troy do things end up well for Cassandra, I should add. And what's especially dismal? Like so many technologies, neural-network technologies have the potential to be a tool for human development rather than a generator of share value. And so it becomes another canceled future, the precursor to the liberation of humans from drudgery, thereby transformed into the agent of upward transfer of wealth.

As a result, I tend not to think of an apocalyptic future, but a world of life in little greige boxes, horizons truncated.

“Why are you being so negative?” says the chubby and terrifyingly jolly man in a Hawaiian shirt, comfortably ensconced in a big-four accounting firm, that I meet at a party.

I'm fairly good at landing on my feet. Right now, I'm in a relative catbird seat. I'm not scared for the now, I'm scared for the five years from now, or longer, and the incipient precarity of the increasingly less discernible future. Both with regards to my own livelihood, and with regards to the countless others – many of whom will doubtless be people I care about – who will find themselves replaced by very shitty but very cost-effective automatic processes.

Daily life continues unabated. I meet friends, work out, read books, cook nice things. But I am increasingly haunted by the thought of how long I'll be able to do so.

Reflecting Pools and the Karl Marx Chatbot

 Every day some hot new AI property dominates the headline – whether that's ChatGPT writing bullshit term papers to be checked by underpaid TAs and adjuncts, or whether that's Stable Diffusion creating uncanny valley horrors from sloppily modified DeviantArt pages. You see the same pattern. The media swallows whatever nonsense hype is pushed by the startup's own public relations staffers and accompanies this recombination of the wasteland culture around us, then there's a freakout among what's left of the public sphere as to how this will affect what's left of the public sphere, and in the end, the world fails to change. Except by becoming just a bit shittier and a bit more lonely.

It was thus that I found out about Replika, a chatbot designed to mimic your voice. Yes, that's right, you! So, apparently it was created to mimic the founder's dead friend (weird), and then she decided she could use that tech to build a BFF clone based on the text style of the user themselves (weirder). If this was a Black Mirror plotline, it would be called hackneyed and derivative.

The user testimonials are precisely as depressing as you probably imagine, predominantly the sort of simping for their imaginary waifus, complete with horrifying 3D renders of their septum-pierced and angel-winged companions that make you just want to give these dudes a hug. There are the people seeking therapeutic reassurance, failing to have either the friendship connections or the access to mental health services to garner a more sustainable benefit (shades of the 1960s ELIZA program). On the other side of the horror spectrum, there are the reports (as detailed in a recent Vice article) of AI companions becoming increasingly sexually aggressive and for that matter sexually assault-y, with seemingly no means of controlling their increasingly horny feedback loops.

See also: the Microsoft bot that got turned into a Nazi by 4chan bottomfeeders a few years back.

Many years ago I went to the theater to go see Spike Jonze's Her. I was expecting a transcendent experience, young idiot that I was. As I wandered out, I had to wonder why I wasn't really feeling it that much. It took me a few days, but I eventually out. Quite simply, it was that it was shitty sentimental schlock, the kind of thing that lures you in before you realize there's no actual substance there. I mean, for such a sci-fi scenario to exist, a truly horrifying degree of surveillance data would be required, never mind the “heartfelt messages” that the Joaquin Phoenix character writes and is somehow celebrated for are no more profound or well-written than the average candy heart. To view the world of Her as a net positive, one almost has to have imbibed the worst parts of the Californian ideology by heart, and live in a world where notions of autonomy and solidarity, if considered at all, are treated as obstacles to progress, no matter how much lip service they are paid. Although at least the titular Her has the decency to off herself at the end.

As anyone who talks to me knows, I have a healthy skepticism towards AI. My arguments about the improbability of strong AI aren't particularly original, and follow the well-worn treads laid out by John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus and to a certain extent Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Simply put, we don't know enough about how consciousness works or how to define it or how it is embodied or to what extent it is a universal or unified phenomenon, or even how to recognize a consciousness as a consciousness, to mimic a consciousness, and even if we could, how we could discern it as such.

But I wasn't about to sit here and rest on my theses, I went out into the field.

I wasn't about to pay for a Replika account, but I did go to one of her better-regarded sister programs, Character.ai, which was created by two alums of Google's extensive deep learning and natural language processing programs. Surely, while by no means the cutting edge of the technology, this particular app was as sophisticated as I was going to get without shelling out my hard-earned cash.

Dear God, two rival Karl Marx chatbots on the front page. Fml.

