Let’s talk specifically about two types of technical instruments; those of verification and those of projection. The act of projection differs from production, and the act of verification differs from the act of confirmation. We shouldn’t be playing cool language games about this, there are specific differences in how each unfolds. To verify something requires measurement, but we often confirm without measurement. Our confirmation might explicitly require a lack of measurement (as in confirmation bias) or measurement can be omitted on the basis of reason (did you really lock the front door? Yes, you did). Our production requires effort into something, which may or may not be evident, whereas project is always evident, the energy devoted to projection is meant to evidence that energy onto the subject, even if the projection fails to become *self-evident* in the subject onto which it is projected. Put more generally, projection is an act of creating impermanent evidence. Verification is the act of utilizing measurement as evidence. Production, a real material change in really existing stuff (even emotional or psychic stuff, which can still “really exist” to confirmation without a lack of verification), is not always evident. We don’t need to confirm our projections, because we know they aren’t real - we do, however, need to verify them as accurate. After all, our confirmations aren’t always true. Two types of people with equally toxic strength in their convictions are those who need to verify exactly nothing out of personal faith, and those who routinely make a point to verify everything they say as evidence of their own rational beliefs. We increasingly look to verification for what Lyotard called narrative knowledge, with unsatisfactory results. Simultaneously, we realize that production has developed into systems of sometimes immoral and often unsustainable violence, and are invited to invest our energy in projection rather than production - without realizing that unchecked projection isn’t any more sustainable than unchecked production. That projection still consumes energy, still requires our investment, and requires us to constantly verify our projection; always just out of scope, always just imperfect (and thus, accurate - never the ideal we desire). We cling to those projections of the real world more than we invest in the sustainability of that world. We refuse to let things die - most of all things that we can confirm no longer exist. The increasing verification and measurement of facets of the self have not always resulted in a greater understanding of the self. There are aspects of our knowledge and wellbeing which have been exponentially improved through the technology involved in measurement and verification. However, we must currently accept that a greater measurement of self does not result in a greater experience of self. Our ability to understand our existence has not increased hand-in-hand with our ability to measure our existence, or even at all. The medicalization of mental illness has not resulted in a mass number of people finding themselves healthy and happy through exclusively medical techniques. The increasingly technical measurement of aesthetics has not led to a more general consensus of beauty or the sublime, nor to a more personal one. The consistent and frequently alarming measurement of catastrophe, of a world undergoing severe shifts of both ecological and anthropological environments - has not demanded significant changes in the forces of greatest impact (mass manufacturing and fuel emissions ecologically, disparity of wealth and autonomy anthropologically) on those environments. In fact, we routinely ask more of those with a lesser impact, and we know this precisely because we have increased data to verify the scale of that impact. The verification of the world, and the energy invested into projecting that verified world into a virtual reality, a fully verified reality - has not led to a more enjoyable, more sustainable, or more reasonable world. We are incapable of returning to a reality which was confirmed but never verified, equally unable to inhabit our own projections or enjoy life as an image of ourselves that, with every new step taken to measure the truth of that image, is increasingly unsatisfactory even as it becomes more accurate.

