…the cruelty of the inexhaustible

by Michael Templeton

Some years ago, we went to Philadelphia for a few days. Just a touristy trip to look around, see the sights, eat some scrapple... I am a Midwesterner, and I admit it can be fairly easy to put the zap on me with some big city glam and cosmopolitism so when we first got to Philadelphia, I was knocked out right away by a few things. Everything you need and want is right there in the city. You can walk to it all. In the Midwest, it is a half-hour drive just to get gas. Then, within a few hours, I started noticing something important. Yeah, everything is right there in the city: Whole Foods, Target, Gap—the whole mall culture homogenization of life that I was used to finding when I headed out to the suburbs. Now of course, the same thing has happened in the Midwest. The gentrification engines took hold several years ago and transformed the entire urban core into a strip mall. You could put a roof over the entire city of Cincinnati and call it “the Cincinnati Galleria.” We are just like the big city now. Everything is the same. A vast sea of homogenization in which the great corporate gods have not only provided us with an urban Renaissance they have replaced all that old junk with spanking new versions of what used to be. The even painted some cool graffiti on it all. They cleaned it all up, sterilized it.

A few years after the trip to Philadelphia, we were in north Georgia hiking the mountain trails. We decided to take the old two-lane highways home to see what we might discover. We did see some beautiful sights, and these old blue highways take you through places that are long-forgotten and magnificent for it. But these things are in fact few and far between because what we mainly saw were long expanses in which the two-lane road spread out into four and six lanes to accommodate vast parking lots that surround Whole Foods, Target, Gap—the whole mall culture homogenization. We were driving through the Southern Appalachian region, and even this had been transformed into a corporate version of itself with cheap Cracker Barrell knock-offs with the word “hillbilly” in the name. Everything had been plowed under and made into the same thing as everything else. I do not know if there is a word more emphatic than homogenization—sterilization, maybe. Southern backroad Tennessee is now indistinguishable from Eastern elite Philadelphia, although I am sure everyone will likely claim their own form of superiority over everyone else, as if the Target in north Georgia is somehow different than the Target in Philadelphia or Cincinnati.

As we now watch as the country breaks apart in fragments of every imaginable species of political-cultural identity, it is genuinely schizophrenic to consider that we are all living in spaces that have become increasingly identical. Once indoors, there is literally no way to tell where you are in the United States. The inside of a Starbucks is virtually identical everywhere we go. What is more, people identify with their particular sameness with a tribalism that verges on violence, and this appears to be what all the division is about. Finding different ways of fighting to be different. Think of the flap over the new look to Cracker Barrell and the change of their logo. For a few days, this drowned out genocide. This is a form of the schizophrenia of everyday life in America that is beyond belief, and it forces us to take all of this seriously. The Invisible Committee pointed years ago that the old modes cultural separation have disappeared. They explained that everything has become the same thing in the form of one big nothing: “We've heard enough about the "city" and the "country," and particularly about the supposed ancient opposition between the two. From up close or from afar, what surrounds us looks nothing like that: it is one single urban cloth, without form or order, a bleak zone, endless and undefined, a global continuum of museum-like hypercenters and natural parks, of enormous suburban housing developments and massive agricultural projects, industrial zones and subdivisions, country inns and trendy bars: the metropolis” (The Coming Insurrection. 52). They concede that the ancient opposition once existed, but there is nothing of that now. What remains of the rural are “shoppes” ensconced in the “Towne Centre” out along spaces of noplaces that were demolished when they expanded the original four-lane highway into an eight-lane highway—on and on... The homogenization of everyday life is part and parcel to the other driver of homogenization and sterilization, digital (non)culture and all that it entails.

Homogenization and sterilization need to be understood in the full force of what these terms mean. Homogenize is to remove all difference, to expel what cause things to differ, and to sterilize is to remove and destroy all forms and vestiges of life. When we sterilized the world around us, we did more than just rid our surroundings of the things we did not like, we rid our surroundings of life itself. Nothing lives. Nothing grows. To engineer a monoculture of our world is to produce a world utterly devoid of culture, and since culture is what gives life meaning, homogenization and sterilization is to produce a world devoid of meaning and life. It is a dead world. To live in this world could make you sick, and in fact living in the world we now inhabit does make us sick. To alleviate our world sickness, we turn away from the world and immerse ourselves in something even more sterile. The digital alternative to life offers everything life does not: a life emptied of all life.

