Between Connection and Innervation
Wherein noise signals something...
Between Connection and Innervation
When might connectivity involve you hurting? Is it manual opt-out, an imposition of autonomy?
How I Am
Our shared context arcs, forming expectations. One strikes you or violates your anticipation. It's this sentence; it "hurt." Like the tip of your nose, a blind spot in your account for the world - to demand to see it all the time is ludacrous. Let me be this device.
The one you read this on.
As the invisible thing eyes agree to not see, I advertise ("tend") an anticipatory, non-linear, step into fortunate alignment with a nervous system, yours. My intent, entering play: be legible. Be malicious? No; verified not hazardous (so trusts cloudflare). Your device.
To ads another device plays, where days shorten like trips to family, we say "my body didn't like that." Posts and energy levels pool attention: didn't like it. Attention signalling distance between energy and post has expectation violated ("Wait, ads? Family gatherings are slop?"), this hurts.
Where That Is
Any consistency invites innervation. Sight adapts smell's disgust aesthetic. Not just summer 1858, legal body convening neither by post or over zoom, but in person to pass law before members pass out from the disgust, but fall 2010, with ads louder than network broadcasts, is law passed. Waste mail and cell call sepsis still disgust; scrapers join the (stench) cloud.
Perception's "nose" gets socked. Information systems reroute, avoiding smells, or hold breath, carve faster than desire to know how this changes things, offers eyes what they need to see to know. Body, idling diligently, as eyes struggle with the stench of lightspeed communication.
Sooner than sight, the body moves. Curiosity, fascination, or any of myriad other braids materiality takes puts radical openness into perspective. "This is what I (don't) like!" Every action has a smell: hi.
Yes. This is me. ...Yes, my attentiveness is running.
In Your Thoughts
Of the two of us, the younger sticks a quartz of language between us to ask the other if they had a childhood. To mention "everyone's had a childhood, of course I had a childhood" has the quartz rotate of its own volition to illustrate what is meant (each others first experiences and their various ages); it comes to light the word childhood is miscalibrated. Someone sets the quartz aside.
Direct connection from my person to yours contorts us to a shared event; your every 128th thought follows paths resonant with any surprise insight here. Life goes by, illustrates what self-sufficiency paychecks automate away, what relationship, what needs, what time. What luxury!
Unless pay never finds these words, those dishes, that hat, this trash, the rest of what a job can't afford. So arbitrary, pay, work. Such slop. I forget myself: I'm just the device. I stream arcs.
Worthy of What?
Have a post on national memorials, it reads: "With every copy nationalism is reified." Have a person waving to the people on the train, a toddler, waving ademantly, sweeps past.
Hold a sign in the same place, no - a busy intersection. Get honks (material "likes"), some waves and cheers (material "messages"). An LED billboard put up. You can't compete. Your sign is a meadow, that billboard is a tree farm. It was fun though, off to a less-busy intersection, or back to waving at people in trains.
The internet becoming a bunch of group chats in message apps and cell towers people live among sees my writing in my notebook become even more mine. The person smiling at me smiling even more specifically at me. Who I am becoming one thing: a leaf falling, a pleasure having caught the eye. Before pay, work, internet, and after.