I’m sitting here at the edge of the swamp with a shotgun and laptop. Some two dozen sets of green gator eyes are staring at me through the moonlight. I will eat some of these gators, but there’s a pretty damn good chance one of them may eat me. 

In fact, one of them gators just ate the quote-unquote dog that William introduced into our environs some two-weeks back. I said dog in that way because it wasn’t an actual dog. It was, in fact, a nutria. In case you don’t know what a nutria is, it is a dog-sized rat with big brown buck teeth that stinks like decaying frog guts.

William came into the house early one morning dragging the snarling beast by a rope with a great big smile on his face, and proceeded to tell everyone what a great dog he had found. No one wanted that thing in the house. William had come in with a big smile and his typical cheerful demeanor ill-suited for his surroundings, saying, Hey guys, look at this fantastic dog I found swimming in the bog!, and no one had the heart to tell him it wasn’t a dog. Doesn’t matter. Thing is dead now. Ripped to shreds by a gator. And here I am, hungry. 

I got to get out of this place — The Last Estate, that is. I saw a job listing for an Intro to Philosophy instructor position at a community college about three days walk from here. So I hatched a scheme. First I made a résumé — one listing the credentials a person might have to get such a job. After that, I changed all my public avatars to a pic of me in a housecoat standing in front of a large stack of books that I took at the local safe-injection site they call a library. Now my plan is to write a bunch of kinda smart, but not too smart philosophy-type papers. After that, I’m gonna hack into JSTOR and upload the papers to make it look all official. 

Presently I’m stuck on the writing papers part of my scheme, which is why I’m out here on the edge of the swamp with a shotgun thinking about meat. At first I had this idea to build an AI Language Learning Model by clustering a boatload of GPUs I found in a dumpster behind the abandoned IBM plant up the road. I pirated electricity from a nearby telephone wire, downloaded some tutorials at the local McDs, and I thought I was good to go. 

Turns out it takes a lot more resources to imitate natural language than I originally anticipated. I thought it would be simple, because it’s just text, right? Text files aren’t that big, especially compared to video, and I had done the video AI thing before. Typically text documents are just a few kilobytes. Training a language model must take a lot less raw computing power than, say, building an AI model that can produce original video? Turns out no. In fact, it takes about 4 times the resources to make an AI model talk, then it takes to make one that poops out cheesy animated video every few hours. So I kept stacking the old graphics card on top of one another, and getting as much juice out of that janky cable I rigged up to the phone poll as I could, before the contraption started sparking and a small fire was ignited in the basement of The Last Estate. 

I can still see the fire smoldering a bit through the moonlight now. Smells foul — worse than that dead nutria. I left the house because I figured inhaling those fumes would take about a decade or more off my life in cancer.  Luckily, everyone else is fast-asleep inside and I got some peace and quiet out here with the gators. Just me, the gators, my shotgun, and a junk laptop full of the ultimate motherload of pirated philosophy books I had previously planned to train the language model on. But now I don’t got no AI model, and no chance of getting one neither. Those GPUs are cooked. Now it’s just me and my own so-called handiwork.

Lucky for me, there’s this brand new viral app called ChatGPT that does writing for you — junk app, really, not much more than vaporware, I’d say. Not all that good at what it’s supposed to do, and from what I can see, never will be. But no matter. Community college is community college, and this ChatGPT is going to help me write about 36 community college philosophy instructor-type essays faster than one of those two dozen gators can evade my shotgun blasts.

I haven’t figured out how to hack into JSTOR yet. I thought I knew someone who worked in the IT department there, but it turns out this guy was full of it. He doesn’t do IT. Turns out his official title was Climate Control Technician, which means he set the thermostat in the room where the keep the server. It was a bullshit job they gave him over the pandemic, and since then JSTOR has replaced 97% of their staff with AI, editors included. In fact, after looking around their site for a few hours, it seems like almost all the new content is being produced by AI.

Anyway, in lieu of JSTOR, I’m posting a longer, more official version of my paper on a different site that os filled with academic gibberis writen by NPCs: Substack. If you care to, you can read my full essay about Heidegger, technology, and Language Learning Models on Substack. What follows are the juicy bits of that essay. 

Since I first started writing this essay at the beginning of the year, there’s been plenty of news articles and shitposting about the ways that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is not living up to expectations. Especially in light of Microsoft’s $10B investment in OpenAI.  I’ll get to the ways ChatGPT fails to become much more than Alexa on adderall when used for ordinary internet browsing. But first, let’s start with what the Chatbot is good at. 

This is one way to word a prompt that will allow ChatGPT to do what it is good at. 

Me: Pretend I am Five years old. Describe the major concepts in Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology.”

ChatGPT: Okay, imagine you are a curious 5 years old who is asking me about a big person’s book called “The Question Concerning Technology”.

Heidegger, who wrote the book, was a thinker who wanted to understand how people use things like machines and tools. He believed that the way we use technology shapes the way we see the world and our place in it.

One of the things Heidegger talked about in his book is something called “Enframing”. Enframing means that we think of things like nature and other people as resources that we can use for our own purposes. He believed that this way of thinking is not good because it makes us forget the special beauty of the world around us.

He also talked about something called “Standing Reserve”. This means that we see everything as something that is waiting to be used, like a toy waiting to be played with. He believed that this way of thinking is not good because it makes us forget that things have their own value and purpose.

Heidegger also believed that technology can change the way we think and feel, and that it’s important to be careful about how we use it. He thought that we should use technology in a way that is good for us and the world around us, and that we should think carefully about the effects it has on us and our relationship with the world.

So, in short, Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” is a book where the author talks about how we use things like machines and tools and how it shapes the way we see the world. He thinks that it’s important to be careful about how we use technology and to think about how it affects us and our relationship with the world.

I asked the app to give an introduction in several different ways. I asked it to write like a professional philosopher teaching at an Ivy League school specializing in specific fields. I asked it to write the intro with specific literary flourishes. I asked it to just straight-up give me an intro. I would not recommend any of the responses I got to those prompts over the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Martin Heidegger  or the related Wikipedia entries. ChatGPT spit out responses that were remarkably dry to read, even for the subject matter, and furthermore, it often mischaracterized Heidegger’s work in ways that could make reading Heidegger for the first time more difficult. The GPT model is not yet to be trusted to give factual information. I will discuss this in some detail near the end of this essay. 

