Mild Hallucination




If the past few weeks have been a mild hallucination, it is because I have not spent the time to sit down reflect. Not only is Los Angeles on fire right now, but Tiktok, controversially, is about to turn illegal. So, Daniel texts me, I wait for him to pull up, and he pulls out his phone, with a new app Red Note—apparently, also, “little red book.” It’s a new Chinese Tiktok-imitating app. The Americans are flooding the app. “Welcome to our app,” multiple Chinese people say on video, as Daniel shows me his new endless scrolling feed. “This is insane,” I say. “It’s number one on the app store,” and Daniel shows me an app with Chinese characters scrawled on its icon. Half of the text I read is in Chinese. I stop looking, thinking of a video my friend sent me from the Food Network, where viewers count the length of each cut: one-second cuts consistently. Something about attention span, they said.

I put on a ten minute song to write this. It’s more difficult to listen to new music than it has been in the past. It’s more difficult to read new writing than it has been in the past. And while the days grow longer and longer, I do not feel like I’m growing. I feel like I’m learning how I will grow when I stop putting it on hold for a few months.

I try to think in photos now. I’m figuring out what a visual language is, but it’s too slippery for my mind. When I read, my mind cannot get a grip anymore. I write about Giorgio Agamben’s Notes on Gesture. I wish I had more time. 

Nothing I read online seems real anymore, as if writing were ever real in the first place. It’s a digitally dissociated world screening before my eyes. I think if we could choose to create a fantasy, it would be better than the world we’ve made…

I watched an Instagram Reel yesterday. And a woman asked me which video was AI: the two looked nearly identical. Except in one, the woman had more makeup and her face looked more rigid and less expressive. So I said, “that one is AI,” and no, it was not. I thought it did not matter anymore. If I cannot tell the difference, what does it say about her?

I buy a Ruby Haunt recording online on Bandcamp. I got a trial for Apple Music today, after seeing consistent protests against Spotify. I opened the app. And it felt strange adding streaming music to the same library that my purchased music (which has been with me for so many years, that I regret it’s still around). I do not think trading one streaming service for another is a viable option for artists.

Seeing Apple Music with no music to stream yet is like having the option to opt out of social media before it even starts. Before we were all feed-junkies. It’s like I could go back in time and say, “streaming will only impoverish your listening habits: although streaming introduces breadth and algorithms and exploration to your ears, you will never, ever, listen to a song twice.” I know what I own now. I am content. I wonder about Red Note.

I am slowly going through my old playlists to buy each album, with the songs on them. It forces me to listen. Two days without coffee means an album or two singles. I listen to the Ruby Haunt album I just bought, with the song “Carrie.” On my little FLAC player on my computer that I’m using to type this, I feel a small amount of relief. I cannot share this music. I mean, I could. But I cannot push “share” and have it uploaded to a thousand tiny fractals of feeds. I want to tell my friend about this album. I will tell him tomorrow. We will watch a movie. I want to put my phone away, but it is difficult. I feel better after writing this, the hallucination deferred. Feeling like the more my writing seems like a journal, the more scattered life has become, and that it’s time to stop thinking in images, but to turn back to new music and new writing. My eyes are tired, so I will not edit this.

I tell Daniel that I think my style of writing is difficult for AI to imitate. It’s dense in terms of content. The style is more approachable. And Daniel says, “Chat GPT could do it,” and I get angry. I think I’ve fallen into a sort of despair. 

                  I listen to Ruby Haunt. Life fuller please, I think, and wonder about a sort of digital truncation of experience. I think of Byung-Chul Han’s book on Non-Things (or was it The Scent of Time). Rage is all the rage for him. Rage, as a sort of negative and overwhelming, full energy, for Han, is, well, simply, go watch Fight Club: it’s cathartic, it’s antithetical to the ordering of our late-capitalist digital lives. Rage is probably what the arsonists felt, who started the fires in Los Angeles, walking around with blowtorches and destroying the environment and communities. Pendulum from numbness to rage. I listen to Ruby Haunt, and think I’m exempt.

                  “These little moments are all that we’ve got,” says Ruby Haunt, in a song that plays as I type this. I wish I could say something about the stars, or the universe, or the world around us; I wish I could think of life much bigger than myself right now. But all I can think of is community with a focused, intentional attention. “I’m trying to read more poetry,” I told Daniel, as he showed me Red Note. “It might be good to be away from the feeds,” I told him. “I used to put my phone away, and I’d be without it for a few days,” I said, “but I’ve gotten away from that practice. I need to get back in the habit.” Which is what I said years ago, before starting the habit.