Dispatch from a lightning tree.

| 2025-06-29

You know that feeling, when you visit your old elementary school and can’t get over how small everything looks now? All those little chairs and little desks and painted cinderblock walls and hand-lettered signs everywhere encouraging you to dare to dream, and it all just seems so alien, and the familiarity has faded.

I haven’t posted anything of note on corporate social since March, beyond keeping tabs and checking in on my friends, and despite my multiple unsuccessful attempts to get clear of platforms that exist primarily to make money with us as the labor force, rewarded with a meager pittance for the billions we make for bad people with ugly hearts, this retreat has been easier. It’s been the perfect storm of death and loss and heartbreak this year, and while I’ve received lovely support and affection from an encouragingly large number of people, the modus operandi of Social Media Incorporated has grated on me even more.

That’s the thing—when you step away from a non-place like this non-place is, the machinery of addiction engineering lurches into motion and starts flooding your former social space (even with three blockers running at once) with “sponsored” posts and “suggested people you might like” and “you might find this interesting” posts so that when you poke your head back in, the algorithm turns your visit to your old elementary school into a nightmarish wall of fake nonsense, computer-generated bullshit, and suggestions that are all precisely engineered clickbait to get you engaged with a bunch of blowhards you’ve never met to argue about fluff and stupidity to make enough money to rent out Barcelona for the next prettypretty wedding of celebrity morons.

It’s like stepping into an old gay bar you loved once and finding that they’ve installed seven hundred TV monitors all blaring day-glo who-gives-a-shit at eye level, so you have to step lightly, dodge, and dart just to find a friend in all the chaos, and the grimly funny part of this is that the teenage engineers behind all this repellent techbro plumfuckery actually think this is going to draw you back in.

Where’s the “there” there? Heck, for the 5-10 feeds this site thinks I should be allowed to see that I actually care about, I can always just bookmark each one, and visit them in turn with a direct link, to comment and chat, and that’s more or less what I’m doing these days.

Are we so lonely that we really can’t live without this level of glittering, jittering, seizure-inducing strobing actinic glare of interference, and surrender more control over what we visit in lieu of all the day-to-day human relationships, phone calls, letters, and plain old hanging out with no particular aim we used to do?

So I stepped away for this stretch, feeling bone-deep defeat after losing a dog, a sister, several friends, security for my friends and family, and a functioning democracy in a country that was once seemingly on a path to civilization, and when I pop my head back in, the click-me-now pages are all carefully arranged to present the worst of the world around me.

Oh look—a post about pride observations at our nearby ballpark…and yeah, it’s aimed at every backwoods red state moron who seems to obsessively read posts about Maryland and Baltimore despite having skulked off to somewhere dreadful like Florida or Oklahoma or Indiana to live their “best” lives, who chimes in, as they were programmed to, “Whut about straight pride? When do WE get a day?”

Thing is, I’m not fooled. I know how algorithmic engineering of social engineering works. They put out the lure because they think I’m a sucker, primed to jump in and fight in the same way dumb people respond to each and every call to name a state with no “E” in it, or to demonstrate that they remember dial telephones or gearshifts, or to post their favorite song, book, movie to a fake radio station page out of a kind of pathetic desperation to feel like part of something in the face of the loneliness created by the celebrity megacorporate monsters who just want to help us to “connect,” but I don’t bite the hook.

It’s not easy, but were our social lives ever meant to be easy? Didn’t we once have the stomach for a little work to connect with each other?

Maybe we didn’t. Maybe it was all just small talk, and we were living lives of quiet desperation, cringing at every horrid moment of accidental connection.

Maybe it wasn’t ideal when I would call my best friend up so we could watch Doctor Who, staying on the phone to share our commentary.

Maybe it wasn’t ideal when my friend Allen lived four blocks away and had no telephone, so when I wanted to get together with him, I had to walk over there and knock on the door.

Maybe it wasn’t ideal that we had to remember dozens of telephone numbers or write them down, and that we were annoyed by friends with 9 and 0 in their numbers, because the dialing was so much slower.

Maybe it wasn’t ideal to show up at a local watering hole to see who was around or, annoyingly, wasn’t.

Maybe all that social labor was just an awful thing we endured, and social media came to rescue us, which is why we’re so much happier now?

Are we, though?

Maybe it’s me, but I don’t feel it. I chattered with a friend for a solid hour and change after a show a couple weeks ago, talking FM synthesis and the voltage control issues of a synthesizer we both own while rats darted around the empty parking lot, and it was a revelatory moment, because I’d arrived earlier that afternoon feeling at an absolute nadir, with a pit of who-the-fuck-cares in my gut and a long drive to a distant venue where all I could really think about was to pilot my car in silence while trying to come up with a metaphor for the way I’d been feeling (I arrived at a tree struck by lightning, burned out and hollow, but still looking like a perfectly intact treet), and I drove home feeling more engaged, enjoying music, and thinking of things I’d like to do when I got home.

Maybe it’s me, and just me, and maybe it’s okay that I’ve retreated to smaller online spaces where my friends largely haven’t bothered to seek me out, because the big places just feel like trees struck by lightning, burned out from the inside, still looking intact but dead inside, standing until a strong wind comes.

To be fair, I cut my teeth writing on digital platforms, so I won’t begin to claim the purity of internet-free life.