I bought a Hyacinth that never bloomed. It was five dollars at the grocery store, in a thin glass vase next to the wine, and I thought the kitchen could use some brightening up! Because it’s the end of January, I’m losing my mind, and I want to die Except the sun didn’t come out for two weeks. The flower would drink and drink and it didn’t bloom, then it started to rot as anything that drinks that much and refuses to bloom does; from within, keeping form but discolored and decaying drinking and drinking I miss her more than childhood. She was always stealth-drunk, secretly stoned, a pleasure to talk to, wide-eyed and thrilled; said she hated her job, was losing her mind, and wanted to die when we made love, she would smile serenely before she asked me to hit her, slapping her with big, lazy-handed slaps, cupping her face, whipping strands of spit and lipstick onto her chin one time she whispered that she was trying to kill me, while she came in sweaty little gasps, I held her thin wrists and crushed her with kisses. The glow that came off her skin was the only thing that mattered to me in the world, and she bloomed as anything that blooms does; from within, her small frame collapsing, losing form but revealing color after color color after confounding, brilliant color

The thing that bothered me the most was the cigarette burn on the bed. Like a sample taken through layers of rock with a bore, it had removed a cylindrical sample through the duvet, the sheet, the meringue-like foam from the top of the mattress. It was done so deliberately, it had created a reference point. In your own bed, things can be organic, loosely distributed, but in a hotel, the sheets can be pulled so tight. The tightness of the sheets and the consistency of the burn gave every part of the bed a uniformity it already had, damage which provided an indicator it didn’t need. You could have taken them all together, the layers and the bed foam, and put them on a ring, like a little wheel of color samples, and given it a fun name at an interior decorating store. She said she hoped that we could make her into one of *those people* and I asked what she meant. “You know,” she said, “Go-getter. Networker. Habit kicker.” She told me that after graduating, she had wanted to work as a logger. She had wanted to be as far away from the bullshit as possible, but then she read an article on sexual harassment in blue collar professions, and felt like she couldn’t do it. She joked that she had planned on being unpretty as a business strategy, but that it only lasted a few months before she realized that she really liked her makeup. I didn’t say anything and she looked at me with utter suspicion. Saying nothing was worse than saying absolutely any awful thing, so I tried to pivot. I asked how long she had been staying in this room; it had been two weeks. She didn’t like to let the maid in, she said, and the maids didn’t seem to mind. They left a fresh towel and a roll of toilet paper out in front of her door a few days before, and she said that between the ice machine and the parking lot, there was a V-shaped part of the courtyard where they hid out and smoked. The maids smoked Kool 100s because they were dirt cheap at the Citgo up the road. She had negotiated her way into the good graces of the maids by sharing a few cigarettes that she had rolled by hand. “See?” I said. “That’s networking already.” She asked how I felt about what we had negotiated. I wanted to bring up the cigarette burn, the hour drive to nowhere, the video she had sent of a man’s leather kutte over her knees while she blew a thick white amphetamine cloud over her naked chest. How as our proximity increased, our messages became more erratic, and their tone increasingly jaded. I wanted to say that from the moment I had parked my car, I was never more sure of being in the wrong place in my life, and that our shared fantasies - the spellbinding feeling of constriction, the intoxicating trust - were never going to be possible, because none of those fantasies took into account the time we weren’t thinking about them. The time she was smoking with the maids or making videos, the time I was at work or driving on a two-lane highway in my car; neither of us were naive. We just very badly wanted to be. In reality, I should have said all of that, and she would have been fine. She was, by my estimation, physically and emotionally invulnerable. Except to a lack of affirmation. She liked her makeup and I had said nothing. My own reticence stung me; I was already ruining her experience by missing cues. I wanted to get out, but I needed someone, anyone in this situation, to be okay. I said that I had some concerns, and I’d be happy to talk about them. Then I stayed. She finally fell asleep three days later and I drove home. The hot water at a motel isn't like the hot water at your house. You get home and you can feel time dissolve off your skin like a layer of dust. I don’t think that human beings are inherently moral or good, but I certainly can’t say that I think people are evil, either. What I think is that death is a force of universal value in our lives, because it creates a finitude, an economy of time. The phrase “time is money” is casually insulting to time, but if it has any truth, it’s because death is the head of time’s federal reserve. We’ve tried very hard to sort of push time behind money, to take the unvarnished honesty of time and push it behind capital, the vaguely stimulating, business-unpretty face of value. Maybe time itself has done this - taken a step back after getting close enough to humanity to smell our cigarettes, amphetamines and enlightened self-interest before saying, “I’m not so sure about this”. Immortality would be a moral quandary not because it perverts nature, or because it provides some unsolvable ethical dilemma, but because it would set the value of time so low. How we waste our time informs our personality, just like how we waste money. When you learn to see time - it is still a fantastic measure of our diminished, almost invisible, systems of value. People of modest means sometimes waste an astonishing amount of money, the same way that people who can see the writing on the wall; who have exhausted possibilities, burned bridges, watched the road in front of them atrophy; can waste an astonishing amount of time.

