I've been thinking a lot recently about algorithms:
a stream of consciousness, poorly written, unedited piece of “writing” based on following an algorithm that started with a video of “Trent Reznor” at Woodstock
Some of them scare me and creep me out and seem like they know too much, but I'm morbidly fascinated (Pinterest). Some of them bury my multimedia and archival work, while elevating my brainrot meme garbage, but also lead me to wonderful internet friends who are realer to me than some of my real friends and who make it worth it (TikTok). Some algorithms showed me thicc goth girls and Robert Smith almost exclusively, even though I'm not interested in goth girls and am only casually interested in The Cure (Instagram, before its algorithm nuked me, ironically, for posting innocent photos of Trent and random archival NIN ephemera that its AI-powered content moderation system decided was 'abusive and exploitative,' despite the actual abuse and exploitation that goes on there.) Tumblr seems to show me pretty interesting stuff, too, despite not technically being algorithmically based. Some of the stuff I've seen is ripped straight out of my head, from things like Pusheen and birds and flowers to dark thoughts and dark fantasies I'd rather not admit to myself.
But the purest one so far I've encountered, the one I hate the least and the one that shows me more things I like and want to dive into than I could ever consume ... is YouTube.
I've started commenting on there only recently, despite using YouTube heavily for years. In fact, someone from Tumblr liked my comment on a NIN video this morning and said, "aren't you that guy from Tumblr?" I said yes, but I'm a girl. That reply is why I'm writing this at all, actually. Fittingly, they replied to a comment I had made in reply to a comment about the video's thumbnail, which was a photo of Trent at Woodstock that I had never seen. It was a beautiful photo, but uncanny and hyperreal, and me and the original commenter speculated that it was AI-generated. So, because I'm nosy, I looked at this person's videos, and saved a ton, and saw we had some of the same ones saved. Well, maybe only one. This one. The TikTok algorithm led me to a version of that song earlier this year and it's haunted me ever since, and it appropriately includes the lyric "how we move from A to B / it isn't up to me / because I don't know." (When I say "this person's videos," I meant saved videos organized into playlists--they didn't seem to have any original uploads.)
And then one of those videos led me to another video -- one that stopped me in my tracks, and I read and liked comment after comment. Someone on that video commented that while they were watching the video, which was of a song, they were reading an article called "Acid Communism," and the song made them feel the same way. I thought it sounded interesting, so I looked it up.
When I have more free time, I'd love to look into this zine. The keywords (above) and some of the select passages (below) looked like a cross section of my brain:
The keyword in the keyword cloud in this post that immediately jumped out to me was "Google Drive," because I'm forever saving things to my phone and Google Drive, things I'm terrified to forget, even if they're just snippets of conversation or funny DMs or comments of screenshots or whatever. For some reason, I just want to remember these things, even if they are just 1s and 0s and not photographs or actual dialogue--a lot of my best conversations these days, actually, are not actual dialogue. It's just direct messages on here and on other socials. In fact, I have a beloved mutual who has an accent so thick, I can barely tell what he's saying -- so I joke that thank God we have Tumblr direct messages. The GoogleDrive thing was funny to me because I'm lately thinking a lot about the algorithm and the subconscious mind, and I use my camera roll and phone storage and GoogleDrive as an extension of my mind: my memory. So much so, that my phone has begun to fritz, and malfunction, and prevent me from saving or uploading any more memories, and seems to be deleting many at random.
In fact, the whole word cloud, to me, read like a weird poem written in a psychotic episode—the kind of poems I like best. The kind that aren’t actually poems, or even good poems, but are even sometimes accidental, like the kind I write myself. Anyway -- I love this type of zine, I love these topics, so I looked up the writer and the publisher. I was heartbroken to learn about death of the writer, which is detailed in his Wiki, and summarized, prophetically, by another one of his works (Trigger warning):
My immediate thought was -- why is it always people like this? Like this guy? Like Kurt Cobain? Like Trent Reznor almost famously was? Like so many of the great Soviet poets that it’s become a cliche? Like David Foster Wallace, posthumously nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, whose strange writing about things like porn and Dostoevsky and mental health and lobsters that he left behind is probably my biggest inspiration?
Of course, I’ll never be intellectually or creatively equal, but I have always felt a kinship with people like them, with weird brains, for whom everything refers to something else, usually music, sometimes life, and can vacillate between high and low language. (Even just now, I looked up the subtle difference between oscillate and vacillate to make sure I was choosing what I meant to convey, even if I’m the only one who will read this far.) I feel like I see myself in their minds and work, and that's why I like them. It just always makes me so angry, and it seems so unfair, because it takes a sensitive, observant person who appreciates and values and (over)thinks the little things to do what they do (or did), and they’re the ones that got less time to do it. Sometimes that’s because of fate, sometimes it’s because “it was all their own decision,” to quote a favorite song from AFI called “No Poetic Device,” seemingly about lucid dreaming. One of my favorite quotes of Cobain’s is simply, “I’m too sensitive.”
(One of Wallace’s most famous essays, “Consider the Lobster,” was written after watching people eat lobster, and he wondered about the ethics of how they ended up on the plate, and becomes a meditation on pain and suffering. There’s a comment on a Reddit thread about an online discussion of the piece, and where someone says they don’t want to even read it because, essentially, they know what happened to the writer, in the end, and don’t want it to impact how they think. They added that those ways of thinking are not conducive to living a happy life, and that such agonizing is probably less the result of creative genius or special insight and more just worrisome hints into the writer’s clearly disturbed inner world.)
