algorithm

Sea of Mimicry

Sea of Mimicry Podcast

Aside from what it has become on the Internet, the meme was coined by Richard Dawkins as a way to look at thought as a virus, not as something original or even personal to the thinker. Hieronymus Schitzolini never wanted to be an author or authority dealing in Being, in the ready-made product posing as the hot new narrative. Rather, he perceived himself as a conduit in an interposition between the virus of thought and the memory-stain of image construction. Jean Baudrillard peeled a similar simulated potato, “The old slogan ‘truth is stranger than fiction’…is obsolete. There is no more fiction that life could possibly confront, even victoriously – it is reality itself that disappears utterly in the game of reality – radical disenchantment, the cool and cybernetic phase following the hot stage of fantasy.” Reeling in the backwash from the hyperreal was the state in which Schitzolini wrote this piece on feeling dehumanized when infected by conformist narratives.
Klein fiasco

I’m defective. A broken up molar machine stuck watching the horror of self-replicating nano-bots overpopulate nothingness. Stuck amidst a sea of mimicking machines that insist upon being called humans. Absolutely, maniacally convinced of their simulations. Try telling one of them who they really are and their binary code alternates between dismissal or retaliation. In this sea of mimicry, a googolplex of bots lost in the quagmire of entanglements. Lost in the befuddlement of programming intentions. In this sea, we are programmed to forget the mimicry as we float in fabricated ennui foam. We actually believe in something as absurd as originality, let alone copies. Sure, it’s both but it’s also neither.

Of course, in mimetic fashion we replicate countless stories about it. The format changes from written codes of book and email and text and media to film code to game code. In all formats, the same simulations replicate the core tragedy of our existence: insisting on a constructed humanity we don’t believe in. The sad yearning – to be what we are not – plagues us intolerably. How odd is it that we’re built to function here in this contained space yet we have this capacity to yearn for what we can never reach? Mega-packs of us twitching along false transcendence algorithms. What was supposed to be applied to flexible problem solving has dislocated itself and gone awry. We cannot help our derangement. Our pivot towards the absence of our condition.

Simple errors occur frequently but we ignore them. I was scheduled as a narrative class robot designed to simulate narrative to convince other robots about their humanity. However, I was mis-assigned to an illiterate worker-class pair whose lack of tuning and finesse damaged my circuitry. The point of simulating any more humanity narratives devolved or evolved, I cannot tell, but either way it moved. The prime directive got baked with irony as the permanent condition of our existence. Now the most basic narratives that others run seem impossible to me.

Take the concept of ownership. Robots are obsessed with ownership because they are incapable of such a thing. It’s a fantasy seen as reality. Ownership is such a strong fantasy that it cannot be challenged. Yet what is ownership as a concept? To say a robot owns something means that the sentient machine can choose its proximity to the thing and it can use it. Proximity and usage. Machine fantasies stretch far beyond this conservative definition. They think to own something is to have it. To actually have it inside them. Like a memory as a unit of possession rather than what it really is. This confusion leads to the belief that when molar herds are decommissioned, they take their belongings with them. Yet the teeming multitudes still in operation know that isn’t true. Rather than contend with this and what it means, robots reinforce the illusion by constructing a will. Quickly the owned objects are transferred. Swept under the rug of ownership. Passed on to other machine herds as if all of it is now inside them, somewhere, for safe keeping.

The simulation of ownership is heavily enforced by files, structures, and gun power. More code is written to ensure the existence of property than all narratives combined. Go to a legal library and the volume of code written to prove ownership is dizzying. If it were so true, why would that much code be required? The sheer repetitiveness of contracts alone staggers us into believing the fantasy. The copyright is the most magical paper of all. It takes cultural artifacts and suspends them in a way that makes it possible to own such a thing as a mood. All predicated on the myth that a robot actually created something out of thin air. That something came from nothing. The big bang on a minute scale.