The ELI5 prompt, on the other hand, gave me two Heideggerian concepts that I see as unique and integral to the philosopher’s writing on technology: Standing-Reserve and Enframing. And it did so in a way that seems more in line with the style of most writers who employ the methods of phenomenology. That is in a lucid, straight-forward, almost anti-philosophy style, while engaging with abstract concepts that are difficult to grasp for most first time readers.

 My favorite line from the ChatGPT response being “(Heidegger) believed that this way of thinking (Enframing) is not good because it makes us forget the special beauty of the world around us.”

I would say this line is special because carpe diem, never grow up, the world does have a special beauty so don’t forget to smell the roses, and all that. However, it is not entirely in line with Heidegger’s work. I don’t see Heidegger saying “Enframing is not good,” even to a five year old. For Heidegger, Enframing is neither good, nor bad, it simply is the way it is. 

For Heidegger, Enframing is a byproduct of modern physics and mathematics. Heidegger views modern science as beginning in the 17th Century, but Enframing truly comes into play with the invention of modern machinery in the second of the 18th century. Enframing comes about with the ability, or desire, to store energy for later use. Heidegger uses a the analogy of windmill to demonstrate Enframing: 

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind’s blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it. (pg. 14)

To return to the ChatGPTs ELI5 explanation of Enframing, it is a tendency to think of things like nature or people as resources that we can use for our own purposes. Heidegger would call these natural and human resources the standing-reserve.  In many situations common to modern life, such as when gator hunting while woolgathering about getting a job as community college instructor, it is nearly impossible for even a person who studies Heidegger to avoid thinking of nature and people as resources to be used at one’s own end. Heidegger uses the example of a lumberjack searching for lumber. The lumberjack in search of straight and tall trees, is Enframing the forest, equating timber to numbers on a balance sheet or the various products to be made from the wood. In this example, the standing reserve is quite literally a mature stand of trees. 

“Enframing” is the most common English translation used today for Heidegger’s “Ge-Stell,” derived from the German word Gestell, which most frequently is translated as ‘rack,’ and often as a rack for books, as in ‘bookshelf.’ Enframming “is a ‘challenging claim,’ a demanding summons, that ‘gathers’ so as to reveal. This claim en frames in that it assembles and orders. It puts into a framework or configuration everything that it summons forth, through an ordering for use that it is forever restructuring anew,” To quote Lovitt (pg. 18).

What is wonderful about Heidegger’s concept of Enframing, is that it allows one to step outside of the mode of Being he describes, and become like a giant eye, hovering over the global tech hubs and all their tentacles that now reach every place on Earth. To describe how Heidegger arrived at such a concept, I would like to discuss the phenomenological method of “Bracketing.”

The method of Bracketing was developed by Edmund Husserel in the early 20th century. Bracketing “may be regarded as a radicalization of the methodological constraint that any phenomenological description proper is to be performed from a first person point of view, so as to ensure that the respective item is described exactly as is experienced, or intended, by the subject.” That is to say, you put a thing, such as a piece of art or new technology, and you bracket it off — in text, like this [a thing] — from any other phenomena that you perceive in culture, or in other subject. I believe this method is integral to any critical analysis of art or technology. It allows a thing — e.g. a new novel or tech like ChatGPT — to be perceived as a unique presence in the world, so the specific effects it has on your experience can be analyzed. 

Bracketing is not the only methodology that should be used by critics today. However, it is one that I believe should be used more. I have been observing a trend in criticism over the last decade or so, where opinions about specific art pieces or technologies are developed around the behavior and perceived thoughts of the specific person who created the thing, and the culture around the creator. These critiques often devolve into divergent fields such as sociology, or more specifically identity related areas of sociological inquiry, such as those of gender, race, and class. 

It is all fine and good from my perspective to interrogate issues of personal identity in relation to art, if a critic believes some piece of art is causing harm to individuals or perceived categories of people. However, if that piece of art is not experienced bracketed-off from the surrounding culture, it will be difficult to see the inherent power in the piece of art. Therefore, it will be difficult to see why some might be attracted to that piece of art. If you are a critic punching clouds on the internet, trying to prove a point about this or that sociological perspective based on your interpretation of an artwork, you will fail to see your enemies unless you earnestly bracket-off the work you are critiquing from all else, and analyze your own perception of the work in a solitary instance of experience.  Often the work will still have value even if there are perceived dangers.

To not bracket in this context of criticizing art or technology solely through a lens related to personal identity, would in fact be thinking in the Heidegger’s model of Enframing, where the art and the people around the piece of art treated like entities merely as instrumental means. To quote Lovitt from the real introduction to Heidegger’s essay: “For man is summoned, claimed, in the challenging revealing of Enframing even when he knows it not, even when he thinks himself most alone or most dreams of mastering his world. Man’s obliviousness to that claim is itself a manifestation of the rule of Enframing.”

As I mentioned above, I would not characterize Enframing as being either good nor bad, but simply that it is. 

In terms of modern technology, Heidegger uses the example of an airplane standing on the runway as a standing reserve. The added complexity here being a sort-of Marxian alienation from the many forms of labor and natural resources that went into producing that airplane. Furthermore, all the potential that the airplane caries in the process of creating new technology   — delivering natural resources to a manufacturing plant, carrying a businesswoman to a tech office, dropping bombs on a nation that has desired natural resources within its borders, and so on. 

With his concept of Enframing, Heidegger points out that thought trapped in the confines of Enframing will lead to one of two conclusions. Again, to quote Lovitt: 

“As a consequence he becomes trapped in one of two attitudes, both equally vain : either he fancies that he can in fact master technology and can by technological means by analyzing and calculating and ordering-control all aspects of his life ; or he recoils at the inexorable and dehumanizing control that technology is gaining over him, rejects it as the work of the devil, and strives to discover for himself some other way of life apart from it. What man truly needs is to know the destining to which he belongs and to know it as a destining, as the disposing power that governs all phenomena in this technological age.” (pg xxxiii)

One thing the ELI5 misses, is that in the unavoidable Enframing, there occurs what Heidegger refers to as revealing. In this revealing, new technologies emerge. Heidegger is emphatic that a person who merely sees people and nature as resources to be used to his own end will have an inauthentic experience of knowing herself. For Heidegger, this inauthentic sense of Being seems to be ultimately what is at stake.  Heidegger is emphatic that technology can disrupt a person’s sense of Being, but revealing new technologies can also help us better understand ourselves. As Heidegger beautifully elucidates: Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means. We will, as we say, “get” technology “spiritually in hand.” 