When you wake up, the fluorescent lights are turned off and the sun is setting. Your room has cooled. From your hospital bed, the big glass window looks like a piece of paper dipped in orange, blue and purple. Stars have started to poke through the paper from the other side. In the morning the sky is a big, blue piece of paper. Every night, someone dips it in oil, throws sparks on it, and burns it to dust. The sky is new paper, every day. It does not burn and then get better, it does not heal, because there is no such thing as healing. The little rectangle of tape on your wrist holds a plastic tube in place. That plastic tube has a thin, skeletal metal finger that slides underneath your skin. When the tube is open, it gives a cold drip into your arm, like a gutter taking the torrent of cold rain down to a trickle, and pours it into your arm, where the city inside your heart melts it, makes steam out of it, that warms you like an aura of radiance. The tube is closed. This is the best night of your life. This is the night you get to see a whole new you. When Vonnegut wrote “Slaughterhouse Five”, he took a long piece of paper and drew a single line, zigzagging up and down, peaks and plateaus, across the paper. He put dots along the line, and every dot was an event, a story that he wrote about. Across the paper, vertically, he drew another line. A single thick red line. That line was the firebombing of Dresden. Dresden, Nanking, Aleppo. We let cities be rebuilt, and we have no illusions that the destruction caused, whether intentional or unintentional, requires entirely new architecture. We do not romanticize that the city has healed itself. It has been rebuilt, and it is easy to see the parts which “survived” as being older than, darker than, more archaic than the parts where steel and cement were poured into the ground. Those parts are brand new. Any flesh – all flesh – is not healed flesh. Our concept of repair, of healing, flies in the face of our own materialism. Who can settle for being repaired? We plan for the obsolescence of everything except ourselves. All the while, our creations have the potential to outlive us. The lights are on. The staff, in familiar unison, asks how you are doing. Their outfits are crisp and white. They look like they rose straight out of the tile floor. Inside of dull, opaque plastic tubs, there is the gleam of metal instrumentation. This is the best night of your life. Your time in the hospital hasn’t bought you healing, because there is no such thing as healing. You have not been treated, stimulated, comforted; none of those things are actions that you, yourself, have taken. This is your ownership. Out of the fire on your skin, the hot shrapnel in your flesh, the smoke in your lungs, you have purchased a new self. The gauze is not a wrapping, it is not a cocoon, it is not swaddling. To some people, closeness must be a matter of proximity. To some people, closeness must be a matter of time. When something is a medium to the outside world, it has a finite life to it, and at some point, your own life consumes that medium. History is built of those eliminated mediums. They are the art we have consumed over the course of lives. When the scissors slide underneath the gauze, dried and cracked on the inside, wispy on the outside, you can feel it being cut. You are the gauze and the scissors also. You wrap, you dry, you cut, you slough away. It did not take time to become these things. You never had to become them; you are new. You are brand new. You will leave here, and the skin that you will show the world is new beyond measure. It has no history. Look at yourself and deliver yourself from doubt. Tonight is the best night of your life. Time, which was stopped, cannot prevent you from entering the world brand new. You are not a work in progress, because you have no history, and your grace is effortless. You were not broken down and built back up. You were not catalyzed and transformed. You were not damaged and healed, because there is no such thing as healing. You are brand new and you are going home.