[and yes i'm very aware that I have a draw to straight white men, some of them with problematic pasts, despite not being white myself (at least fully), and I need to invite other identities into my brain and heart--which, interestingly, the NIN fandom and the NINternet is helping me do just that.] Anyway again -- the GoogleBooks page also mentions the biography of another name, who I guess co-wrote or at least digitally published the Acid Communism zine online and dedicates a ton of time writing about this obscure, random dude with weird thoughts. At least relatively obscure--he's apparently still read, circulated, written about, and remembered annually at special gatherings, by his screen name, k-punk.
His blog still exists, but it seems the last apparent entry was written in 2015, a year or two before he died. It's simply entitled, "Look what fear has done to my body," and is a list of songs. Not a playlist, no hyperlinks, just a list. That is until you click the green text, which contextualizes the list, and seems to say he wanted people (his students, specifically) to encounter the songs first as txt. It’s something I do more and more lately — partly because I’m lazy to fetch links for every single reference I make, partly because I think too many embeds are distracting, and partly because I think it’s more powerful when described instead of quoted or shown.
His list post is accompanied by a photo in which there is graffiti that reads, "YOLO," short for "you only live once."
Apparently, like me, he also wrote a ton about music, and about his “totems,” things and recurring themes that have deep personal significance. I call them “fateful objects, determined by the gods,” to quote a favorite line from Nabokov. Things that make us “stumble” and where our “hearts shall always break.” For k-punk, according to the article, those were Kubrick’s films, Roxy Music, Japan, and the “eldritch visions of Joy Division,” among other things, about which he “wrote obsessively.” For me they are my sometimes “eldritch visions” of Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails, God, Russia, and a boy who broke my heart — a boy who studied algorithms, who in my head is named Ruiner.
Unlike Mark Fisher, the real name of k-punk, the other listed contributor, "Matt Colquohoun" is still very much alive, I found, and blogs at xenogothic.com. Except now Matt is Mattie Colquhoun ("[kuh-hoon]"). The name is spelled Calhoun elsewhere on the GoogleBooks page for Acid Communism, strangely. In the bio on the blog, the pronouns listed are she/they, and the contact email address is still matt.
Side note side quest: I was chuffed to find that Mattie is sort of like me: she is now a doctoral student in philosophy, and I at one time desperately wanted to be a doctoral student, I just couldn't pick a lane: philosophy, literature, theology, history, semiotics, Russian pop culture, anthropology, film, journalism/writing, or even Modern Thought and Literature, an interdisciplinary program that would have let me do all of them. But none of that has practical application, except the writing and journalism, which is what I do now and have done all my life. (I wrote my first article for the school newspaper when I was in 5th grade and I've never shut the fuck up since. 5th grade is also when I went from “k” (the initial that for some reason displays when I make a comment on Pinterest, despite me never having my real name elsewhere on the account) to Wednesday, because my friend’s mom thought I was a little k-goth. (Which is odd, because I listened to punk.)
If you click the xenogothic link, it links to other, mostly abandoned socials, including a YouTube channel. She only has two uploads, from years prior, both were like looking in a mirror: An unboxing video and a YouTube Short about not knowing how to pronounce her own surname. I have an old, previous YouTube channel that I lost the keys for, so somewhere on there exists, permanently, two videos. One is of me doing a parody "unboxing," where I open a box and it reveals another, smaller box, and another where I make a tuna sandwich, in a parody of a viral video of a guy making a tuna sandwich. And I've always known how to pronounce my surname, but I never knew what it meant until a few years ago, because my surname is of Spanish origin, and I don't really know Spanish. Only a few people have ever seen those silly videos. Anyway. Sometimes I think no one reads my diary entries and txt posts, and sometimes I imagine they must be annoying to come across. But I have more to talk about than just NIN and Trent, as much as I love them. I write them mostly for me, and I'm thrilled and touched when even just the handful of very sweet people on here for some reason subject themselves to it and reliably like these posts.
I sometimes feel like my writing is itself a kind of algorithm. If you can't tell (you can), I don't edit these, I don't plan them out or draft them -- I write them all as a stream of consciousness as they occur to me, sometimes stopping whatever else I'm doing to jot the idea down, because I'm afraid to forget my idea, and afraid to forget what it means to me at the moment. (Hence the Google Drive, hence my writing while at the dinner table and standing in the middle of a sidewalk and also while brushing my teeth.) I'll see a photo or a thought or someone will say something and all the sudden I'm ignoring my actual job and other responsibilities to write all this shit. Like I am doing... right now.
So. I asked the person who liked my comment on the NIN video who led to all this, who asked if I was the "guy from Tumblr," who in a roundabout way led me to the video that led me to Acid Communism, and k-punk and Mark Fisher and Mattie Colquhoun, and whatever this piece of writing is... I asked if I'd know them on here. They said no, but that they loved my blog. I smiled. And then a few minutes later, I got a reply to a comment I left on the video they led me to, in a roundabout, algorithmically-determined way.
I had thanked the comment writer in my own comment, which I left about 45 minutes ago, thanking them for leaving their comment that led me to Acid Communism. My phone just dinged with a notification from the comment writer:
I was gonna post a link to the video, which has a very striking, evocative title. But if you search it, YouTube doesn't bring it up at all. Instead, it shows this:
You can't even find it unless it finds you first.