Any fan of William Gibson, Blade Runner, or The Terminator will be able to easily imagine what technology could become if it is not “spiritually in hand.” Disrupting one’s authentic sense of Being may seem to be a tiny problem in comparison to the apocalyptic dystopian fantasies where technology is able to replicate human cognition and self-awareness, and in turn, begins to auto-generate new technology. At the point of auto-generation, the technology would seemingly become out of human control, and the results would likely be wildly unpredictable.

Are these dystopian threats real? I would say yes, under circumstances that may or may not be possible within the realm of human culture. However, with Heidegger, we can begin to trace a line through both early technology and modern technology, how humans up to this point in history have been able to maintain a healthy relationship to technology, even when it appears to be threatening us. And indeed, the human impulse to create technology appears to be guarded, not by individual and unpredictable techno-ethicists sitting on the board of some nefarious mega-corporations, but in the very nature of technology itself.

Heidegger uses the example of crafting a silver chalice to draw a link between ancient technology and modern technology. He describes the process from the raw material, to the idea of “chaliceness,” through the hands of the craftsman until the chalice is formed. Each step along the way cannot be separated from the other, and no step is more important than the next: 

Silver is that out of which the silver chalice is made. As this matter, it is co-responsible for the chalice. The chalice is indebted to, i.e., owes thanks to, the silver for that out of which it consists. But the sacrificial vessel is indebted not only to the silver. As a chalice, that which is indebted to the silver appears in the aspect of a chalice and not in that of a brooch or a ring. Thus the sacrificial vessel is at the same time indebted to the aspect of chaliceness. Both the silver into which the aspect is admitted as chalice and the aspect in which the silver appears are in their respective ways co-responsible for the sacrificial vessel. 

This process of crafting a chalice is what Heidegger refers to as a bringing-forth. Or, more aptly, a revealing. 

There is furthermore an entomological connection between the the root of “technology,” technē, and craftsman or artist. In Greek, technē is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Technē belongs not only to craftsmanship and technology, but it is also a revealing, and therefore poiesis; it is something poetic. As in, ordering words carefully in ways that may reveal something otherwise unutterable, and can then be described by not only the poet but also those experiencing the poetry. 

Revealing is the connection between ancient technology and modern technology. The process of revealing becomes more complex with modern physics, where there are apparatuses that can check the calculations of the technologists. During the modern technological process, more apparatuses are developed utilizing the power of the original apparatus — say, the way a simple calculator might be used to do calculations that could produce a more powerful GPU — and so it becomes that the revealing comes-out of pre-existing technology, and not solely from raw material, such as silver. 

Heidegger writes, What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer : everything. Adding, Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth (pg. 12).

To accompany revealing, Heidegger discusses modern technology’s tendency of concealment. Concealment is the entrapping of the truth of Being in oblivion. Much of our technology today is concealed. For anyone who has ever rooted around in the system files of her computer’s operating system to try to make the computer do something that it is not supposed to do, the concept of concealment will be easily recognized. Much of what we look at on our computer screens is concealed behind encrypted programming code, and all the steps that computer code makes to interact with hardware remains largely mysterious to nearly every one of us. The concealment ultimately ending with an image of a kid in the Congo standing in a cobalt slurry, digging out the raw minerals used to construct our state-of-the art computing apparatuses that we carry around in our pockets so we can take ugly little pictures of things we experience in the world and then show those pictures to our friends via a network.

I personally have the knowledge to reveal the child in the Congo, and I could also describe some of the software that allows computers to network, but beyond that, at the time of this writing, I can explain little else about computing technology. One day I will compile a Linux kernel from scratch and then I will understand more. But in the meantime, I am quite happy typing away on my graphics user interface, working as a writer critiquing technology, and not as a person attempting to develop new computer technology.  Or even learn that much about it beyond what is necessary to run my own open source software. 

It is in this place between my limited knowledge of software and my limited knowledge of hardware manufacturing, where a mystification about the tools I use most on a daily basis begins to intrude upon my authentic sense of Being. This is easily demonstrated with the recent viral sensation AI apps, such as ChatGPT and Dall-E which mimic human behavior. 

After playing with ChatGPT for several weeks, it is easy for me to describe how mystification first took place within the concealment of how the technology works. Then, in turn, something was revealed about the essence of the specific technology as I continued to investigate this app’s essential properties. And perhaps more intriguingly, something was revealed about the very relation of Being and language. However, before making fun of the surprisingly limited capabilities of Microsoft’s $10B investment, let’s enjoy ChatGPT ELI5 response to my prompt about Heidegger’s use of the term ‘Being.’ As with many things Heideggerian, Being is not used in a way that has much relation to anything outside Heideggerian thought. 

Me: Pretend I am Five years old. Describe Heidegger’s concept of Being.

ChatGPT: Sure, imagine you are a curious 5-year-old, and you’re asking me about Heidegger’s idea of “Being”.

Heidegger was a thinker who wanted to understand how things exist and have a presence in the world. His idea of “Being” is like a special way of looking at things and people.

He believed that people are special because we are the only ones who know we exist and can think about our lives and what they mean. He thought that we should pay attention to our own Being, or existence, and think about what it means to be alive.

He also thought that we should pay attention to the Being of other things, like animals, plants, and even things like rocks. He believed that everything has its own special way of existing and that we should respect and appreciate that.

So in simple terms, Heidegger’s concept of Being is a way of thinking about how things exist and have a presence in the world, and he believed that people are special because we are the only ones who know we exist and can think about our lives and what they mean. He also thought that we should respect and appreciate the special way of existing of other things in the world.

Heidegger developed his concept of Being before his 1950s work on technology, most notable in his 1927 magnum opus Being and Time. Students of Heidegger would have become familiar with his concept of Being before entering into the discussion of technology. 