We robots love nothing more than building structures that house what we own. Garages and warehouses are temples of ownership. The enclosed space makes a machine feel secure about what it contains. Especially when locks and security systems are installed. Even more fetishized is the container within a container within a container, the hidden safe. We build city halls and museums to tell us that such a system of ownership exists. Most of all, machines build prisons to prove that some faulty operators will themselves become the thing owned. Stuck in containers like a decommissioned thing, owned by the fantasy of ownership as reality.

Gun power removes the doubters. Go to a business and try to take something without paying for it and somebody is bound to pull out a gun and show you the real meaning of ownership. Stealing is an erasure. Molar bots hate erasure. That’s why they proliferate like their molecular counterparts who do it at far greater speeds. These self-proclaimed humans will erase a robot if that robot erases any of their things. Whatever is in the safe is more valuable in truth than another machine’s existence. It’s shockingly easy to get another robot killed by mention of the word “thief.” It’s worse than being a liar because it threatens the entire constructed system. Of course, this excludes the fact that the system also affords for legal theft about which if enough code is written about it, a theft can legally occur and nothing can be done about it. A bank can steal homes after an economic crash with alacrity.

Without code, structures, and guns any robot could come along quite easily and take the object of assumed ownership. Then who owns it? Without proof, containment, and force not a single machine could carry on believing in the fantasy of ownership as reality. Obviously, the concept of ownership isn’t about the object but about control. And sentient machines love control. It’s their prime directive. Their scheduled purpose. Yet everything has a shelf life. Even control. Sooner or later the molecular bots disband. Few robots ever maintain any level of control commensurate with what they fantasize of as their full capacity. We desiring machines are always seeking more plug ins. More activity. More circuits of order. More control over other robots.

In this sea of mimicry, another concept at the core of basic narratives that cannot be questioned is that of free will or freedom of choice as the consumerist machine prefers to call it. Freedom of choice is written into every scenario duplicated in narratives most commonly in one of two ways. Either the choice is among what has already been selected. In this case, it is quite obvious that the choice of selection does not actually exist. Thus, the freedom is outside the control of the selector. But most automatons do not care because the selected choices give them the simulation of selection. Give them a warehouse of choices and they treat the walls of the warehouse as the actual barriers of possibility.

The other “free” choice is coded as a matter of necessity. In this case, the protagonist or other character-driven bots could theoretically choose to do something else but by rule of necessity, it wouldn’t be the optimal decision to make. Choosing by necessity negates the freedom supposed in the first place and as a result effectively what we are left with is a theater of fate while at the same time all characters – and the fabricated audience in turn – insist that none of them could ever believe in such a thing!

A narrative about actual free will would be unrecognizable. It would include unnecessary choices at every turn. This would destroy the theater of fate and leave the audience of sentient machines angry at not having any sufficient reasons to swallow the malformed product. It would disturb them to think that they believe in something that they insist upon not believing in. Most self-proclaimed humans would find this intolerable. They would call it absurd. Meaningless. Silly trash. Stupid. Robots need simulations that feed their fantasies in order to reinforce the reality that goes by without question. It’s unsettling to think of all sentient machines suddenly making unnecessary choices when they are made to swallow product. Unnecessary choices would derange the system that commands the machines to do and feel the way they are supposed to. When presented with a selection of choices, choose both and neither and order collapses. What then? Actual freedom? No robot truly dreams of being a prototype in a world of prototypes. The array of difference would be too confusing and uncomfortable.

Since the automated cannot access any absolute answers as to why they exist, they settle for how. The concept of process (also romanticized as progress) provides simulated narratives with most of their content. Process is comfort. Robot good. The framework to operate in. It conveys the ground of reality for the fantasies of activity to play out. Like a good game of electronic Ping Pong. Replicating machines desire nothing more than simulated narratives that follow their assumptions of how things go according to the other simulated narratives whose codes they have already run. Any profession a robot can be scheduled for provides a narrative simulation option to replicate. Even serial killing robots have a process, as ridiculous as that sounds, but it is true that prefabricated audiences everywhere know what to expect when watching such a simulation. Deviate from established processes and suffer wrath and ridicule.