The more effective marketing becomes, the more closely it resembles a form of psychological abuse which would be blatant if it came from another person. The sleight of hand caused by projection; both psychological projection of the self and the technological projection of image onto various media; is increasingly complex. This complexity in both technological intricacy and psychological convolution hides the relationship between a virtual self which is measured, verified, and reproducible, and the self as experienced. More accurately, it hides the lack of relationship, the lack of a connection between our projection of enjoyment and the actual enjoyment of experience. The more sharply we feel this gap between our pursuit of enjoyment and actually enjoying something, the harder marketing works, in part due to an increasing irreducibility of self. Product marketing convinces us that reflections of the self - performance, identity, desires - are variables which we can measure as they are experienced. In actuality, the self is not reducible to any of these concepts at a single moment, and least of all can it be reconciled as all of these concepts at once. Technology is recruited in this effort to convince us, to show us measurements of experience; but having more (and faster) measured data has created more ecstatic sensations but never a more a transcendent experience.. The data itself is agnostic, it doesn’t care what kind of experience we have; it is marketing which continually moralizes meaning, which proposes that the data also has a fixed narrative meaning. Even then, we know that our own narrative of experience fluctuates, it changes over time. Part of the psychological abuse of marketing is not just the suggestion that your projected image should represent the “real you”, but like an abusive partner, the assertion that this “real you” doesn’t change. This is your problem, here are it’s markers, and here is your solution. Again, technology is recruited; the medicalization and verification of the self is used to validate that you are your own measurements. You are a narcissist, you are depressed, you have attachment issues; here are your recommended products. Conversely, celebrating these traits rather than pathologizing them is also a form of manipulation. A product or service suggesting that you embrace yourself is shallow duplicity; that they see you, they support you - an indiscriminate blanket assurance of your validation. The “verified” self, the image, is a doppelganger which takes over as the measurement for the experienced self, and we cannot see when the transition was made from attempting to make the image reflect the experience of self to craving an experience of self which provides the same beautific certitude as the projected image. Unlike a doppelganger in fiction, we have to do the work of becoming our own monstrous self, with either increasing ease or difficulty depending on the necessity of our experience. The disconnect of looking at old data can unsettle us, can feel haunting or profane; posts on the internet from a decade ago, once enjoyable visuals of ourselves now experienced as cringe, entirely accurate recorded data of places which are now no longer real to us. It is the unceasing and increasingly awful work of marketing to convince us that next time, the verified image will stick, that the product we are being sold will create a permanency of self that has never existed. Even as we are shown time and time again that the image of the self, measured and verified, is entirely unsatisfactory in hindsight, marketing convinces us to place the blame for this lack of satisfaction on our own experience. This too is clearly a form of emotional abuse; the suggestion that changes are made “for real”, for a happily ever after, and that they are around the corner. Even as you never change (who you are has been verified), that unchanging self just isn’t quite completely evident yet. Predictably, the way to make that self evident is through investment, and often an investment in image, rather than a detachment from such. An investment in the image of the self is an investment in projection. And, as each power is directly invested into projection; the material power of capital, the emotional power of time, the intellectual power of attention; the projection, not the self is beautified. Instead, the machinery of projection is the combination of technological representation and serialized production, which takes your shape even as it convinces you of becoming a better you. Marketing isn’t blind or ignorant to the immune response of the psyche - “I am not my own projection” - but product marketing doesn’t particularly care whether you believe you can project the true self, or even care if you use all this technology to verify who you really are. What it insists is that the projected experience is your experience, that you control how your image is projected, and that the result of these facts is the need to acquire signs externally to manipulate that projection. This requires your investment in the projection. Quality of performance, how “true” you are to your identity, is all your business - but participation in owning your projection is mandatory. It is equally mandatory whether you are convincing people of who you are, or who you aren’t. It is even mandatory if you are trying to convey that you aren’t what you project, or that you aren’t real at all. The least convincing manipulation, the most defensive and obvious lie, is that the misstep is in thinking that marketing actually cares if you believe that buying the right products will lead to either a better image or self-improvement. The time of that naivete is over, and suggesting that marketing is still about your individual consumption is not unlike suggesting that an abuser doesn’t “know any better”, that they still grapple with their own traumas. In fact, we would rather humanize brands and products than people who have hurt us, because we can still avoid or punish other people. We have fewer ways to avoid or punish systems of production, but just like an abusive relationship, acerbic messages or negative press still only warrant real action (material changes) if the relationship between product and consumer is threatened. Now brands, companies, and trademarks wear you as a mask, they inhabit you as a host, and it is your name, your image, which sustains their parasitic identity. You no longer experience the lack of satisfaction from the disconnect between projected image and experienced self, but instead experience the impossibility of satisfaction from being part of an abusive relationship with constructs and ideas that market themselves as moral purpose. They have total antipathy towards their user or even weaponize your own experience, imperfect but personal, against you.