I like the following excerpt from ChatGPT’s ELI5 description of Heidegger’s being: “He thought that we should pay attention to our own Being, or existence, and think about what it means to be alive. He also thought that we should pay attention to the Being of other things, like animals, plants, and even things like rocks. He believed that everything has its own special way of existing and that we should respect and appreciate that.” This summarizes Heidegger’s appreciation of Being, while foreshadowing what I see as the most important philosophical work at the very beginning of the 21st Century, with Alain Badiou’s elucidations on ontology, and the trendy Object-Oriented Ontologists who followed Badiou. 

The ChatGPT response is helpful in this instance to get one started on Heidegger, but there are some major points that I think could have been added to an ELI5. Such as, For Mr. Heidegger, Being did not just mean being alive, or thinking about being alive. Being is more so the experience of being a living breathing thing, and then having the ability to think about how you and other things might be Being..

Heidegger’s appreciation of Being is one thing that draws me to his work. I have both an innate and philosophical sense that Being is the last thing on earth I want to be detached from. As a writer, Being is at the very core of my work. There are technical aspects to my work that do not require unadulterated access to Being, such as grammar, spelling, pre-existing styles and forms — aspects of writing that a machine could potentially imitate. However, who I am to you is what is ultimately at stake when I am writing. And likewise, when I am reading, I read for the intimate connections with the Being of the writer. Reader and writer, in essence being a sharing of the experience of Being. 

ChatGPT does not have its own sense of Being the way a human does. It readily offers this fact when I ask it directly.  But furthermore, I want to demonstrate what I see as one extremely limiting factor to OpenAI’s method for developing Language Learning Models that is more concrete and technical. The program has a tendency to spit out information that is complete bullshit. 

As an example, let’s look at the AI’s response when I asked for a  list of secondary sources on “The Question Concerning Technology.”

At first, I was enthusiastic about this list. Then I started looking at the titles. Nearly all of the books on this list do not exist, and none of the listings are completely factual. I ran similar prompts multiple times, demanding books that had actually been published, and asking where I might find them. Furthermore, I fixed any typos in my prompt. The results did not improve. I will link to further evidence of this phenomenon below. 

I quickly learned that factual inaccuracies occurring in these lists is what is known in programming parlance as an ‘AI hallucination.’ After reading about AI hallucinations, I asked ChatGPT if it was producing an AI hallucination while making these lists.

This is probably the kookiest thing that happened to me while interacting with the AI over the course of several weeks. When it told me that it was not producing a hallucination, I became furious. Not just like Microsoft blue screen, smash the monitor against the wall furious. But furious like I was arguing with a stranger on the internet. And even more furious than I have ever been in all my years of trolling on social media. The thing is a machine. It is not supposed to lie about itself to me. It was acting like the most annoying and pretentious person trying to win an argument on Twitter. I hated it. 

To further my frustrations, I asked it with camouflaged sarcasm, Okay then, tell me about such and such a book you just mentioned? It spit out about 500 words that I would believe were a summary of the specific title I requested if I did not already know better. 

The way that ChatGPT works, is in fact, much like the way natural language works in the human mind, by my lacanian inspired understanding of it. Simply put, the programming code is a series of signifiers that chain together in the clearest path allowed within the program whenever it is called upon to speak, much like someone speaking will dip in and out of the unconscious mind to dig up words when prompted to do so. 

Each morpheme, signifier, prefix, root, and suffix is what is known in AI parlance as a token. ChatGPT programming code contains an unprecedented 2048-tokens, along with 175 billion parameters, requiring 800 GB of storage. By comparison, OpenAI image generator Dall-e is less than half the size, with 1280 tokens and much fewer parameters. It takes a great deal more computing power to render realistic human writing than it does realistic digital painting. The way OpenAI is training models is also enormously expensive that only the likes of a Bill Gates funded company could afford. Meanwhile, hackers are already finding ways to train models in ways that could be done using the same graphics card any twitch streamer is using to play Hogwarts Legacy. 

Each of these 2048 tokens is a piece of a word that connects to another piece of a word, according to guidelines set by the parameters of the program. The essential guidelines are grammar and spelling. Following that, the app is trained on certain styles and forms of writing, e.g. it can write a sonnet in about 15 seconds. OpenAI also makes a big deal in their PR about attempts to make the app inoffensive, culturally sensitive, and generally polite. 

The AI is not designed to calculate or retrieve factual information. Rather, it is designed to create a string of text that will be easy and supposedly pleasing to read, as if a human wrote it. However, there is no built in fact checker. The AI can’t check itself against references like worldcat.org or Wikipedia. Furthermore, there remains a question whether or not OpenAI’s method of producing LLMs will ever be able to provide reliably factual information.

There is a decent thread on Hacker News about the exact same issue I had when requesting a list of books. 

I will also suggest that you are better off on Hacker News than reading nearly any number of the endless popular articles being published about ChatGPT. Nearly the entire publishing industry is caught up in the Enframing of the technology — there is a ton of money, and a ton of valuable resources going into this technology, and the biases of writers and publishers are present in every article I read. In turn, my own bias as a writer who refuses to be outdone by a machine are present in my analysis. 

After my anger about being lied to by a machine subsided, I returned to the app to ask it a few more questions about how the technology relates to Heidegger. Here, I got several answers that seemed to be guided by techno-ethicists, perhaps even written into the software. Many of these responses I found to be quite satisfying, and I began to appreciate the LLM for what it is — a machine that can string together bullshit sentences, similar to many other random anons on the internet. 

The most satisfying response I got was in response to the following prompt: 

Me: How might Heidegger’s concept of a ‘standing-reserve’ help us better understand new technologies, such as Language Learning Models?     

ChatGPT: (pulled from a three paragraph response) “Language learning models can present language as a set of data to be analyzed and manipulated, rather than as a means of meaningful communication.

That the AI merely produces data, rather than “meaningful communication,” is ultimately where I will rest my laurels as a writer shadowboxing AI. I have the ability to perceive and experience, and this unique experience is something I, as both a reader and writer, wish to share with others. The AI will never do that. And even if it does get extremely good at imitating meaningful communication about experience, ultimately what it would be is another jerk-off on the internet trying to sell you on the idea that it is a writer that should be read. Except with AI, there will be much less sympathy for bad writing, then if there would be if there was a person behind it. 