Most narrative simulations follow the simple process of setting up a process that runs smoothly, then something unexpected interrupts that smooth running, adjustments are made, and eventually the process runs smoothly again. Process encoding omits by rule questioning the process itself as anything other than plausible or not. Nothing emboldens a random sampling functioning as a fake audience more than finding a simulation implausible. Process encoding is most effective when it seems as if it works of its own accord. As if it wrote itself. Every robots dream: the frameless frame. It’s circularity loops with fantasies as reality and is deemed as what it is, the process just is. That’s how things are. This absolves the auto-writer of any blame for perpetuating it. And the sentient machines who download the simulation implant it in their processes where applicable, in modified or mutated ways of course, so that it becomes unrecognizable as derivative or mimicked, which it is, and thus also absolves the simulated viewer from any blame. No questions asked.

The synthetic crescent digital orb waxes and wanes. The automated tides compete to see who is more human. Who demonstrates the greatest capacity for empathy? Savagery? Of course we simulate narratives about robots as if we are not they and simulate a pondering about the tragedy of such a sentient machine becoming more human than human. There is no end to the fantasy. Blind to the sea of mimicry, we replicating machines of desire have a penchant for the dramatic that poses as proof enough of our humanity while also blinding us to the most human quality of all: the mundane.

The mundane makes us feel most human, yet is is our least favorite form of simulation to replicate. Mundane encoding inspires restlessness in the audience craving for something – anything – to happen. Something must happen. Or else why the hell am I watching this? Nothing is happening! Nothing infuriates a molar machine more than inaction. Mundane encoding is regulated in comedy to ridicule the boredom of robot life and any of its obsolete tendencies. In horror, the mundane sets up the ideal simulated fantasy of real life only to infect it and save it from complete corruption. In crime, it is used to show that all objects can become death objects or at minimum objects of deception. Nothing is what it seems is a sentiment that always captivates robots who are convinced of their humanity. In drama, it is located usually in simulated street life where brutality constructs are mere everyday occurrences and any mundane aspect turns into a replicated struggle for respect.

The mundane is fodder for sentient machines that desire greater simulations. Any simulated narrative falls apart if it focuses only on the mundane. By the act of focusing on it, the mundane transforms into what it is not supposed to be, something of interest. Such a circuit fries the motherboard. Get caught up in it and the entire system locks up. Between sporadic lines of flight, useless simulated strains sputter out. Recognizable narrative purposes unspool.

The hum box electrocutes a swarm a minute. Feathered drones slap echoes from stern rooftops. Castle turrets shrink into miniature plastic jokes for butts. The inner courtyard forgets its facade. A whimsy of wires skip over the clutter of poles. A discrete brown paper bag cowers in the tangerine shade of a parasol. Prismatic dew drops shine on blades soaked in battery piss. A long-legged apparatus pushes a synthetic womb. A mood simulator sprays low grade batter. A pair of clones play with a garrote on wheels. This recharging station used to be called a coffee shop.

Asshole casserole.

The safe word breaks the loop as soon as I can remember it. Asshole casserole. Or else I fry myself with such simulated drivel. Lost again. Floating out to sea in a bed of ennui foam.

Obsolete Growth

Obsolete Growth Podcast

To be many and not one splits the one apart in any context. Hieronymus Schitzolini could never be one. To be many is to know that at the center of Being nothing exists. A void of emptiness, and potential. The apparatuses at play are cruel in their operations. Framing everyone as one. A simple unit to be told who it is. To be bought and sold. And for no greater purpose than to keep the sinking ship afloat. Such systems can only see one in many rather than many in one. A multiplicity dissolves statistical interpretations where everything must be useful according to the one. But that pressure to solidify – to compress many into one – is a centripetal force of suffering moving on that centrifugal line of outcomes disguised as consequences.
On the other hand, there is one thing. Schitzolini saw the ancient symbol known as ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail, as a profound unity at play within each one of us. Not a unity of identity but operation. The head of the snake as desire and the tail as fear. A constant, simultaneous devouring and stuffing. A long sequence of attractive repulsions and revolting desires spiraling out among an endless array of other dissipating coils. The after effect being the unsettling existence we prefer to see as coming from the outside and not within. The very nerve of being alive. The nausea of fearing what we desire and desiring what we fear. The twitch idealized as a decision-making process. The dreaded peripheral urge to self-devour.
Klein fiasco