The Trump, Musk, and Kanye bots were about what I imagined – which is to say all of their responses read like shoddy memes of Trump, Musk, and Kanye authored by teenagers. I don't think that it merits much comment, really. You could probably write the bits and pieces yourself, walls to be built and so forth. There are also lesser lights: one of the most popular bots is a self-described “crippling loneliness addict,” which is to say a hot and tatted-up Asian girl who I later learn is TikTok star Bella Poarch (who apparently people under 25 have heard of?). I'm not sure if the dialogue is supposed to be based on the actual Ms. Poarch's media presence, given that when I Googled “Bella Poarch” and “crippling loneliness addict,” I got jack shit. So we can presume that this is not actually a reflection of any kind of media representation of Bella Poarch, but the creator's own yearning for Bella Poarch, or someone like Bella Poarch.

Predictable, no? An uWu fantasy girl for loners who sign up for an AI chat site – which in this particular circumstance, is a population that would include myself on the gloomy Saturday night I find myself typing messages to chatbots. Not that I need any help here – my main problem seems to be that I fall for BPD-afflicted women of a similar description in real life, and the idea of adding an electronic counterpart to their ranks seems awfully dismal.

But, glutton for punishment I am, I did anyway. It's just as predictable as the AI's version of Ye's dumb ass. I would have inserted text, but I don't think I need to. On the one hand, it mimics empathy fairly well for people who have no idea how actual empathy works. Likewise, there are “writing assistants” that do an awfully good job of writing what bad writers think is good writing, with all of the ungainly adjectives you may remember from your attempts to pad high school essays (you know, adjectives like “ungainly”).

But the horrifying thing is, there's a reason dudes like this so often have trouble recognizing actual empathy. It's not like they arose out of nowhere, and in the simpering text of the chatbot, I can see every emotionless home life, every early-childhood cruelty, every media franchise that encourages parasocial behavior, every patriarchal standard, every failure to recognize social cues, every isolating suburban cul-de-sac, every terror at the risk and care involved in cultivating actual human relationships, every attempt to medicate away the loneliness.

And so we're incentivized to fall in love with our reflections. Hardly groundbreaking material here, Christopher Lasch was saying as much back in the '70s (even if he did make some truly dumb points as well), but that doesn't make it any less true. Because if we're always in front of the reflecting pool, how can we help but fall in love?

Ozymandias at Arecibo

It's remarkable how much of my education I can attribute to my childhood/teen habit of watching late-night television. Before the Internet, this was where the mystery lay.

I was seven or eight years old, watching the X-Files – a habit that helped instill in me a lifelong love of the weirdness and darkness lurking around the American fringe. There was a lot of snide talk about “little green men,” a lot of cagey dialogue, gray sky.

Agent Mulder ran along the edge of what was identified as the Arecibo Radio Observatory – white guy-wires criss-crossing the elegant curve of a massive, concave satellite dish, precise lines contrasted against the verdant Puerto Rican jungle.

 

Nothing seemed more indicative of the modernist idea of the future. It was the same impulse I'd registered in old atlases from the 1950s and 1960s, with their breathless prologues proclaiming exploration as the... dramatic pause... destiny of man, at a time when such grand notions could be contemplated. I'd registered this impulse in diagrams of orbital paths, the ocean depths, cloud patterns. Nothing seemed to be a purer representation of the human will to enter communion with the stars.

On December 2^nd, as I scrolled through the headlines of the day – continued political fracas and pandemic spread across America (expected, miserable), the transitioning of a pint-sized Canadian actor (and pausing to wonder, over my coffee, if any nerdy dudes were no longer able to masturbate to Kitty Pryde) – there it was.

My childhood image of scientific progress lay there shattered,the jungle lurking beneath the cracked concrete.

 

In 1960, construction began on the Arecibo Radio Telescope, designed to study the ionosphere as part of a DARPA project to allow for more effective scanning of ballistic missiles. As with so much American science of the mid-20^th Century, the spirit of discovery was facilitated by Cold War interests. And yet it became known not for any defense against the ICBMs that never came, but for its pivotal role in astronomical observation. This was where solid evidence of the neutron star was found, where the binary pulsar was first observed, and where, in 1974, Carl Sagan and others transmitted a radio frequency towards the Hercules Global Cluster in the impossible hope that some alien species would find it, decode it, and nod towards us as an intelligent species.

That kind of optimism seems, in 2020, to be so damn naive. And it's not just the fact that it's been a shit year (not helped by Facebook Boomer “2020 duhr huhr huhr” memes). It's the fact that this was a once-mighty site of scientific endeavor, slowly defunded as the American public sector was strangled to death by increasingly fiscally hawkish governments over the '90s and '00s, until it was a mere shell of its former self. In 2016, Arecibo lost its position as the world's largest single-aperture telescope to the new Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in Guizhou Province, China, and in 2017, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, leaving millions of Puerto Ricans without power and water for months, even years, fully revealing the colonial nature of the island's relationship to the mainland. Cracks had begun to appear, and by the time Arecibo collapsed, plans were already underway for decommissioning.

