YOU CONTROL MACHINES…
I haven’t posted anything to Instagram, or any other social media sites for that matter, for a while. It’s going to be complicated, but here’s why:
You control machines.
This machine will control life.
Do not control it.
This is the warning that sounds from the deep in my novella, Rising Flux. That story was the first thing I wrote after I decided that I was going to self-publish my own books. It was a test to see if I could write fast enough to keep up with what I thought was a realistic release schedule.
(It wasn’t.)
I wrote it over the course of eight days, and it was a key instrument in shaping the character of Origin, the one who gives that warning. He didn’t always “speak” in haiku in previous iterations of Molten Flux, a book that was largely complete by the time I tackled this novella, but I found this way of him speaking to be fitting.
How can an unlimited life be meaningful without a few self-imposed limits?
But one thing that puzzled me for a while, something that niggled away in the back of my mind, was the true meaning of the words. It’s not something that Origin only said to Rettic, and it’s not something that only applied to the substance of molten flux. The latter fact was something I only realised while writing the final book of this series, which is also where I discerned the true meaning of the warning that I’d written more than two years ago.
First, I have to ask you this:
What is a machine?
I won’t look it up in a dictionary to define it. I’d rather make it up myself, like I do all things in these books. It’s why I write them, after all. It’s the amount of control that I get from them.
So, a machine. A machine is a device that turns one thing into another. What those things are can be very vague and abstract, if need be. A car’s engine is a machine that turns fuel into motion. A car is a machine that turns motion into expanded human activity. It takes people to jobs, materials to work sites, goods from factories to stores.
The roads that this car travels on is a machine that turns this expanded human activity into expanded economic value. An economy is a machine that turns this expanded economic value into other productive ventures, supposedly. Sometimes there’s excess. Wasted motion. Exhaust fuels of harebrained or failed investments into boondoggle technologies. As dictated by entropy, it all has to end somewhere.
But an end is not something we experience in our present, so let’s not worry about that. Even if there were an end to our current societal machinery, the human compulsion to create order and systems would quickly assemble something to take its place, no matter how ramshackle it would be.
From moment to moment, we live within a series of machines. We are parts in them. If we cannot fulfil our required process within these machines, we are repaired or replaced. It is a cruel and unfair process, yet the constant motion, the constant actioning of all the valves and pistons around us means that it cannot stop unless all parts collectively agree to stop, yet in a world of game-theory driven capitalistic intent, who would agree to such a thing without immediately reneging?
So what does this have to do with Origin’s warning? What does this have to do with me not being bothered to scream out into the churning void of the internet?
You control machines.
What Archarus, Rettic and Ryza failed to understand when they heard this warning was that the “you” it begins with is not specific to them. It is proverbial. If you (you, the reader. this time) look back at how I think of machines, you’ll see that all these things I mentioned, along with all these societal systems you can slot into that broad definition, are driven by human needs. Not necessarily wants, because a want will inspire a need to go with it, which I’ll expand on more later, but NEEDS.
Everyone needs food to live. We largely do not grow it ourselves, because the current distribution of labour, land and skills do not allow for this, so we buy it with money. Money we get from the jobs we must have to acquire it. But not all jobs are these ventures of primary industries. They don’t all produce necessities. There’s been many things to ruminate on throughout history that can be seen as frivolities, but I’m inspired to write this in part by the latest craze for generative AI.
It is an unavoidable technological parlour trick which has been leveraged into every conceivable consumer good in the past year or two because simply slapping those two letters on the box seems to make the company’s valuation jump. Entire organisations have turned themselves upside down and inside out to task teams of people to research just what this mystical deity can do for them, simply because everyone else is doing it.
But one thing to realise about this is that it’s driven only by the wants of a small number of over-rich thinkers in Silicon Valley as they try to track down the next technological revolution. I source a lot of this opinion of mine from the writings of one Ed Zitron, who can be found either at his newsletter wheresyoured.at or his podcast, Better Offline.
The idea he outlines there is that, since the advent of the smart phone, there hasn’t been a technological expansion to match it. This hasn’t stopped people from trying to create it. Why wouldn’t you? If you were to get in early enough, you could get a stranglehold on the world, much like Apple did with the iPhone. Look back at the rest of the failed tech revolutions of the past few years. NFTs, metaverses, block-chains, all of them have been snuffed back into a grave pit filled with the dirt of broken promises and successful grifts. But it’s important to remember, all of them came about because some very rich men wanted to be richer. And that want turned into a need that their organisations suddenly were obliged to accomplish.