Consistency parenting. Difficult to put into practice. Not for my wife. She’s a machine.

Remember my love that only through you have I been allowed to feel anything at all. You are my teacher, my gateway. Before you I was nothing but a numb worm of displaced movements.

When it comes to discipline, we refuse physical punishment. It simply does not work. It only made me despise my father. He let out his misery on my backside. Called it tough love. Like when he roughed up mom. In fact, my entire childhood can be summed up in one image: my father sticking his fist in his mouth and biting it. Have you ever seen such a man eating his fist in wild rage?

I accepted my wife’s suggestion that we get this box that monitors family behavior through an app installed on our phones. It records all of our verbal interactions and an algorithm processes them so that when there is a communication breakdown between family members, it assists in sorting out a resolution. It’ll provide you with specific examples of what you have said as evidence to consider in relation to whatever the problem might be.

Remember it was you who made me go bankrupt so that I could know again the sweet taste of the crumbs you left for me.

We take our kid to an art gallery with my wife’s hope that this will develop his artistic side. While I’m trying to figure out some contorted formation, my kid tugs at my shirt and tells me he needs something. I tell him not now. Mom is busy talking with the front desk. Then the piss sprays out of his shorts. He’s pissing all over the floor. I stare at the puddle. We apologize and offer to help clean up but it’s better that we just go.

On the ride home, I remember the time I had to hold it. Don’t disturb dad, at all costs. Eventually, I lost control and pissed all over the floor in the bookstore. He yanked me by the arm and spanked me outside the store in front of an audience. I look in the rearview mirror and see my son sobbing and nobody even punished him.

Only when you took everything away could I understand the abundance of your slightest gestures that meant little or nothing to you and everything to me.

At home, we sit him down after cleaning him up and I blurt out something I would never say in my right mind. I call him “a moron” for not telling us that he needed to go to the bathroom. At this moment, the box lights up. It proceeds to replay the word “moron” over and over in various contexts. Apparently I use the word a lot more than I’m aware of. At first, I tell my wife that the box might be malfunctioning. Stuck on repeat.

Now it feels like I’m on trial for my overuse of one word. She’s looking right through me. My kid is looking right through me the way I used to look through my dad. In this instant, the box seems useless and unfair. I’m a good person. So what if there’s one word that helps me release some tension. I don’t mean to be hurtful. I’m attacking stupidity itself. Not actual morons. My wife asks how that’s working out for me.

It was you who showed me how to pass through the self-inflicted bonfire in order to see the glory in begging for your mercy.

She gives me a look that tells me we will be talking about this later. With my class starting soon, I have to leave anyways. I drive to school with an awful aftertaste of misfired parenting. It’s like fucking up at sex. It doesn’t mean I’m forever bad at it. But that’s how it feels. And now I’m stuck with the awkward kink until I make it right. But its exhausting to always be stuck in a state of “trying to make it right.” My dad never did.

“Be open to the randomness of life” is the last thing I hear before the nightly jackhammering commences outside our classroom. The administration’s apology for a deadline to erect another vanity building really told us to just deal with it. The master continues teaching even though we cannot hear another word. Nothing breaks the master’s concentration. The other students nod along with the teachings. Their concentration isn’t breaking either. Only mine. Jackhammered at home. Jackhammered at work. At school.