I open my Instagram on my phone and begin to scroll. The usual nonsense, but no more than about a half dozen images down I encounter something I had not noticed before. A set of panels that each show an image of a human face. I can tell these are not photographs but AI images, and each one has some kind of title or descriptive feature. These things are AI specters, for lack of a better word, for some kind of “thing” I am invited to talk and interact with. I suppose if I am curious, or desperately lonely, I can have a chat with an AI entity. This works great for the Meta corporate machine because I would be training their AI bots with my thoughts and ideas. They like me to believe it is great for me because I will have a new friend, someone who will never betray me, let me down, hurt my feelings, etc. Just an online entity with whom I can turn and talk about my life. Best of all, its free! What a deal. A fucking emotional and spiritual dildo to relieve my suffocating loneliness and isolation. As the world becomes increasingly cold and alienating, I can find true companionship within a digital interface which will always be there for me because it is not prone to the failings that have plagued human interaction. It is always awake. It is never too tired or too busy. The digital friend and companion will always remain faithful as long as I continue to feed it...  feed it what? My heart and soul?

The digital mechanisms that have finally been perfected in the form of AI have at last surmounted the final problem which is that we always know they are digital mechanisms and not living beings with whom we can be friends. The digital sex bot can stand in for live nude girls, but we always know it is not a live nude girl. But with AI, as long as we feed it what it needs, which is humanity, it will increasingly appear to be a live nude girl. The primary problem with this is that the reason people are lonely and isolated is because they only ever interact with a digital interface. The Meta AI specters are another iteration of this very problem, which means I would be treating the problem with the problem, and I do not mean this in the sense of a homeopathic cure in which we provide the body with the disease in order to teach the body to fight the disease. This is more like treating alcoholism with whiskey and thinking I am better now because I am drunk and no longer care about being an alcoholic. It is only in a world dominated by a collective schizophrenia in the form of absolute homogenization and sterilization that this kind of infinitely regenerating destruction is experienced as something positive. Compared to the digital other scene, life is a sad substitute. Living and breathing and experiencing the world is now a poor existence compared to the digital representation of living and breathing and experiencing the world. If this gets to be a little overwhelming, just go talk to your new AI friend.

I suppose Zuckerberg, or the AI specter who stands in for him, would tell me, “yeah, it sounds bad when you say it like that.” Which is to say that, returning to my alcoholism metaphor, the downward spiral into wretched ruin and death sounds bad when you call it “a downward spiral into wretched ruin and death.” The digital world that was meant to offer us so much has absolutely derailed and impoverished life in every conceivable way. While we are able to buy cool shit from all over the world with a few movements of the thumb on a smartphone, we have also been compelled to transfer our entire being into a digital reiteration of ourselves that has more reality than our living bodies. What is more, the system has been such a singular global con that it has convinced us all to literally create it for the propriety systems that actually own it. While we have logged on as users, what we really did was enter as the object of use, the object who provides data and literal money for the privilege of being used. Thus, we have come to be trapped in a vast invisible but very palpable web or net of existence that, like all webs and nets, has no exit. The web, the digital, has become what Ian Alan Paul defined as the reticular society. This is the global society of those isolated beings who have been enmeshed and trapped in a global digital web: “Life is steadily impoverished as it steadily enriches networks with data, a poverty which is expressed in an offline world which is always already subordinated and submissive to the connected computers which facilitate its online dispossession” (The Reticular Society, Thesis 8). The more we give over to the digital network, the richer and more powerful it becomes, while we just become increasingly impoverished as our ability to do anything other than give over to the digital network disappears. More and more, we cannot do anything without engaging the digital network. The reticular system is becoming all there is, and the world beyond, in all of its materiality, takes on the aspect of abstraction. Reality is becoming the abstraction as the digital takes on the aspect of the real. My AI friend is becoming my only friend.

The digital realm is in fact nothing but a ghost. It is an absence, an emptiness which facilitates certain types of relations at the expense of all others. Yet, as this absence continues to swallow our lives, it becomes the place we go to find some measure of solace against the isolation and alienation of a material world that is now uninhabited: “It is only because of a wasteland which spreads informatically and algorithmically, deepening its desert within each life and throughout all of social life, that what is online can appear as an oasis, as a digitized refuge from the desolation that breathlessly expands. The reticular society is simply the networked presence of the life it makes absent. It is the form of domination which endlessly communicates what it has captured. It is the circulating simulation of what it has historically stolen away” (The Reticular Society, Thesis 8). What we encounter in the digital is the digital reproduction of what we fed it. The outside world does contain Whole Foods, Target, and Gap, but the digital version of all this is open all the time. As we upload our lives to social media, social media gives us back our lives in a digital rendering that is increasingly becoming more valuable than the lives we are lead in our living bodies, and this creates a system whereby life itself must now find some measure of value within this digital system in order for life to matter at all. This system of value is then rendered homogenous within a global system of value and exchange in which everything finds its equivalent, even life itself has a digital unit of exchange, and life itself is no longer life at all.

