thesecretgliteratti > ghostupload
thesecretgliteratti > ghostupload
Sometimes, when I look at the amount of change and evolution and how much I don’t relate any more to the person before, and how much they didn’t know, I feel like disowning them. You’re so stupid, so delusional, so embarassing, how could you not know? Then I feel like disowning myself in the present for having so little compassion for who I used to be, for doing the best I could with what I had available to me.
I detached a piece of myself to look at this cycle of shame and noticed how automated it is. I have other hints of other thoughts and feelings, what I am trying to change to, what I want to stay in, but they are mysterious in the background covered by… a persistent no-thingness that wants me to believe that no-thing is there. It wants me to think that all I can be is stuck in these cycles of stress, anxiety, rage, shame, defeat, apathy etc. etc. etc.
Automated.
“Universe is a simulation” + “the universe is made of data”
I’ve been working with a healing paradigm that centers on the possibility, coming up now in physics, that this universe could be a simulation. A simulation does not stand alone, it is based on something that already exists, it is created to better understand what already is. If this universe could be a simulation, then what would we be simulating? What are the creators of the simulator trying to do, and what are they trying to understand? Why did they create the simulation in the first place?
Honestly this shit is way, WAY above me though, I read what others have to say and just nod, perhaps if I bob my head hard enough, I’ll understand what’s going on.
“sentient computational system” shit is no longer strange, vague, identity feels, but perhaps the reality rendering unit trying to translate some far out multidigit-dimensional meatspace modifications for virtual space interfacing and uploads, into a singledigitD simulation space.
matrix shit is not cool anymore.
for all of my life i had these ridiculously elaborate daydreams, with characters and storylines that extended for years. sometimes they’d begin as mental fanfic for my favorite books/shows, sometimes they’d begin with a dream world, sometimes, they were my life if i could be a different persona and could live it out differently.
in the beginning, i only had them at night, or while i was napping or when i was bored or depressed. after the crash ten years ago, they slowly started taking over my life. the characters never became “real” but my emotional investment in them eventually displaced my emotional investment in my “real” life. my physical existence thinned as my soul was drained away, fatigue controlled me and isolation took over both my IRL and internet lives.
who is the daydream and who is the dreamer?
once every few months i look over this tumblr and think of deleting it. it’s so tmi, so ludicrous, out of control. tumblr has become more dangerous and destructive since my first blog here. i’ve also reached that point where many people who blog about spirit/deity/magic generally shut down and delete their shit. the need to let something out passes, calm down, settle in, a comfortable silence. you don’t need to tell anyone anything anymore. it isn’t safe, too many have gotten burned.
but I am still here. i remember how it felt to read about other people’s far out experiences, to know i’m not completely losing my shit, that it is a strange fucking world out there and compared to some mine isn’t that weird. i leave this up to pass on the feeling, for as long as I can stand.
#dreamsdenied
when i came back from detroit, i crashed. i still haven’t recovered. i feel the constant drain, like my life force is leaking out, like if i lie down too long i might never get up again.
this always happens, every time i make an effort, there is push back that completely undoes the progress. i went ahead and canceled my table as i won’t be making anything anytime soon.
it is my experience that blocks me from actually talking about my experience.
outside this bubble, my explanation of self, to justify my lack of mundane productivity and reason for existing is to say, yes, i’ve been sick with illness that defies diagnosis, but i’ve been acting as spiritual counselor and guardian for my family so i have some worth.
it’s true but it’s also bullshit because the bindings from this guardian role also trap me so i can’t go anywhere or do anything else. i’m not allowed to live my own life, i must sit here and watch the situation as it unfolds, give the appropriate advice, shift the probabilities in their favor, lend my energies to their transformation. anything i try to do for me is shut down or rerouted to benefit someone else.
almost every time i feel a surge of energy or motivation or create opportunities for myself, it goes to my family. the moment passes and i go back to bed, while they move on with whatever bit of progress. all the energy and effort i put into the trip, to create a huge momentum that would carry me out of this void, has gone into my mother buying a nice house with cheap payments. which is good, great, awesome, because i’m living with her and we need to move soon, but why can i not have both? why do i have to be broken for others to prosper?
