My work is not mine. I am not a discrete thing. As I write this, I dissolve, I end. The “I” becomes a moment, my body renews its cells. There is a here and now and then it passes.

Talking about the self is talking about no one. No one is everyone, where there is nothing, there is everything.

The internet is a place of everything and nothing.

None of these ideas are new or mine, for as long as I or you or anyone else can remember them.

The “designer” is most intimately familiar with the not-mine-ness of one’s “work.” (1) Every word in this sentence presents problems. I’m laughing at how impossible it is to express a simple idea well! Perhaps because the idea disappears as it is made. It can reappear, but only impressionistically. The designer is another one of the creatives deemed author, but it’s always been a fraught label. Design creates something which is handed off beyond them, often in space and time, and becomes morphed and used in myriad ways.

This is a book about consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective. Its main thesis is that no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self. All that ever existed were conscious self-models that could not be recognized as models. The phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process—and the subjective experience of being someone emerges if a conscious information-processing system operates under a transparent self-model. You are such a system right now, as you read these sentences. Because you cannot recognize your self-model as a model, it is transparent: you look right through it. You don’t see it. But you see with it. In other, more metaphorical, words, the central claim of this book is that as you read these lines you constantly confuse yourself with the content of the self-model currently activated by your brain. (2) Metzinger: BeingNoOne

I was walking home in the dark and indecisive–should I listen to something, or listen to nothing? I take my earbuds out, put them back in. Sometimes I forget they are there, even if no sound is playing. Someone says into my ear, “Somethingness in nothingness.” Nothing is nothing. When it’s quiet, I notice the bright signs of the hospital, how the street sign glows red from carlight. I can’t escape into nothing. There is something there. It’s invisible, yet there is always air. Emptiness is full.

I saw a few films by Mika Rottenberg back in 2021. She juxtaposed important singing traditions in long-worn dress with absurd ASMR-type videos of jelly things being sliced and diced. Within the “portal,” as Patricia Lockwood calls it in No One is Talking About This, endless feeds on imagery and information emerge and recede and form an ever-changing landscape of content. Although I probably would argue it is organized in certain ways, there are other systems of juxtaposition that blow postmodernism out of the water with their absence of logic, besides the random. Perversity has become perverse.

Since its beginning (in history, because I lived through it as a young person), I have been considering my “presence” on social media: how and on what platforms do I wish to participate, or resist these systems. I remember in middle school posting my first pictures of myself on Instagram and having the following confrontations and internal dialogues:

It felt too good to receive “likes.” …and induced a semi-paralytic state of attention throughout the day following posting, checking up on the device for change. Essentially, tapping in again for another short burst of dopamine. At the time, I did not have these words for the experience, but I had a sense there was something wrong with it and decided to avoid posting.

Mostly, though, it passed into you, you, you, you, until she had no idea where she ended and the rest of the crowd began. (3) Patricia Lockwood: No One is Talking About This

When other people posted images of themselves, it immediately seemed like some transparent proclamation of either, I am hot! I have friends! Or I exist!

There was too much juicy information locked in these revelatory images to avoid them.

At that time, there wasn’t even an infinite, ad-ridden feed. All those aspects were amplified to maximize profit by maximizing attention in the years since. Many of us have this question now: presented with a system sans “true outside” (arguably the nature of systems themselves), we face a coerced dilemma. To participate or to refrain?

I begin to feel more and more that the whole world is conscious...These are the eyes of the Earth. And this is the voice of the earth. (4) Patricia Lockwood: No One is Talking About This

“I’m convinced the world is getting too full, lol” Lockwood quotes her brother. (5) Patricia Lockwood: No One is Talking About This

Many of those who have seemingly already chosen their current iteration of online presence/absence/selfhood—the active members—never actually considered the decision. As we write,(7) in English we become conscious of underlying understandings of self and cognition.

Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. (6) Patricia Lockwood: No One is Talking About This

We imagine these as individual decisions, or decisions as discrete moments. I once sat in on a lecture about the “toilet flushing” nature of synapses firing. The unfamiliar professor described how once it was triggered, the entire bowl would flush. The synapse fire was never partial. And decisions were made before subjects of the experiments had consciously registered their choices. The firing began just before the subjects noted thinking, Yes, I’d like to raise my foot now. Somehow I remember this experience vividly, and it comes back often.

As you write, you might wonder, how far back did my mind choose these words? Here I know it was a minute lapse in time between them, but my sense of consciousness is all muddled. I can't be sure.

This also points me toward a contemporary experience of those with digital access and privilege: impressionistic knowing. I don’t have a better term for it yet, but it is that shaded sense you have of knowing something, which can only be confirmed by outsourcing the knowing to Google or some search engine. The internet brain-prosthetic can only be accessed via that transmutation of one’s own knowledge into a question: thus the human becomes detached from solid photons of knowledge in favor of the waveicle model. Knowledge is both a statement and a question, here and in the computer at once. The human is extended into the networks of the world, no longer human but simply feedbacks, inputs and outputs vibrating within an interconnected system of knowing and not knowing. Nothing is certain or bordered, but perhaps certainty was a fallacious goal in the first place.

Collective intelligence—observed in slime molds, termite colonies, the internet, social movements, the stock exchange, urban fabric, and our brains—is a phenomenon where novel forms emerge in nonlinear and unpredictable ways out of interactions between thousands or millions of elements or agents in a complex system. (8)Agniescka Kurant

I am eating a mind. I am eating a mind. I am eating a fine grasp of the subject at hand. (9) Patricia Lockwood: No One is Talking About This