To make sense of this requires a turn away from the homogenous and sterile toward the sensible and irregular. To regain a sense of life demands the sensibility that forms and defines life, and this means to turn away from the homogeneity of the physical world and the sterility of the digital. No one needs to adopt the avocation of the committed Luddite, but everyone needs to expend the effort necessary to rediscover what amounts to a fundamental form of communication. The homogenous and sterile world around us ends up becoming an intolerable pit that provides nothing even in its apparent infinite array of choices that are ultimately infinitely the same thing. The digital world captures and entraps us within its reticular black hole by forcing us to communicate in a specific way. The only way the digital works is via code. Everything must be compatible with specific kinds of code designed to function interoperatively. You know this by the ways you are forced to communicate with any online system. Try typing a question in your own words. It will never work. It will never even be sent. If you apply for a job, you absolutely must input your information in a way that is singular and specific. To communicate in the digital system, we must do it in the form of what Bifo calls “connection” which “is an operative concatenation between previously formatted agents of meaning that have been codified, of formatted according to code” (And. 21). What this means is that no matter what you mean or even need to say, you must convert your meaning into a form that will adhere to the previously formatted code. What you think, need, want, feel, etc. is of no consequence. In fact, you must stuff all that “you” down into a digital space that does not include you. Humans, on the other hand, communicate via conjunction. Conjunction is “a way of becoming other. Singularities [you, me, anyone] change when they conjoin, they become something other than what they were before, in the same way that love changes the lover” (21). Conjunction is unscripted and non-coded. Communication is improvised and in response to each other rather than a formatted and coded system. And we are always, even in minute ways, transformed in conjunction. I come away from a moment of communication with another human slightly different than I was before because there was a conjoint meeting of two distinct minds that came together in a spontaneously emergent moment of contact. Even if the moment was planned, what unfolded was spontaneous because there was no way for either of us to know what we were going to say, how we were going to react, and what the meeting would lead to.

The moment of conjunction is “the meeting and fusion of round irregular bodies that are continuously weaseling their way about without precision, repetition, or perfection” (22). Irregularity and the lack of perfection are the key predicates for the kinds of communication that are intrinsic to humanity. When we give up these admittedly difficult and unpredictable aspects of communication, we lose everything that makes us human, that makes human existence distinctly non-digital, heterogeneous, and non-sterile. The miles and miles of Whole Foods, Target, and Gap or worse, the infinite empty space of the digital realms, all of this can and does offer and infinite set of experiences, but they are all uniform, homogeneous, and sterile. They are all, in the final analysis, an endless repetition of the same thing. Human experience and communication consists of the irregular and yes, the non-sterile. We are dirty little varmints, it is true. What we gain with a return to conjunction is nothing short of an elemental experience of beauty. Without trying to render a philosophical schema of what constitutes the beautiful, we can use Bifo’s claim that beauty consists of “the cruelty of the inexhaustible” (36). The experience of beautiful spaces does not consist of the infinite; it consists of the inexhaustible nature of the experience. We never run out of ways of experiencing these beautiful spaces. We could literally touch every square inch of the space, and we would still never exhaust the beauty of experiencing the space. When you experience a person you love, their beauty lies in the fact that you never reach an end to the ways you experience that person. They are an inexhaustible source of experience itself. The homogenization of our world, and the sterilization of the ways we experience the world rob us of this cruelty of the inexhaustible. To counter it all, just stop handing it over to a machine that transforms the inexhaustible into distinctly exhaustible units of digital exchange. Stop exchanging the inexhaustible for the excremental, and turn instead toward the things of the senses, the body in the world and the way it senses the world, and the beautiful cruelty of the inexhaustible.

Works Cited:

Berardi, Franco “Bifo.” And: Phenomenology of the End. Cambridge: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 2015.

The Invisible Committee. The Coming Insurrection. Cambridge: Semiotext(e) Intervention Series 1. 2009.

Click here to read Michael’s bio.