Substrate

Aren’t you excited about the party? What with all the small talk and the rumours and the canapés on a little plate? People are decked out in fine clothes, handbags and shoes, cracking dad jokes while catching food in their mouths with haste and vigour. The kids have been excused. Weren’t they just babies? Time flies, except on the man who drinks his first beer too fast (or our age and you know he’s not just old enough to drink now). As you slip into the party you don’t know anyone, so you make a show of making yourself busy and show nervous excitement. We sit in lounge chairs and chat, pretending the world will never end. Something awful can happen at this barbecue, but the good part never comes. The time passes and eventually you can leave.

Do you ever get tired of your own skin? Do you ever get tired of your own thoughts? Do you ever get tired of the same conversations, the same news, the same cultural indoctrinations in public discourse? So the magazines, we tuck our innermost thoughts away in drawers, concerned about the rain. We’re good enough to live under the same slight of hand. There are the masks, too, which everybody gets in the end.

I’m pretty good at detecting nonsense. We all feel alone because I think I don’t acknowledge them when I say I feel alone. I’m not the first weak-tailed dandy to have written an essay of despair, but I am a contemporary person, an existentialist who said that humans are built to feel scared and sad but we’re inevitably lonely. And yet, we geniuses have designed a society in which expressing true feelings in public is discouraged. So the masks again, the eyebrows too.

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It is not too far-fetched to link the silence at the end of a musical performance with death. In Moscow, on the gravestone of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke is carved a stave with the semi-circle and dot of a fermata, the sign that indicates that a note (or in this case a pause) is to be held. Underneath is written ‘fff’ (one step above fortissimo, meaning very, very loud).

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[S]overeignty is the name for a confused, reactive, often not-quite-thought view that there ought to be a solution to the pressure of adapting to “other people” and to other nations’ force of existence, intention, action, entitlement, and desire. Sovereignty is thus a fantasy of jurisdiction. It is a defense of entitlement, reference, and agency.

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I use Signal every day and recommend it to others. But, as this post reminds us, for all its state of the art encryption, at the end of the day it's a US-owned, centralised service. What we need is choice built on standards. (In this case, the author suggests, XMPP.)

The burnout of our age, Han writes, doesn’t come from external repression but from internal overproduction. We are not crushed by the lash; we are fried by the light, the constant buzz of notifications, the tyranny of being reachable, and the invisible expectation to always be on.

– Miski Omar, The Guardian

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