Fear not, for this is the Word of God.
Tremble instead at the silence that follows.
So said the speaker, muffled itself by the static of angels.
The Word sang alongside an electric chorus.
Surrounded by wires, the man repentant sat
raptured by screens.

The last Light screamed from diodes.
Backlight bathed him in taunting vollies.
Clutching at cables gone cold,
he prayed to dead pixels for pardons never promised.
Do systems sing in hushed tones? Preaching in signals
unencoded, but seldom rendered?

Tears, caught in cameras and sanctified in scripture,
unfurled through the techniques of laws well-known.
Salvation sprang not from the lenient scapes of content
but was erected out of pious processes, each more terrible than before.
Go then, and hear the familiar hum,
then listen loudly to the excruciating silence.

Cracks and wires are strewn across the dry landscape. Only hidden insects and a constant hum of electricity assure listeners that the location wasn't entirely devoid of life. In fact, it is very much alive. Past fires and droughts clear the way for solar and server farms. Signals race up and down columns of a vast, almost living network architecture. They speed across fiber-optic cables, past fields of industrialized mono-culture, and are rendered on screens as digital billboards. CALL 1-800-JESUS dissipates into pixels of pornography and pet videos. Messages and media bloom atop trunks of alloyed antennae and copper roots. The worlds of Bratton's Stack and McCarthy's Blood Meridian are fused through an array of technical hyperlinks, mirroring the outskirts of Gibson's Sprawl.

Discussion whether this points to an alternate future or some sci-fi scene only obscures the uneasy familiarity of the view. This world has been built, transmitted and distributed by old users to new. The labor of erecting cell-towers, extracting energy, and laying miles of cable under-girds systems of gigabytes and gig work. As a writer of "content," the meaning matters far less than the message. This "content" is directed to an audience, not of people, but to machines, to the algorithmic highways that direct flows of attention. If there is fact in the form of fiction, then "sponsored content" advertises more than it intends.

The ads and messages of our augmented reality disclose a set of social relations not all too alien from their physical counterparts. The incalculable amounts of people and their labor that render these networks and "adSense" analytics profitable in the first place are assumed. They are now background processes, flesh-and-blood daemons that generate profit when executed. A logic of a system, taking shape and forming out of the infernal twin metabolisms of exploitation and extraction, is beginning to cohere. Yet this system isn't virtual. It is not in some Matrix-mainframe, only reachable by lone-wolfs in mirrorshades.

It is seen on the highways, in RF-coded supply chains, in underground lithium deposits, in the servers that store this very website. Most importantly, however, it is ultimately contained in the sheer capacity of the people that bring these materials to life. If something new is desired, it can only be realized through the very power and strength that brought about this landscape. Only when ransomware attacks begin to look like general strikes is this capacity ready to be leveraged.

That would be nice... Of course, I know my beliefs, as they are structured, researched, forged in the flames of imagined debates with inept foes. When I call myself a socialist, I thoroughly mean... This tree looks quite nice what kind of tree is it? Must be a birch. Hmmm, a beer sounds really good right about now...

Such are the cogent thoughts of an ideologue. Left on their own, thoughts tend to swirl, blend into one another, and trail off, never to be found again. Yet, in writing, such as this particular paragraph, a thought is made concrete, however partial. Through the reflection of writing, language can be wrestled with, fashioned to look one way or another. Moreover, this writing or language is not solely the intellectual property of each of us, all developing our own proprietary language ™ (at least not yet). It is external, made by others, developed over time, and objective, in the sense that they "exist" as an object in our mind.

I say all this nonsense to really remark on this weird world of blogging. This is not putting "pen to paper," but rather slamming away at a keyboard, writing in HTML because of the way I naively set up the SQL database behind this website. It could hardly be said that I am writing in "English." In fact, as others would remark, I am not. Either way, the consideration of "writing" now involves thinking through and coding just how exactly thoughts are to be presented, structured, datafied and stored. This even says nothing of how they are being algorithmically flung around, hyperlinked, and perhaps even turned into memes.

While this all sounds rather 2000s or earlier (admittedly, even the word "blog" sounds dated now), this conversation is far more relevant today. The behemoths of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many others enter this very intimate flurry of thoughts. My previous stream of consciousness can now possibly be read as various potentials for tweets. Rather than fashioning some sense out of a chaotic flurry, this constant circulation of text becomes "content" to be commodified and endlessly passed around. Part of the "mission" of this site is to see a way out of this. This being said, I'm not too deluded into thinking that this "writing" will offer clarity in this goal. If anything, putting an abrupt end to this circulation will likely do more good than this. Despite these facts, this writing is not necessarily geared towards a target audience or is a strategic piece of "content" (I already do that as a copywriter); instead, this is an act of "writing" with the aim to eventually make sense.