Capitalist realism, consumerism and accelerationism are anti-eros, inhibit the release of the erotic, and pathologize seduction. Rather than seeing mutualism and competition as complimentary forces, the polarization of mutualism as a moral choice to competition as a “natural” force, a force fait accompli, creates a situation in which no partnership is stronger than the accepted terms to compete or not compete. This extends beyond arguments of monogamy and polyamory, beyond patriarchal demands of sexuality.. By making cooperation a moral standard, but competition an assumed demand, erotic love (a mutualism of pleasure, intimacy, libidinal energy) takes on this same aspect of moral choice, excusing it from the realm of integral, innate human behaviors. Capitalist realism assigns the fruits of wealth accumulation within a liberal sphere, within a belief in liberation; that the things you desire as external manifestations of the self are achievable through wealth, practical systems, and class status. At the same time, these three things are totally non-reliant on identity, they should seem egalitarian even as they require that you hustle. Efforts are made to include all potential facets of identity - but what is marketed as efforts to “dismantle” systemic (really, to reduce the symptoms of) systemic bias is also an effort to deny exclusion from the system of wealth value itself. You can do anything to the system except not participate within it. Mandatory participation, but totally optional (and entirely conditional) acceptance; the antithesis of erotic energy, which chooses and often rejects, not out of a pretend free market selection but out of human agency, an innate desire - for our choices, our helplessness, and even our indecision - to matter. Our primary relationship now is with a system of symbolic exchanges, a kind of dysfunctional threesome where we and our human partners form a triad with the activities, software applications, and objects that facilitate our interaction. This has nothing to do with fetishes or material symbols of affection from a lover, and everything to do with the aggressive marketing of our own consumerism as care for ourselves. Without capitalism, a gift is still a gift - but without a partner, our investment in the self under capitalism is through objects, through symbolic exchanges that convince us of a psychic return on our investment in self-gifts. We then bring these objects, our summoned self, with us in seduction and negotiation. These things are threatened by the presence of satisfactory love, of good-enough love that affirms our selves without the misguided expectation that cathected objects and manipulated signs will, somehow, re-invest a lost energy in us.

I’m reading a book by Winnicott, and he’s talking about a breakthrough session with a patient. The client is a man, an attorney, who has felt unfulfilled in his life, and unaccomplished in his psychoanalysis. During a moment of revelation, he experiences himself talking on the therapist’s couch as a younger woman. Not being a young woman - no, being himself, and aware of his analysis, and his catharsis, as a young woman. He says of this experience, to Winnicott: “If I were to tell someone about this girl I would be called mad.” And Winnicott tells his patient: “It is not that you told this to anyone; it is I who see the girl and hear a girl talking... The mad person is myself.” And this led to the resolution of a crisis on the part of the patient. The catharsis was not seeing himself as someone else - it was seeing himself, as being seen as someone else. By someone else. It got me thinking about the last time you came to my apartment. It was after your birthday and the snow was reduced to gray slush on the stairs. You had barely taken off your boots when you told me that we couldn’t see each other anymore, and this wasn’t a surprise. It was exactly as real as anything else about our time together, because we only had one rule. No expectations. There was nothing good about expectations, you said. They would only get one of us hurt. That was, in a way, true. If we had expectations, one of us could have been hurt - but with no expectations, both of us were sure to be hurt. It was the kind of mutually assured destruction that only two careful people can negotiate. You were wearing the necklace I gave you at Christmas. I remember when you first put it on, I told you that I loved you, and you told me that I was wrong. You told me that if I ever used that word, you would never touch me again. It was a one-word expectation. Neither of us cried and we did everything we had done before, which never felt quite real, because we only had one rule; no expectations. We made love without forms and without script, which meant that it went the same way every time regardless. There were no expectations, but there were no surprises, either. Improvisation isn’t possible if there’s no theme to deviate from. Afterwards, you had some very complimentary things to say about me. You said that I was a decent person, and something about feeling very present, without a need to look back. You told me that I smelled good, that I smelled like your dream lover. You told me I smelled like coffee and Fernet. Your nylons had a tear in them and you threw them in my trashcan, and then you put your boots back on. You left for Baltimore two weeks later and we never spoke again. Thank you, for not making either of us to be insane. Consequently, thank you for showing me: the mad person is myself. Maybe that’s what love is made of on some level. Not a shared insanity, but the willingness to trust our own madness to someone else.