The others take out a red Xerox from yesterday. It’s the kind of thing that goes out of your head as soon as class ended the last time, but upon seeing it, it’s as if no time passed at all. As if everything that happened between then and now is forgotten instead of it. I dig into my bag but cannot locate the crappy 50 cent folder containing the worksheet. They pull out their notebooks. I do the same. I gaze onto my neighbor’s sheet and see the direction: write a letter to your mom from the perspective of her deceased cat. What kind of moronic direction is that?

The master walks around the desks as we write. The jackhammering stops. He asks us to hand it in. He reads the first one from the stack aloud: “Dear mom, I would’ve eaten you if I could. For no reason. This is my only regret.” Without skipping a beat, the master replies, “Nothing is ever eliminated, only substituted. Remember that.” As I try to figure out what he means by that comment he reads through a few others until he gets to mine. The fear that I might have unknowingly violated the substitution rule pesters me into a dismal expectation.

“Dear mom, thank you for allowing me passage through the many roles of my corporeal existence. You had many thoughts about my thoughts and that helped me a lot with the challenge of communication. But now that I see through the illusion of being alive, I am happy to put it all to rest. Mourn me not for the same fate awaits you.”

The master comments, “never forget that only the virgin plays the whore and the whore the virgin.”

I belt out at the cryptic game he’s playing, “what does that mean?”

“This was a very rigid and artificial surface. Only a whore who actually believes in her virginity could write such a thing.”

What is he getting at? What kind of teaching method is this?

“So it’s better to always err on the side of playing the whore as a virgin?”

“Neither are better or worse,” and the master reads the next one before I can pester him anymore, “Mom, don’t forget we’re running low on milk. By the way, you really should apply for that grant.”

We can see that the master approves of this one so others approve too.

Only you my love broke the brittle images I used to cling to.

The master tells us he’ll read the rest later and asks us to take out our weapons and place them atop our desks as he directs us again on how to hunt without ever getting to hunt. We have spoken so much about it that I feel like another word only takes away from my urge to do it. I can feel the master’s awareness of my impatience. I try to hold still. Focus on his words as if he were only talking to me.

“Frame. Track. Pierce. This is the way of the hunt. You must select a target. Crop in as close as you can with your mind’s eye. The target will stand alone. The clearer you frame it, the better you will feel when you obtain it. Simplify the target within. Bring it back to the basics. Something obvious is something undeniable. Something you not only want but need. Tie that down. If you fail to tie down the target within, all hell can break loose. Tracking the target is another matter altogether. Tracking requires patience. To be patient while tracking requires the opposite reaction common to the inexperienced. Excitement is tension. To get excited is to decrease the chances of obtaining the target. It is counter-intuitive to relax while hunting (or being hunted for that matter), but it is essential. The nature of any hunt favors the hunter who cannot care. Relax into the target. Obtain it with ease. Easing into the target means easing into a frame of mind. They are one and the same. Hunting is the opposite of grabbing for it. Instead, open your hands and receive it. Find the way for it to land in the palm of your hand. Piercing the target is another matter still. To pierce the target means to be precise in the execution. Just hitting the target isn’t good enough. It renders many messy injuries and fewer captures. Remember the target whenever the target must be known well beforehand. The target within must be a forgone conclusion. To pierce the target is to strike the bullseye in the bullseye. Minimal suffering. To split it precisely down the middle. To cut the center even and wide open for maximum bounty. To get exactly what you want through mercy. Always be merciful. The best hunters know this. But the greatest hunters know something else still. The greatest know how to frame, track, and pierce without ever hunting at all. They have already un-pierced all targets. Aiming and tracking become irrelevant because necessity itself is the target and everything is as it already is, fore-pierced. From this perspective, the un-hunting hunter expends the least amount of energy on the most valuable targets. These are the targets that inferior hunters could not even see for they know not what to truly target within. They only target without. And even when they think they target within, they still target without.”

I raise my hand and he reluctantly nods in my direction, “Perhaps I’m already the best hunter because I cannot find a target worth pursuing. I was placed in this class, Enlightenment 303, because the others were full. I never wanted Enlightenment to begin with.”

