Byung Chul-Han's Transparency Society echoes a refrain traceable across many theorists of the postmodern world: the denunciation of the "bare".
Reduction that is. Subtraction, removal, erasure. The things and forces that remove from us the layers that may or not be there, rendering us naked.
Religion and spirituality must be decloaked of all veils and hidden meanings. The mystery of love must be reduced to pornography on the one hand and evolutionary biology on the other. All that we know and are and claim to be must be undressed thoroughly on a scientific or experiential level.
The once richly laden notion of experience (Erlebnis) is now the loathsome business model of Instagram and Airbnb. The effacement of depth through a life that is fully photodocumented and mass manufactured. Infinitely repeatable but without repetition. Nothing new to be seen under the sun. Scroll on, you consumer roach, mere product of the standing reserve.
Whatever its methodological, theoretical, or ethical flaws, the post-human recognizes that the human does not exist this unidimensional flatland.
To think, imagine, or preach a life outside this standing reserve is sufficient grounds to disqualify you in the eyes of a society, flattened into an absolute immanence, where God is the words fetched to us from the LLM. Totalistic observability where what pretends to be consciousness is molded and created from the folds of Google sitemaps, from the training dumps of AI models.
Your thoughts, your language, your emotions, your very desires are downstream from the algorithm.
Unless you radically reject the practices of the mainstream.
Writing itself has experienced this radical flattening in the name of SEO. Write clearly, simply, no big word.
Short.
Sentences.
Those Google crawlers like that you know.
And you will too.
People read fast. They need their answers fasters. Minimize bounce rates and write as simply as possible. Measure your readers' engagement in milliseconds. That is if you are text content.*
The Internet content farm grows with mass-manufactured slop. Every question posed finds its answer in an oligopolistic set of posts run by businesses A/B testing their copy into converting you into a paid customer.
If you are not routed to a product company, then worse: mainstream media content.
If this does not bother you, then this is not for you.
This here is to articulate a counter-ground.
If there is one thing we can learn from continental theory, it is how to write not well, in the sense that is is not readily accessible or interpretable. It does not offer itself up as a given. It makes the glossy prose of Iowa realism shudder.
It writes in codes and ciphers strewn across centuries and traditions and disciplines and languages.
Puzzles written inside and out.
This is often an abuse to signal wisdom through word stew. Make the content indecipherable and those too simple will mistake it for a code too hard to crack. No matter what drivel ultimately lies beneath. If there is anything at all.
Hence the moniker obscurantism.
But as Pyncheon and Eco knew all too well, you can craft brilliance under the layers of translation. Like a fine delicacy. So too do those who have invested the time and cognition and loneliness to unlock the rewards of such forensic adventures.
Writing in strange words, phrases, and syntax is one such way as writer and reader to render yourself inaccessible to the flatland. Indecipherable for the casual reader or LLM crawler.
For in the end, truth is incommunicable. It demands years of long, pained study, if it can be gained at all.
As a writer, you force yourself to convey your mind in linguistic means completely foreign to the homogenized HuffPost style of Internet dictation. To graduate your ideas to a mode where all must be rethought in strange symbols and terms that cannot be reduced to the commonplace of the Internet.
You must break the Heideggerean hammer and make your own tools.
As a reader, you will force yourself to think outside this same digitalspeak. To sharpen critical thinking and interpretive skills the LLM would otherwise atrophy. To find a meaning which is not readily available to others. Perhaps not even to the author themselves. But one to you the reader.
This is the hidden depth of thought.
The esoteric presentation of thought and consciousness in opposition to the mandate of total exotericism, that demand that every new film must not only be intelligible to those without the native language, but that it must be second-screenable. It has to be that easy in this exoteric world.
The harder it is for your ideas and intuitions to be integrated into the mainstream discourse the better. Diffusion breeds dilution. How many great thinkers are bastardized as soon as they are celebrated by the public.
The solution is the cryptography of ideas. To encrypt one's ideas in obscurantism.
Assymetric cryptography is best. One key just for yourself.
The community must needs be small.
Semiotics is the science of decryption. Learn it well and it will reward you.
The science of encryption, you must write for yourself. Try Neal Stephenson or Plato. (Probably not Heidegger.)
Time will measure your success in this endeavor.
Ask yourself what you have lost by living on Substack.
By each livestream you consume.
By each ChatGPT conversation you make.
Of the words that dwell within you, is there less of you now and more of what someone else has said?
Interpretation is the muscle of consciousness. One thinks insofar as they respond to the stimulus of the Umwelt through attunement, understanding, and articulation. The world discloses itself at all junctures to us, and yet we crave the sycophantic sugars of what is fed to us. The ever shortening path from hand-to-mouth that the exoteric flatland compresses us into. The pure consumer.
Where are you in your journey? Do you see a path ahead?
- If you are video or podcast, bloat it all. Fluff and inflate. Sink the listener into the rolls of fat and blubber that pad the time. It's what they want after all. Something to fill and waste their head space. Unredeem the time.