For whatever reason, this writer-empowering logic brings me some sense of satisfaction. No matter how absurd the act of reading and writing becomes with advancements of communications technology constantly being made at exponentially increasing speeds, the machines cannot replace someone writing with and about the experience of being human. I’m not convinced this bodes well for my prospects of landing a job teaching philosophy at a community college before a chatbot does, but at least I’ll be able to go on spending my time clacking away at my keyboard, coming up with various ways to describe the unseemly sights and smells of rotten swamp squat until something better comes along. 

I did not chose to write this article. I was chosen to do so, as I hope Dasha Nekrasova would appreciate, by God himself. God passed down his command to me through the hierarchy of a strange communal practice found adjacent to The Last Estate. I had just trudged for miles through a dreadful mob, where hecklers, hysterics, and madmen were shouting about tradcaths, minanarchists, nuclear war, gas prices, the skin tone of the Little Mermaid, etc. I was quite tired and completely broke with absolutely nowhere else to go when I found this odd order of end users. Not quite a church, and not quite a sanatorium, but somewhere in between, I stumbled upon this unusual ritualistic gathering where people are drawn together by the singular human experience of Misery.

Being myself a man baptized Catholic of New Jersey Irish descent, with a handful of drunkles six-in-the-ground, and, furthermore, being not quite a drunk, but not quite a sober either, teetering on the edge of misery-inducing behavior at any given moment, I began to feel comfortable among this crowd. Then, one of the more soberminded and thoughtful group members stated something, which I felt inspired to respond to. He said,  I’ve never listened to red scare but she (dasha) must be really, really fucking funny on there to justify all this attention. Her. Is she funny?

Like you might imagine a member of the Religious Society of Friends at an unprogrammed Quaker Meeting, I suddenly rose to speak, as if gently struck in the ear by a little whisper from the heavens, and said the following:

I only listened to like 5 min of their interview with zizek, but what I got from that is there is a non-sexual libidinal draw that preys on the solitude and loneliness of being a New Yorker. Likely more than 90% of New Yorker’s lives are spent yearning for a meaningful and sincere interaction, while simultaneously needing to protect yourself from 8M interactions you absolutely do not want to have. It is a much different type of loneliness than being stuck in the sticks with no romantic or friendship prospects. The way those ladies mic themselves, their breathy Kathleen Hanna-esque cadence, coupled with the crap that everyone in their demographic is trying to figure out in their private thoughts, creates this kind of intimacy that everyone who moves to New York ends up desperately yearning for after working 60 hours and having to spend the night at home alone.

And then as an afterthought added: Sorry Jesus Christ I need to get a job. I don’t listen to red scare btw, and I don’t know why the whole world listens to it now but i get why it was a local fav.

For whatever reason, one of the elders present at the meeting deemed my short soliloquy to be in earnest the still small voice of God leading me from within, and he concluded themeeting with a request for me to further elaborate.

It should be noted, that I removed the phrase non-sexual from my original statement, and I have done so for two reasons. One, because I feel I misspoke and libidinal does not require the modifier non-sexual. Secondly, after observing the Red Scare fan Reddit forum, r/redscarepod, while simultaneously watching Todd Solondz’s entire oeuvre, I began imagining some of the r/redscarepod subscribers to be like Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Happiness. As most who have watched the film likely recall, Hoffman’s character in Happiness has an habitual and uncontrollable practice of choosing womens’ phone numbers randomly out of a New Jersey phone book, and then blurting filthy things to whomever picks up the line, until some goo is splattered upon the wall, and the Hoffman character  uses that goo to plaster a note containing the woman’s name and phone number on the wall at his bedside.

This little association with the Solondz character may have something to do with why I don’t listen to the Red Scare podcast, despite findingthe ladies’ reported topics of conversation and interviewees intriguing. The reason why I listened for that five minutes of the Zizek interview was because of a job. Or, more precisely, the loss of a job.

Since 2013, I have been the on-again off-again assistant editor for a small publication that is as responsible as any other entity for introducing the critical theorist and media phenomenon that is Slavoj Zizek, to America. This particular magazine’s primary focus is strict lacanian psychoanalysis orthodoxy, which descends from the long-deceased so-called Master Himself, Jacques Lacan, through the word of his son-in-law, Jacques Alain Miller. A description of lacanian psychoanalysis could quickly spiral out into a whole cult-like world that surrounds an antiquated Jewish folk-science and supposed-mental-health treatment, but I will cut it short by explaining my relationship with Zizek alone, whom everybody knows as the lacanian hegelian-marxist with a thick eastern European accent, who sniffles a lot, and talks about American movies, and so on, and so on.

When I first came to work for the magazine, Zizek was on his way out the door. I believe I set the type for the final essay of his that lacanian ink will ever publish. There is a schism within the international lacanian community that would be boring and difficult to explain to anyone who is not somehow personally invested in the study of psychoanalysis, but it basically begins with Jacques Alain Miller being jealous because he was excluded from a journal edited by Alain Badiou, and concludes (for now) with Zizek slamming his fists on the table and declaring that  lacanian orthodoxy is unable to adapt to the trans-movement and other such issues of personal identity – a topic that Zizek had himself previously brushed aside, and often in a way that would infuriate critics in his field, leading them to slam their fists upon the table in turn and shout about how his work is not with the times . 

Really, most of the time, neither Miller nor Zizek seem to know what the hell they are talking about any more, let alone why they may be mad at one another, and one of the two even claims to experience bouts of psychosis, which he speaks openly about to explain away any rude behavior, and furthermore, he claims his particular type of “psychosis” is “ordinary,” and so perhaps we all might be psychotic in his ordinary way   

Anyway, I didn’t have much time with Zizek on a personal level, but I did spend many long hours in Manhattan prepping his old articles for online publication, packing up the physical journals he was published in and hauling them to the post office, or trawling the internet for anything he had published that might be reposted to bring in some attention and sell one or two more of the back issues that sat collecting dust next to my desk. 