Is there any reason why we should be so dissatisfied? We are now fully integral - or more accurately, so needy for movement that our integration of events is always “in the works”, in pipeline, scheduled for inevitability. Everything can be postponed but nothing can be really negated; what we call cancelling as a pejorative is now is just a less flattering form of validation - the emotive rejection becomes the excitement, swapping the unwanted person or thing for our own reaction to them rather than just being done with it (this isn't your doing - you aren't allowed to be done with it). The thing cannot be held within the moral or physical structure of our life as presented, it must be actionably rejected and not just given up on. This exile doesn’t really give us satisfaction, only a vague sense of conviction. We do what we have to. “What we had to, when we had to.” As if these actions occurred from our agency, and not simply because we caught a persistent, nagging glimpse at a reality that exists without being mapped or validated. Absent a reality that is totally integrated - totally explained and by extension, explained as a moral fable - do things exist neither for other things or in spite of them? At the same time, this existence neither for or against is a kind of original sin, a state we are aware of in glimpses. It is not an existence with no purpose, but our own performance in service of that purpose, which dissatisfies us. Rightly so. We don't reserve the right to destroy our own performance once others have a hold on it; even if we burn the original, not physically but through our own subjectivity and our own search for a more authentic self-representation. Authentic performance is more being than doing and states of being are phasic and incomplete. It is our perception of ourselves which is “always on” - there is no taking time away from the conscious self, and now we approach having no time away from performance. Performance was not our default state before, in much the same way that Jaynes theorized a “bicameral” human mind some 3,000 years ago, devoid of modern conscience, instead both commanded and begged by voices within. If the new standard for normalcy is to broadcast, to perform, we are left to perform for ourselves or do so well for others that we would rather not have in the first place, should they actually believe we are who we say. In this way, we are usually either dissatisfied with our performance, wanting in our underperformed humanity, or complicit with our integration into a system of images. An actor who praises their performance more than their audience isn’t insane; they are evil. At the same time, becoming evil is widely acknowledged as the smartest thing a person could do in terms of improving their material conditions. You only risk having to validate your performance, perform contrition for the disconnect between who you are and what you say, or remain evil. This ability to accept a willful evil, a change from evil as immoral act to evil as internal calculus, is frightening in our non-reaction to it. It is perhaps the least exciting "big reveal" of the previous century, having been upstaged by the awareness of the conditions which preceded it; material conditions, power relations, and positivist totality. An abusive relationship with technology, quietly promised to continue past the end of the world, has traumatized us from doing the hard work of sorting out where we individually posit the lines of desire, of love and of anxiety. Unwinding these three like metal cables, ductile but durable, we find they were never braided together for our convenience but for the sake of these legacy systems. First systems of production, then systems of objects, and now, systems of images. These systems should no longer decide for us, but we find in each one examples that they never held power over our decisions anyway; what to embrace or reject in reclaiming our desire, choosing to love or having no choice in whom we love, and defining our existence or letting it pass without statement.