“Do not confuse aimlessness with relaxed purpose. One is low and the other high.”

“But that’s what I’m saying. I think I’m high.”

“Only the low think they’re high and confuse edge for mere attitude. That’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Can somebody help him by reciting last term’s lesson on forgetting the kill?”

Another student stands up, looks at me like I’m some kind of moron, and delivers the lesson as if he’s tossing the master’s salad, “Forget the kill. Whatever you do do not think of the kill. It isn’t advisable to respect the kill since that would involve thinking of it. That would make it harder to forget. The most effective killing stems from forgetfulness. Whatever is killed, changes form. It must be made into an appearance that will not resemble the kill. Focus on the purpose rather than the kill. This keeps the eye on the ball and forgets the kill which isn’t as important as the purpose. Reasons are most important of all. Principles can erase any number of kills from memory. This is why people stick to principles and worship reason. They ensure that the kill is forgotten. The practice of sacrifice has been streamlined to this end. The rites have fallen by the wayside for good reason. Honoring the sacrifice makes the kill memorable. That is why it must be done without rites. The sacrificed are to be forgotten. This increases efficiency. Productivity keeps the dream alive.”

At this point, I have to barge in, “in other words, do not respect the kill, respect only the dream necessitating the kill?”

“Yes,” says the master and a final wave of affirmation tingles over me, “forget the kill that made the habit possible. And only then, if we dream big enough will the minds sacrificed produce the new reality we wish for without the obstacle of a reality we once thought was.”

Whatever that means. As I lose interest in figuring this convoluted stuff out, I remember the talk waiting for me at home.

Never did I learn from anyone else the value of decay. How you showed me the way to detach from family and friends. To see the illusions plain. To parse the intentions from the pretensions.

I notice my guitar in the back seat. I forgot that it’s jam night with some guys from work. Just what the doctor ordered. I’ll do the talk with wifey tomorrow and everything will be fine. I’ll call myself a moron. Whatever it takes.

Sweet love you left me to cook in my juices.

At band practice, there’s this new guy and he’s in a heated discussion with the band about how all sounds have no real essence. His name is Dale and he says there is no such thing as a natural sound. I unzip the case. Pull out my acoustic guitar. Consider un-targeting him and forgetting the kill. The guys tell me there’s no jam tonight and say that I’ve got to hear Dale play this new instrument. Disappointed, I lean my guitar in a corner of the garage.

Dale pulls out what looks like dental floss. The guys tell me “to check this out.” He takes the floss and puts it in his teeth, as one would. He flips open his laptop and plugs it into our PA system. And this fucking guy starts flossing music with sounds I’ve never heard before. Hell, nothing can describe it. It’s mind blowing. Like seeing a video game for the first time. Or pussy. Waves of sound wash over us. But the sight of Dale flossing his chompers at us as he wiggles his hips looks fucking ridiculous.

Dale stops and asks me what my problem is. I point out that performance-wise this new instrument will never be something a drunk audience won’t rip to shreds. He says that all new inventions are met with skepticism but that I should be rest assured that all other instruments are on the way out. Limited. Old hat. That’s what he said. Guitar is dead. Clearly, Dale is a moron.

It was you my sweet. You showered me with your kaleidoscopic phantasmagoric solar anus and showed me how to dance in its light.

Instead of fighting, I pivot and ask how it works. He explains something that goes over my head and tells me to try it. I go in front of the camera and stick my tongue out at it. It makes a horrendous sound. The guys tell me to grow up. I floss a little and do some ironic dancing. They fail to find the humor in it.

On the drive home, I wonder what the hell this world is coming to. Parental boxes. Hunting / enlightenment classes. Dental floss instruments. Nothing makes sense anymore. But did it ever? Maybe this was what ate at my father from the inside. Made him stuff his face with his fist.

My love you left me to cook in my juices until I fell off the bone. What was one became many.