Imagine if they were to stop. To decide they don’t need to suck up enough electricity to necessitate a fleet of nuclear reactors just to train their AI models. To instead turn all this money, both theoretical and real, that they pump into it, into something else. Something that will accomplish the basic needs of those who live in the present, rather than the imaginary rationalisation of the future conjured up by those who think themselves as “Effective Altruists” that just happen to drive million-dollar sports cars.
In 1953, President Dwight D Eisenhower gave a speech original entitled the “Chance for Peace” speech. In the wake of the Second World War, he paradoxically lamented and lauded the necessity of the military industrial complex that was created to win it, while warning that such an economic juggernaut should not be allowed to steer the needs of society.
An extract of the speech reads:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
I think that the cross of iron we now hang from is this tech “industry” that has wormed its way into every conceivable aspect of our lives, and it’s their snake-like promises of riches and fulfilment that keep us tied to it.
This is the machine humanity controls.
This machine will control life.
The problem with being a self-published author is that I am in charge of every aspect of marketing. The larger problem it begats is that the primary way to reach new readers is through social media. Through a dreadful network of opaque and ever-shifting algorithms and newsfeeds that were never necessary for human consumption.
The idea of a social media follower is an ersatz one. If I were to upload a post to Instagram right now, only a fraction of my five hundred or so followers would ever see it. Is that unfair? Not particularly. Who’s ever going to have the time to see all the posts by all of the hundreds of people they supposedly follow?
As you’re already grimly aware, the best way to bump your way up that newsfeed is by “engagement.” It’s a nebulous word, but how else would you prioritise quality content over slush? A post wriggling with likes, comments and shares surely has to be something worthwhile, the social media companies say. Yet this does produce a more grim effect. It forces us to chase this engagement. To create content that will either simperingly pander to the zeitgeist of the hour, or to appal and outrage it.
It made me feel obliged to post in such away. More often than I wanted to, either with crap that I’d shovelled out the door, or overwrought masquerades of who I was because that’s what I thought people wanted. But it’s not what they want. It’s what the social media companies want. They are the ones that want the engagement. They want their platform to not just be some latched-on remora of our lives, but a necessity. They want to maximise our screentime, to make to so when we’re away, we’re only thinking of more things to “share” in their domain.
Think back for a moment. Has there ever been a time where you’ve been doing something, and you’ve had the compulsion to stop and try capture it with a camera, if only for the idea that it will be popular on the internet? Have you then caught yourself in that moment and wondered why it would matter in the first place?
It was a while ago that I saw someone else ask that question. They had been very active on the internet for years and years, but all the things they’d uploaded had disappeared into the ether after only a matter of days, never to be seen again because that’s not what this machine cares about.
This machine cares about new content. About the clicks and the likes and the drive to keep mashing out lives into their oubliette of advertising at no cost to them. But why do we do their work for free? Why should we be the ones to populate and paddle the oars of their economic juggernaut?
One thing I am aware of is that if I were to vanish from social media entirely, another would replace me. There’s plenty of indie authors out there. It’s a loud room to be in, with all of us shouting at once. But if we all went silent, what then?
Do not control it.
The last words of Origin’s warning are his solution to these machines.
Think of this: if I were to be constantly posting on social media how much I hated it, wouldn’t I still be a part of it? If I were to protest the late stage capitalism we have buried ourselves in, yet still ask for money for my creations, am I a hypocrite? Fortunately, the former isn’t a question we really need to answer in the present, and the latter is an answer I don’t intend on finding.
What I’m trying to get at here is that the only way to destroy a machine is not to protest and throw spanners in the works. It certainly helps, but these things will only be repaired by the machine until catastrophic damage is done, not something one man can do.
To destroy this machine, you must live beyond it and without it.
This is why you may not have heard from me in my usual channels, and why you likely won’t in future. I feel it is too antithetical to my works and my writings to continue to engage with these algorithms that fuel our newsfeeds. In fact, it’s my goal for this year to live as algorithm free as possible. If you want to hear from me, and if I want to be heard, I will only be doing this through channels that are uninfluenced by the hand of money. Through channels that you and I can both come to when we’re ready, and walk away from when we’ve had enough.
To this measure, I’ll be keeping up my email newsletter, and attempting to re-invigorate my blog, where I’ll be posting more unstructured ramblings like this one. I’ve also created a Discord server, where you can come and chat with myself and other readers of my books. I will not be posting on Instagram, Facebook or other platforms as often, if at all, and if you do find yourself missing me there, then I thank you for following me so closely up until now. I’ll also keep with bluesky, because that doesn’t seem like unwashed shite as of yet.
Join my Discord: https://discord.gg/K825WNjNEH
Or hit me up there: LibrarianRettic
Follow me on bluesky: @jonathanweiss.com.au