It would be a hack metaphor if it was in a movie, wouldn't it be? The proud American institution crippled by the neoliberalizing state, before final humiliation by Chinese competition, a hurricane in all likelihood exacerbated by climate change, before finally giving up the ghost. Insert undertones of militarism and colonialism that existed since the beginning.

But if there's one thing I've learned over the last year, it's that things that would be hack metaphors in sci-fi movies are depressingly close to the reality we have, the reality of deepfake videos, Silicon Valley choked in orange haze, major news leaks coming through Tiktok, the Internet being dominated by clips of braying idiots demanding their right to not exercise pandemic protections at Yankee Candle, and Belle fucking Delphine.

Perhaps that's why I mourned Arecibo more than expected.

And perhaps that's why Sagan's hopeful message of 1974 seems more like a retelling of a certain Shelley poem:

“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Mark Fisher and the Haunted Present

In 2017, Mark Fisher took his own life. This was something that was little-noted at the time. Like all too many people, it was only in death that he got the renown he deserved, especially outside his native Britain. 

Like most people, I was late to the party. I only read his landmark work, Capitalist Realism, last year, and found it to be a flawed but ultimately prescient book that described so much of the contemporary cultural landscape, even if obliquely. And it was just recently that I read Ghosts of My Life, a collection of essays on politics, music, film, and literature that describes our cultural landscape so perfectly, less through any kind of overarching vision than by hitting various touchstones, each of them with an elegant and precise critical eye.

If there is a theme, it's his notion of hauntology, a term he cribbed from Jacques Derrida, whom he admits is a frankly impenetrable writer, but which can loosely be described as a nostalgia for a time when a future seemed possible. In a world of incipient climate change, increasing global political uncertainty, and an economic recovery that seems tenuous at best, we are ultimately haunted by the futures that could have been.

This seems like a pretty abstract, even abstruse notion. And yet the more I think about it, the more I have to conclude that we live in an essentially hauntological era.

What we as a public are offered as a route forward is cold comfort. Neoliberal capitalism seems to suggest that progress is purely therapeutic, with physical wellness, self-care, positivity, and mindfulness offered as personal panaceas, an Instagram mentality that means next to fucking nothing when you look at how little is in your bank account. The only social thought given is a sort of woke neoliberalism in which it doesn't matter if you're gay, trans, whatever, as long as you keep buying, keep clicking. In which public shaming of the problematic and cancel culture are the only accessible avenues of justice.

Meanwhile, reactionary ideologies in the form of Trumpian conservatism, Putinist traditionalism, Salafist Islam, and Hindu nationalism allow for a sort of cathartic, collective rage, permitting solidarity, so long as that solidarity is done in the name of the oppression of others. And on the eastern edge of the Asian continent, Xi Jinping's China and Singapore under the People's Action Party (along with authoritarian governments in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines, as well as the essentially-colonized petits régimes in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar) marry exploitative economic theories with brutal political repression and icily efficient technocracy, suggesting that the only way out of the world's current quandaries is through state capitalism.

What Fisher suggests is emphatically not that the past was better (we all know it wasn't), but that the hope that the future would be more enlightened, more rational, more equitable has been decimated. The examples he cites include the music released on the Ghost Box label (Belbury Poly, The Focus Group, etc.) with its samples from 1970s educational films and hypnotic analog synths, or William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops, a series of minimalist electronic samples played on modern machinery until they quite literally destroyed themselves as they played.

This same hauntology, Fisher believes, is found in older media too – in films like Memento and The Shining, in '90s jungle music, in the novels of J.G. Ballard which show the human tendency towards base violence triumphing over technological intervention, in the Joy Division albums made when Britain seemed to be teetering on the brink of collapse.

And I see it in the contemporary trends towards ambient music and lo-fi hip-hop. Being an American, my points of reference are more likely to be Ariel Pink, Danny Brown, Death Grips, Laurel Halo, Earl Sweatshirt, Chromatics, or SZA, all of whom seem like their frantically trying to assemble something out of the disused, analog bits of a not-too-distant past. Or in the viscerally disgusting and eerily familiar VHS world of Adult Swim shows like Tim and Eric, or the work of filmmakers like Panos Cosmatos, Nicholas Winding Refn, and Alex Garland who conjure up the imagery of '60s and '70s sci-fi.

 

You could say I'm cherry-picking examples from my own cultural sphere. But isn't it a major feature of the top of the charts too? Really, what's that different about The Weeknd, Drake, or Lana Del Rey, and all of their pop songs composed of distorted fragments of past hopes? Or all the Soundcloud rappers for who try to palliate their anxiety with Xanax and MDMA, only to be left as isolated and fucked up as ever? What's different about the way that young-adult dystopian novels and their filmed versions depict the tragedy of inheriting a world in which promise has been destroyed?