I was doing it back in 1985 when I still had to dial a BBS on a dial telephone, listen for the eeeeeEEEEEEE, and clap the handset into a pair of rubber cups on a modem that streamed characters about as fast as I could type, and when I was on all the strange Devonian shale medium creatures of the pre-commercial internet, playing with Gopher and Veronica and MUDs and MUSHs and MUSEs and the firestorm cauldrons of USENET, and when Livejournal came around and gave me a place to write serially, a wannabe Armistead Maupin sharing stories an episode at a time, with an audience of enthusiasts and occasional critics. It was such a energetic era for me—full of aspiration, creativity, and major and minor missteps.

The jaundiced eye of the post-human corporate gestalts turned on us once they saw the possibility of exploitation, and offered us easy connection, and lazy ways to interact, and we all just fell in line, and here we are.

And here I am, because I feel like maybe it was unkind to just disappear, but I want more conversations with rats darting around empty parking lots at my feet and while we’re driving aimlessly in search of a new place to eat and when we’re in a room together, face to face, talking about things that matter and things that don’t.

I want to put on little concerts of friends playing unlistenable electronic nonsense and banjo music in my house, and have pot luck dinners, and play board games that are beyond my easy comprehension. I want to ask mechanically sophisticated friends for help fixing my windshield wipers or getting my old shortwave radio to tune more than static again or to teach me how to make waffles I enjoy as much as cheap store brand toaster waffles.

I want to, but I, too, have been trained well, and there’s a lot to untangle in return, and maybe those little desks and little chairs and cinderblock walls with hand-lettered signs everywhere encouraging you to dare to dream aren’t as pretty a scene as the gauzy lens of nostalgia presents, and for now, I still feel burned out on the inside even as I still stand here, still looking plausibly like a tree even though it’s all still too soon and too hard. This is what grief looks like, and it’s okay. Life returns.

We need to reach again—at least I do—else what’s a heaven for?

© 2025 Joe Belknap Wall

Reading: Becky Chambers

| 2022-10-16

A recent exchange reminded me of a great book I read recently, as an attempt to rediscover the love of science fiction I’d once had, and which had faded with the devolution of sci-fi into bleak pessimism, a perverted wallowing in the supposed hopelessness in our species, diseased and fetishistic lusting for (and after) the apocalypse as a sort of displaced modernization of the religious sickness of the flagellant, and war war war war war war war and every narrative turning on the gun, because people can’t be bothered to read Ursula K. Le Guin’s elegant counter in the brief, but insightful, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.”

I’d gone so far as to attempting my own sci-fi novel as a nod to James Murphy’s excellent dictum that the best way to complain is to make things, setting some basic rules—no war, no AI, no FTL travel, no artificial gravity, no murders…and so on—writing at a leisurely pace that equates to “I wonder if I’ll finish this before I die,” but along the way, helpful fans in my circle pointed out some excellent humane modern science fiction of a genre that’s been dubbed “solarpunk,” which inspired me to wonder if I could catch the tail of that flowing gown as its practitioners stride into a future that’s not the usual grimdark catalog of miseries.

One of my favorite suggestions has been the work of Becky Chambers, a fantastic writer in the field, and I recently finished the first two books of her Monk & Robot series, which exist in a pastoral future where, when AI arose suddenly in that stabilizing green future, the response wasn’t war war war, but a collective release with an apology, as their former workforce was treated to an apology and the right to live as they chose…and they chose to disappear into the recovering forests of the moon where they all lived and disconnect from their former masters.

(more…)

What we miss in the the hurricane

| 2022-04-29

One of the things I truly lament about the social-mediafication of the internet is how I’m stuck looking at an endless thread of posts about political creeps, bible-waving hysterics, celebrities I’ve never heard of and care even less about, and other things that have no direct impact on my life that I can do anything about, and that all that AI horsepower producing billowing clouds of atmospheric carbon in competition with digital mining for moronic fake money can’t seem to recognize the things I *do* care about (probably because few of them result in online purchases), and it’s because of this that I only just found out this week that one of my all-time favorite composers, Stephen Scott, died a year ago.

I’ll share this video to illustrate his amazing, lush, and satisfying work (as well as the craftsmanship and astonishing precision of the people in his ensemble), but will it get the same traction as me bewailing or ironically demeaning some random crime of taste? I post videos and links to amazing things I love all the time and they get zero traction, because the AI sees they don’t get the endless arguments that descend into the mudpits of prog and kitchen appliances and pulls them out of everyone’s feeds.

Stephen Scott was amazing and I wish more people knew his work, and even further, I wish there was more work to come, but his catalog is closed now, and that’s terribly sad. I’d have liked to meet the guy, if for no other reason than to say “thanks for the inspiration and all the time I’ve escaped from the world into your musical realm.”

Sigh.

Pondering the social internet.

| 2018-04-08

I’ve been writing a lot, performing here and there, and gearing up for more performances in the summer and fall, and in the midst of it all, I’m missing the way I used the internet as a social tool and a medium back when I was first venturing on the web.

It’s all very topical, of course, but I’ve been reminded quite often that Facebook just isn’t what Livejournal was, and it really games the system to generate revenue while not making us better off.

Cal Newton wrote a great piece (which I’ve linked to here) about managing the social internet in the era of social media, and I’m increasingly interested in using the internet as a tool instead of as an obligatory ludic loop, forever devouring time and attention in exchange for…well…what, exactly?

It’ll be interesting to see how I do. Watch.