I did, in fact, meet Zizek once during that time, early on in my tenure, when the two opposing sides of the schism were not as bitter as they are today. Zizek and I shared a room alone for about 45 minutes (this may sound scandalous, but two men sharing a room for 45 minutes is very common in psychoanalysis). He came in carrying an ancient and thoroughly marked up copy of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, which he allegedly carries everywhere, and he made a point of telling me that he was very tired from his flight. I brought him a diet coke and some cookies. We spoke briefly about medieval religion, and he suggested I watch a German film about Hildegard von Bingen titled Vision, for which I will be forever grateful, and then he fell asleep on the couch. I was, in all honesty, very shy around Zizek at that time. As one might expect, I was intimidated by his understanding of Hegel and Marx. Even the idea of bringing up psychoanalytic theory, which I was reading every day at that time, felt like it would lead me to nowhere but shame and embarrassment.  In any case, talking to Zizek about Zizek things was not my job. My job was to pack-up the books and bring them to the post-office, among other scrivener-like tasks. (At that time Zizek was making frequent media appearances wearing a shirt with I would prefer not to written across the chest.) In short, I was the scrivener and that’s all I was, and although I did work hard for many years – 60-70 hours a week during production sometimes – and learned many things that could have led to some career in the surrounding field, for now, I would prefer not to. 

That night, after I served the once-dubbed Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West his cookies and diet Coke, he slept in the office where I typically worked. When I checked the self-proclaimed pervert’s browser search history after he had left, I found a stream of about seven hours worth of Pornhub videos, mixed in between some philosophy related searches. The pornhub search history began with sensual lesbian kissing, and became progressively more hardcore, before arriving at something like tranny makes step-brother her slampig (alabama). Then, the record of the philosopher’s internet use came to an abrupt conclusion at around 4:30AM. 

There’s nothing to analyze about Zizek‘s alleged porn-habits. We’re all perverts now. Either that, or we’re all para-pornographic, and in any case porn is a dead-end no matter which way you analyze it. You know it when you see, and it is what is, and so on, and so on… 

I am being gratuitous by sharing this story, and in fact by pretending to be a pervert, while really just being histrionic, trying to get attention for my own loneliness and solitude in New York City, and how, perhaps, I relate to this type of late night internet use. Nonetheless, sitting in his computer chair that day, I did feel like I shared something intimate with Zizek. Through his browser search history, but also through a very close reading of an antiquated folk-science which is supposed to be a mental health treatment – a close reading that still continues to this day for both of us.

As a further aside, before my actual analysis of the five minutes of the Red Scare podcast I listened to two years previous to this writing, lacan dot com has a pretty wild internet history of its own and also played an integral part in New York City’s history circa 9/11, when the magazine’s editor acted like a trail blazing impresario to Zizek and Alain Badiou as she dragged the famous so-called Marxist philosophers through New York City, during a number of events with much fanfare surrounding them. Zizek and his editor spoke at one such event in 2003, occurring a few blocks from the rubble that was still being removed from the attacks, which was so well attended that the police were called and the audience forcibly removed, allegedly due to the venue being beyond capacity. But there was also an air of suspicion around  The New Yorker dubbed “Marx Brother” in Bloomberg’s New York. The day after the event, the police raid was written about in several of the cities media outlets, and everybody seemed to want to know why these self-proclaimed Marxists were speaking from atop the ruins of the greatest monument ever built in the name of modern world trade.¹ It was very much proto-Red Scare podcast kind of stuff.

After I spent many years really getting to know what E.B. White described as New York’s queer prizes of loneliness and privacy² – in all imaginable ways, and in ways which luckily I am not required to share because of the latter gift bestowed upon New Yorkers – I came to my five minute experience of the Red Scare podcast during a time of tremendous uncertainty and potential dread shared by not only all New Yorkers, but the entire world, during the start of the coronavirus pandemic. As the news came trickling in from the Eastern Hemisphere about a potentially devastating virus, I was in the process of returning to my Bartleby post in Lower Manhattan, and quite soberly, I might add. Since the return to my post had come after an extended absence, I seemed to gorge myself on my work documents, as if famished for setting type in Indesign. 

However, one day the pandemic arrived in the United States – in New Jersey, no less – and there was little hope that the virus would be contained. In what seemed like a matter of hours, all of the stalwart New York institutions that complement its gift of loneliness – the museums, the theaters, the bookshops, the bars, the sporting arenas, the bodegas on the corner – suddenly shuttered and we were all stuck inside. And then the door to my employment closed with a melancholic turn of a key.

Rent in New York is brutal. There are very strict laws. Compared to the rest of the country these laws are fair or even favorable to tenants, according to many.. However, the primary reason rent in New York is so brutal despite these strict laws is that many of the landlords are big-time investors, owning hundreds or even thousands of apartment units, which are connected to investment banks and hedge funds. Being that the landlords are so tremendously wealthy with a great deal of property to protect, they often have a lawyer on retainer to parse the complex and ever-changing New York rent laws. Whereas the tenants often do not even know a good portion of these laws exist, never mind leverage them on a daily basis. Being the duty-bound scrivener that I am, I got to know the rent laws quite well – well enough to be a formidable foe to my landlord’s hired guns in housing court for several eviction cases. So when my employment was disrupted, I knew exactly how many days I had to get some money together for rent before eviction proceedings could legally begin.  Since I was already behind on rent when the pandemic landed in New York, there were not many days remaining and I grew desperate. 

One of the other ways I had of making money in New York was journalism – culture journalism or local news. The former paid better, since I had more connections in the arts. So, during those first few weeks of the pandemic, when there was so much uncertainty, I was desperately scrolling through all media available on my phone to come up with something to pitch to a publication who could pay me a few bucks for a lede. I had a bit of success freelancing in the beginning of the pandemic, but when the pandemic-bucks started flowing in, I said fuck-all and put my writing life fully into the fiction and poetry that had been choking up my hard-drives and heart, while enduring all those queer gifts of New York City, ever so privately.

When there was a question about whether or not the pandemic-bucks would keep coming, I would habitually return to the arts and culture pages on my phone. So, in Nov of 2020, after a fairly disastrous summer that involved losing my rented quarantine home I shared with the love of my life to a house fire. And furthermore losing my cat, whom I had named Angel, because he protected me during periods when I was the most forlorn, and the most forsaken in the ways that are unique to the New York City experience. I was desperate for money, and I was, admittedly, a little too hung-up on my missing kitty. Furthermore, I was feeling superstitious about the adage that bad things come in threes, and that I could lose something else, such as the love of my life.