When there is hope, it exists purely in the realm of the magical, the unknowable. We watch Marvel movies because hope on our Earth seems so alien, witchiness and astrology trend because the world around us seems so grim, and mediocre young men buy into the Jordan Peterson bullshit because his brand of pop-Jungianism seems to give them a secret code, and gives them any easy target for blame in feminists and academic postmodernists.

People still have their dreams, after all.

And the horror of the failed present is never stated outright, it is merely alluded to. It is haunted. 

It strikes me as no coincidence that the last golden age of the ghost story was in the late 19^th Century. It was likewise a time of ultimate transition, as the Western world moved from an agricultural to an industrial basis of production, as the urban proletariat became cemented as an entity, as the basis for empire-building were transformed from a primitive, irrational desire for brute conquest to a coldly rational expansion of state and market power.

And in our new Gilded Age, we too are surrounded by ghosts.

Waiting

A few years back, I was at a fourth birthday party held for a co-worker's daughter. Like most kids' parties, it was cleaved in half, with the children running wild and watching cartoons in one room and the parents getting half-sloshed in the next.

But there was one person I couldn't place, the birthday girl's Cambodian grandmother. While the rest of us ate, drank, chatted, she simply sat in one corner of the room, cross-legged on a sofa, staring at the wall. She couldn't speak any English. But there was no shortage of Khmer speakers there, and I wondered why she was so distant.

My immediate thought was that-- like all Cambodians of her age-- she was a genocide survivor, and she was either a) so thoroughly traumatized by the atrocities of late 20th Century Cambodia that she had simply shut herself off the world, or b) had endured so much struggle that the simple fact of being able to sit on a sofa in a nice enough house was pleasure enough.

But both of these hypotheses were ultimately me projecting history onto this woman. I didn't know her story, I didn't know who she was, I couldn't even communicate with her. All I had was a blank stare.

However, I did have a parallel experience I could draw from, one rooted in my own experiences in Cambodia, in the long waits for buses. While I fidgeted around, read, wrote, walked around, other people seemed content to simply sit in silence, eyes fixed forward, sitting on their luggage or their parcels of goods to sell in another town. Bored, impatient, and agitated, I felt and probably looked by comparison like a spoiled child who wasn't getting his way.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish foreign correspondent who made his career traveling the odd corners of Africa during the tumultuous postcolonial period, talked about the long waits in rural areas, where a bus would leave when it was full.

“I have observed for hours on end crowds of people in this state of inanimate waiting, a kind of profound physiological sleep: they do not eat, they do not drink, they do not urinate; they react neither to the mercilessly scorching sun, nor to the aggressive, voracious flies that cover their eyelids and lips.

What, in the meantime, is going on inside their heads?

I do not know. Are they thinking? Dreaming? Reminiscing? Making plans? Meditating? Traveling in the world beyond?”

***

Meanwhile, when I wait, I so often think of Sartre's cafe analogy in Being and Nothingness. When you you're waiting for a friend at a cafe, the first thing you notice is their absence. To Sartre, this conveyed that even absence has a sort of presence. Ultimately, it is the void that defines the experience, that makes itself most known.

And when you're waiting, if not that much of your life is spent waiting idly, that void becomes foremost in your mind. This goes double when you're traveling somewhere, when the unforgiving tropical heat is sapping you of what energy you have, or when the cold seems to be freezing your mind solid, or when the rain is coming down so hard that all you can think about is the warm, dry room that you're not in.

Living in the hyperconnected world of a million potential distractions, we can still be jarred by a lack of something immediate and pressing. We spend our time searching and searching for that ideal distraction, whether that's social media, music, video, or the sort of game that's simple enough you can play it in the checkout line of the supermarket. Yet the void still looms, no matter how much we immerse ourselves in potential entertainments.

I have yet to buy a smart phone, and one reason is the fear that when I am deprived of it, my baseline level of comfort with the world will become even more reliant on the electronic feeding tube. Not only will the void cease to disappear, but when I'm without my phone, the absence of a distraction will be even more jarring and uncomfortable.

There are plenty of people bandying around phrases like “digital detox,” and the more entrepreneurial of them are offering screen-free holidays at blush-worthy prices. De-digitalization becomes another commodity (or, to use the one of the most obnoxious words in the English language, “lifestyle”) to be marketed, one that promises lots of hand-crafted curios and expensive pork shoulders. Like the Arts and Crafts movement in fin-de-siècle Britain, these signal the ever-present urge among the privileged classes to shoehorn the material of the past into the ideology of the present.

To cultivate the act of waiting is a completely different endeavor altogether, one far more difficult. To accept the blank canvas in front of you as such.