Influence and self/control
I've been so frustrated with the internet, basically for as long as I've used it. Being online feels like always being watched and being manipulated and constantly struggling against those things, while simultaneously watching and manipulating others. And it's not just social media. Everything you do online is in some sense a public act. There are records of some kind or another of every file you access, every page you view, everything you click.
The thing is, that awareness and anxiety didn't originate online for me. I grew up Christian. For a lot of my life, everything I did felt like something documented and judged by an unseen observer. And on top of that, I was taught the world was filled with temptation, always ready to lead me astray. In a perverse sense, the internet just makes that a reality: always watched, always pushed one way or another by algorithms and insular communities, never truly one's own person.
I have a pretty intense skepticism towards free will and choice of any kind. I have a hard time seeing myself as separate from the things that influence me, which is the main reason I'm so anxious to avoid being influenced (or at least, to maintain some awareness of and distance from what influences me). I read lots of books and listen to lots of podcasts, I isolate myself, I journal and meditate. I think too much.
Talking to a therapist about this last year, she suggested I was seeking control, which upset me a lot because in fact I'm trying to escape from control. Even self-control means maintaining some external control in the absence of the mechanisms for enforcing it, bringing control inside one's self. Freedom from control is what I'm seeking, if I'm seeking anything. Although I tend to conceive of what I'm doing with my life these days as avoiding any kind of seeking, refusing any kind of goal.
Speaking of self-control: to what extent is the self already a product of control? Where focusing on and maintaining distance from the things that influence me makes me feel like I am not the author of myself, attempting to ward off all possible avenues of influence feels like dissolving my sense of self altogether. Am I trying to extinguish myself? To the extent that this effort is unconscious, it might be undermining it to try and gain conscious understanding of it. The conclusion I keep returning to is that I should just let the process happen, whatever it is and wherever it's headed.
So what influence do I have over others? How am I culpable in the production of other selves? I'm going in circles about this, feeling guilty for so many small things, gestures and phrases that might've contributed to one or another crisis. Just more reason to isolate. Language itself is dangerous. Even by writing and posting this, I'm doing something to whoever reads it. (All readers are, of course, created by what they read.) Sometimes I feel trapped, paralyzed by responsibility for everything I do and say. It doesn't matter if there's a god to judge and see one's actions, the world as consequence flows irreversibly from each of us.
The rise of LLMs gave me a bit of a panic for a while. It stirred up visions of language, as the dead residue of communication, coming to replace living creatures such as ourselves. Language as necro-parasite, the zombie anti-flesh that spills out of our mouths and infects even our machines, taking over everything and continuing to proliferate long after the extinction of anything that could understand it. By speaking and writing, am I betraying life in favor of this dead thing that only temporarily lives through me? I often think it would be better if I couldn't speak at all. It's hard to find a way out of this perspective. I tell myself, language is a tool, language is technology, it isn't capable of control, it doesn't have agency. If there's even any such thing as agency. Maybe agency is an illusion created by language. Maybe it's just a lie to justify control and abuse.
The Flame Alphabet is a novel by experimental author Ben Marcus in which language itself carries disease, to which children are (apparently) immune. The older you get, the more susceptible you are. It makes you weak, tears you apart inside and out. I read the book back in 2015, it's probably due for a re-read in the era of pandemics, extreme polarization and semantic collapse. It appealed to me so much back then because I was slipping away from a period of belief in language as the core of spirituality. It didn't last long, and by the time I was reading this book, I was already thinking of language as something to be avoided or escaped, to minimize its influence. Perhaps I wouldn't call it a disease, but it's certainly a vector, if not for illness then for suffering and confusion.
Since I continue to use language, I hope that in some sense I can use it to undermine itself.