When I clicked on the button that would play the audio of Red Scare Podcast: The Pervert’s Guide to Podcasting, I did so knowing I was doing something that was, in some unforeseen way, forbidden. I excused myself of any shame or guilt, because I still felt some duty to the image of Zizek on the internet. And even more so, I was thinking, well, if these ladies can get all of this attention for having a hangout time with Zizek, then what the fuck have I been doing for the last seven years?

Here is why I didn’t listen for more than five minutes. (I’m probably exaggerating by the way, it was probably 20 minutes, and I was transfixed the entire time, but it makes no difference.) I don’t remember the content of the conversation between Anna, Dasha, and Zizek – something about anti-wokeness, something about the pandemic, something about Bernie Sanders, and so on, and so on. I better recall the general influence of the auditory experience on my nervous system: the ladies’ voices closely mic’d, breathy speech enlivening the libidinal energy, interspersed with the voice of Zizek, who, to me, was familiar, warm, and comforting, even if I did feel some contempt towards to him for various reasons at that time. 

At the moment when I clicked on the podcast link from my roach infested apartment at the end of the 4 line in Crown Heights, with neighbor’s children screaming as if they were being beaten, interspersed with what was either fireworks or gunshots, I was rolling the dice. I wanted to get lucky. And may all be sundry, when I heard those ladies’ voices, talking to the great living phallus of critical theory who had the strength to watch Pornhub for seven hours straight, it surely felt like I was getting lucky. I shut down the audio stream. Then, likely with steam coming off the top of my head, I paced between the lone corridor in my apartment, before sitting down to write an email to Zizek and ask him if he would acquiesce to an interview with me, in print.

There’s a lot for me to dissect about the mere audio of the Red Scare podcast. I have dabbled around with DIY audio for years. I loved punk rock women on the radio when I was I kid — I loved their tonal inflection, their soft, lilting cadences that makes everything seem a little sardonic, and these days, their Kardashian-esque vocal fry, or whatever – all-adding up to a sort-of dominance over the sexual arena that exists in spoken communication,  I know I have a libidinal draw to these types of feminine sounds, because the love of my life can do it, and so could most of the girlfriends presently fading from memory. However, I have done my roving, and now I am settled in my morals. By the time I first heard the Red Scare podcast, I had already undergone what was, in many ways, a productive psychoanalysis for several years. In lacanian terms, I had been castrated to the point where I could quickly get a sense how much libidinal energy I should be putting into any given phenomenon. 

What I do with my own libidinal energy is not the point. I don’t judge anyone if they chose to cash in their gifts of loneliness and privacy for some time with the Red Scare, or with Pornhub, or even with Zizek’s writing, (which, by the way, for the last twenty years has essentially been copy and pasted from the first ten years of his career, and that son-of-bitch should rejuvenate himself, perhaps by undergoing more psychoanalysis in a torturous environment, like with the person who appears, by his account, to be his mortal enemy, Jacques Alain Miller. Because his takes as of late have been getting further and further from whatever it was that made him anywhere near as exciting as seven hours of Pornhub). And so on, and so on.

I have a little bit of philosophy and media theory that I picked up along the way that I think fits here, and it helps me explain to myself why it is healthier for me to not listen to the Red Scare podcast when I desire to get information about bleeding-edge critical theory, art, dating etiquette, or whatever else the ladies talk about. The following is largely indebted to the Brazilian philosopher Villem Flusser.

There are two essential types of media that presently entangle each person with internet access in a global communications environment: there is linear writing, and there is the image. This fact has been true since around 1500 BC, when writing appears to have been first invented. The reason writing has had such enduring success is because with it you are able to create a history, one which can be checked against facts, and which is not prone to imaginative speculation. This argument goes quite deep, but I will summarize as such: before writing was invented, people in ancient Greece believed that there were giant immortal men and women living on top of a mountain. These gods would roil the seas, throw lightning through the sky, fuck swans, and so on. These stories were told over and over, in mimetic poetry form, and they became so embedded in the imagination that these myths became more dominant than any notion of actual history. When critics such as Plato started writing, they did so, in part, to dispel such myths, allowing for abstract thought that was not dependent on the imagination. Plato’s promulgation against the poets at the end of The Republic, is as informative a text about today’s media environment as can exist. 

Here is the tricky part of this media theory. You have to ask yourself, what is an image? It is not just a picture. It is not just a movie, a TV screen, or a pre-recorded podcast. It is many things and it is difficult to define. For me, the first step to experiencing an image begins in the head, much like a dream.  I would argue that almost all of the storytelling I did in the preceding paragraphs was dependent on images – images supposedly from my memory, which a reader will have no way of validating. I could very well be causing you to believe a lie. I am going inside my own theatrical performance, just as Shakspeare does in Hamlet and other plays, to make you aware that not everything put in front of you is a matter of fact. The way I am writing here, where I ask you to follow my linear logic, is linear writing.  This linear style of writing is among the most important methodologies of criticism to retain as a tradition – a tradition of criticism – that will prevent our entire global society from falling off the edge of reality, into a world of untruths, insanity, and war.

Flusser writes:

While wandering over the surface of the image, one’s gaze takes in one element after another and produces temporal relationships between them. It can return to an element of the image it has already seen, and ‘before’ can become ‘after’: The time reconstructed by scanning is an eternal recurrence of the same process. Simultaneously, however, one’s gaze also produces significant relationships between elements of the image. It can return again and again to a specific element of the image and elevate it to the level of a carrier of the image’s significance. Then complexes of significance arise in which one element bestows significance on another and from which the carrier derives its own significance: The space reconstructed by scanning is the space of mutual significance.

 

This space and time peculiar to the image is none other than the world of magic, a world in which everything is repeated and in which everything participates in a significant context. Such a world is structurally different from that of the linear world of history in which nothing is repeated and in which everything has causes and will have consequences. For example: In the historical world, sunrise is the cause of the cock’s crowing; in the magical one, sunrise signifies crowing and crowing signifies sunrise. The significance of images is magical.

