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Some writing I've done for classes and journal entries.

"Précis 1" for Unsettling Science, 09.26.2024.

My favorite animation is by @mummy__joe: it features stripped-down art, soulless corporate music, and a depressing storyline. We’re introduced to Tina, a girl who eats Crunchinos every morning. Tina exchanges ten Crunchino tokens for a “Goobyvision Pro”, and within the Crunchinoverse, she spends 10,000 hours mining Crunch-O coins for “15 gigabytes of gorgeous Crunchino-front property” to upload her consciousness (“the Crunchinoverse version of… [happiness]”). “I’ll… spend… eternity… in virtual stillness… the only indication that I exist will be a blinking green light… until the fall of civilization.”

This animation marks a surprising departure from @mummy__joe’s typically comedic works. It’s one reflective of the deepening intersections between late-stage capitalism, big tech, and mortality – AKA existential dread in the digital age. What does it mean when we can upload our consciousness and transcend death, as though we are gods? What is the politics of a “digital self?”

In Mummy Joe-land, 15 GB of digital memory in Crunchino’s servers was allocated for Tina’s consciousness. Star aptly notes that “technology is a repository of memory.” While Star mentions this in passing, it perfectly encapsulates how much agency objects have over us – memory is a nebulous entity, something that initially defies entropy but is eventually lost to age,  and something that exists in an unbounded space. Our ability (through posting on social media, for instance) to store memory in a discrete location with discrete timestamps “until the fall of civilization” seems to almost devalue our humanness. 

In Daston/Galison parlance, trying to capture ourselves digitally is like “collapsing a complex, three-dimensional form into two dimensions… the projective process itself could easily mislead.” The digital self is but an image produced through a mechanical lens, one that cannot objectively capture all of the flavors and variations of life. Online, we are but a cheap reproduction of our truth.

When we choose to exist digitally, or outside of our physical bodies, we reinforce the authority of the organizations who create objects like “Goobyvision Pros.” On the level of the object, we unknowingly give up energy (Tina mines Crunch-O coins for 10,000 finite hours) to be subject to the object’s rule – as Johnson says of the door, “especially clever is its way of extracting energy from each… unwilling… passer-by… no matter what you feel… you have to leave a bit of your energy, literally, at the door.” By respecting the door, and even by unwittingly acknowledging the door as having agency (“the door-closer is on strike, for God’s sake, keep the door closed”), we give it authority to dictate our freedom of entering or exiting a space. 

The door exists in a superposition of being an object and an authority figure, and similarly, the Crunchinoverse is an object that empowers Tina to exist outside of herself while subjecting her to some unknown rule, which isn’t just the rule of time or the death of civilization. Now consider the rulers of the Crunchinoverse. What happens when Crunchino executives devalue you further by relegating your memory to data for profits? Crunchino could also destroy everything you worked for because they simply felt like it, and we could even consider natural disasters such as floods that inundate data centers.

Johnson presses on: “I built up an inscribed reader to whom I prescribed qualities and behavior as surely as the traffic light… Did you subscribe to this definition of yourself?”

The Crunchinoverse isn’t just a work of fiction: we are already living in its shadow. If Johnson can create an image of an “inscribed reader” that has concrete qualities and behavior akin to an object (a traffic light), it seems interesting to think about how the Internet and the Crunchinoverse are objects that, unwittingly or not, do the same and treats us as though we were nonliving objects.

In an era where we put every thought in a box, our online activity can trace back to the real. We don’t need to own a “Goobyvision Pro” in order to experience having a digital self – whatever we mindlessly churn out into a giant, corporate-controlled algorithmic black box can upend our lives (provided you are rude). Somehow, the Internet, originally touted as a tool, has provided an expedited way to weaponize the self’s worst, most impulsive tendencies: it subscribes an immutable definition to the whole person based on one moment in time.

The tale of Tina, then, should serve as a warning for the present. Maybe we too are blinking green lights, flashing on and off, on and off.