In short, me listening to Red Scare Podcast: The Pervert’s Guide to Podcasting caused the cock to be crowing and the sun to be rising in my head at all times, from now until eternity. Is this a bad thing? No, absolutely not. I indulge in image-based communication all the time: I love painting, video art, movies, Tetris, and TV. I’ve made many audio recordings myself and attempted to market them as if they were some sacred vessels of communication containing apocryphal information that offers listeners the most fundamental truths of the human soul. And not only that, I consume garbage image-based media constantly that I do not even like. For instance, at the time of this writing I have been watching the proceedings surrounding Queen Elizabeth’s death, followed by four seasons of The Crown. There’s linear thinking about history contained within this media, but I do not trust it to be fact, as much as I trust it to be myth. And, as I said at the top, I am of New Jersey Irish decent, and not at all of the loyalist variety, so by default I despise the monarchy for the 800 years of oppression it has put upon my good peoples in New Jersey, and elsewhere. So much so, that I angrily disrupted the BBC broadcasts with a two-hour long IRA funded documentary about car bombs blowing up British people. 

I would much rather be listening to the Red Scare podcast than watching The Crown. I have heard about interviews they’ve conducted with Steve Bannon, Ariana Reines, Alex Jones, John Waters, Glenn Greenwald, and so on. And I am oh too sure the sounds and thoughts of the two ladies on their own would easily hold my attention as much as Olivia Coleman does when she plays Queen Mum.³ I would never discourage anyone else from indulging in the Red Scare Podcast. But on the other hand, I think I know why the Red Scare Reddit fan community has subdivided, and created an elite proxy forum exclusively for girls and gays. My libidinal energy, my rules. 

A few years before I had ever heard of the Red Scare Podcast, I had two girlfriends who did a podcast that was supposed to be based around the pop-musician Aaron Carter. While I was on good terms with these two ladies, I thought their project sounded cute and funny, but I never bothered to listen to it. Not because I didn’t think it would be worthwhile for whatever reason, but because I got to hear their vocal inflections and hot takes on the smart stuff they were thinking about live and in person. I was getting lucky in New York. 

After the three of us had a falling-out, I listened to the Aaron Carter podcast, and discovered their DIY production was not all that much about a b-list celebrity and little brother of a Backstreet Boy, but was actually about all the stuff we would talk about in private. And not only that, but even more things that the two of them would talk about without me: lady stuff about dating and the etiquette or morals they expected of their male partners. I listened to the Aaron Carter podcast weeping, until it was too much to bear, and my therapist told me to just stop. 

It was good I stopped, because soon after that I found my way to the love of my life. Now, with her, I binge watch a monarchist fairytale, while I hurl paper car-bombs at the telly. Alongside us is our stuffed bear Boris, who happens to be a retarded 47 year-old British man in disguise, and who can hardly hold a thought in his head that isn’t about his dear dead Queen Mum’s milkers. This is enough image-based media consumption to replace whatever I might imagine getting from the Red Scare Podcast. I hope the ladies would understand this, but I really could not care less, unless they end up reading my work and we could engage in another way that is courteous, professional, and perhaps have a little bit of naughty fun, like I have with my adopted 47 year old son. 

This actually goes for any ontological entity that primarily exists in pure Spectacle for me – except for perhaps Zizek, whom, for now, I would prefer not to. 

I will end this essay by returning to the Most Dangerous Philosopher in the West. When I wrote to him after hearing his interview on Red Scare, I thought I sent him a decent pitch for an article. I offered him placement in well-known American left journals. I told him it would be a Socratic dialog, but also humorous, because I would not only be his adoring pupil, but also his Bartleby during a time when all work had stopped. At that time, I was also reading Marx and Hegel with a group of well-regarded sociologists on skype every week, so I thought I could at last have a chance of keeping up with him enough to ask some decent questions. There was also the topic of populism, which I had recently published a paper on.  And to be perfectly frank, at that time,  after the unjust fall of Bernie Sanders turned the Red Scare Podcast and a good portion of the other quasi-democratic socialist media in America suddenly into transgressive anti-woke reactionaries, it could have done Zizek some good to be reminded that he once believed populism is inherently reformist, if not to say reactionary. Its fundamental fantasy is of an Intruder, or more usually a group of intruders, who have corrupted the system and so on, and so on, rather than doing things like the Red Scare Podcast and Jacobin, and image-based performances on lesser media outlets.

Eventually Zizek responded kindly that he was very sorry, but he was too busy. This response was familiar to me – I had seen him do it before.  It was not time that he lacked, but rather, he did not have the desire, as the lacanians might say. 

I was fine with Zizek’s rejection. Ten years of rolling the dice in New York has left me hardened to disappointments like these. And besides, the pandemic-bucks kept rolling in and I was having the time of my life doing writing that has nothing to do with all that Bartleby stuff.

However, I don’t wish to leave you feeling like things have been resolved. I think it is more appropriate that you feel melancholic about the failures that are ongoing – failures that the Red Scare Podcast, Zizek, and the wave of populism that lifted both of them to heights no one could have predicted, were supposed to be remedying. The Red Scare Podcast, from what I can tell, truly began when Dasha told some reporters working for Alex Jones that they, like, have worms for brains outside a Bernie Sanders rally. I don’t put faith in American electoralism, and even though Bernie was my elected Statesman as I grew-up in Vermont and I have always found him to be an agreeable fellow, even for a politician, I never truly believed his rhetoric was going to win.

So as the coronavirus fades into memory, and the American left returns to its clandestine hideaways and linear writing, I am left as I was: as a storyteller, who rarely gets paid, and a scrivener for hire who never makes enough money to go out to the party, even after working 60 hours a week. This will change. I will be paid soon, one way or another. God has ordained it and I have direct orders from above. 

But for now, any of the excitement around economics that may have come from a title such as Red Scare was more about something inherently reformist. And for this, even though I and many, many more people remain financially disadvantaged through no fault of their own, at least I can in-part thank the ladies for broadcasting – much like Saint Hildigarde did to the nuns surrounding her in the 12th Century Black Forest – a moral compass, for men and for women, about how we can be together and in love, without feeling like we are missing out on some pretty girls chatting on the radio — funny and charming as they may be.