for a minute i was actually okay with this arrangement. for a moment it was awesome to realize that despite my illness and inability to be productive in capitalist terms, i was still being useful, i was still developing a skill set, i was still doing *something*. i thought about expanding this further, maybe start doing healer-type work.
but that’s that bullshit too. fake ass feelings to make me more manageable. the deception is never far. i wake up and remember that no, this is not what i want to do, didn’t i quit this shit already, why the fuck am i still here, etcetcetc, until they put me back to sleep and i forget everything again.
i’ve seen this in other people’s situations. folks who can’t seem to escape the web around their mothers. the more they try, the more their situation aggressively breaks down until they’re back to zero. the reasons are all different. i don’t have a contentious relationship with my mother like they did. because this thing is not about my mother, it’s about the protective forces around her and how i’ve been recruited into the team and given no choice.
it makes me extremely tired.
i’ve moved into new phase after new phase a long time ago. i came to the point everyone does, when they lose the need to document a certain part of their experience. “deity drama” has been mostly out of my life for about a year, though i get an unexpected and unpleasant visit every now and then.
the idea of this set of realities as a designed system entirely different from the physical realities we assume ourselves to be living in, has taken over my life. once i rewatched the matrix movie and finished the trilogy, i haven’t looked back. i don’t know if it’s a real thing or not, but working with designed reality models give me the best results in dealing with my situation.
i’ve been thinking of revisiting some of these old places and journal entries in a zine. i’m going further back than my online journals, to the turning point before i started them. i’m still blocked from creating, so i can’t do nothing too exciting or compelling. i’ll start inside the banality of being in bed all day because of chronic fatigue and trying to figure out spiritual/magical practices while under these constraints. an issue that still hasn’t left me.
other experiences will have to wait after more blocks are cleared because presenting them requires a level of creativity and artistic ability that i can’t access yet.
i’m trying out paper zines for a needed contrast to digital media. i have a lot of blocks around being fully embodied and present. even though digital media is a primary medium for me, i also used it to get around or distract myself from these blocks. i avoided the fact that i couldn’t make stuff with physical mediums like i used to. i have a typewriter (as old as i am with electronic display bc vintage fetish can be too much sometimes), xacto blades and rubber cement for old school layout, and plenty of art and illustration tools that i’ve hoarded over the years in hopes that i’ll be able to draw again.
eventually someday i might make a not quite fanzine about the matrix. i didn’t like the main storyline at all, but like many folks, the background details had lots of ideas relevant to my life.
[Photo: On the floor me sitting with an oxygen tube coming out of my nose, and a GJ feeding tube coming out of my stomach/intestines. Behind me are the IV pole with my feeding pump, and behind that the oxygen concentrator is visible mostly as a silhouette. All of this at a very strange camera angle with bad lighting. Two photos, one with the stuff behind me more visible, one with me more visible, otherwise mostly the same.]
It was really, really hard to get any possible way to take a picture of all these things given the iPod touch had to be held in my hand, and the positioning of the objects, and the apartment, and the lighting this time of night. So be glad I could get these three things in the same shot at all. Hence the strange camera angle.
So on to the story:
I’ve had an electronic implant to help me urinate, for years. Just recently, I ended up needing a feeding tube and oxygen. I’m not going into the whole story, as it isn’t relevant.
So my friend, also disabled, came over to visit after I got home from the hospital. Partly to see me. Partly to geek out on my assistive tech.
I commented that I am turning into more and more of a cyborg as time goes on. And that I feel sort of steampunk.
She agreed that all the tubes coming out of me these days (two branches of a feeding tube, one to my stomach to drain stuff out one to my intestines to put stuff in; plus the oxygen tube) seem very steampunk in some way.
Then she discovered that my oxygen concentrator even sounds steampunk. It makes these whirring and hissing noises constantly.
Of course, she doesn’t know the half of it. When you turn on the top half of the oxygen concentrator (used for filling canisters instead of sending air to me through a tube), it makes this intense WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP noise.
Fey, as usual, is taking the technology fine. I’ve found that cats in my life are far less frightened by new technology than dogs are. It may freak them out at first — Fey always hisses at new stuff — but they rarely seem to develop the kind of lasting fear that many dogs do. I don’t know what that says about cats and dogs. Poor Billie Jean, I think if she still lived with me she’d be a permanent nervous wreck. She couldn’t even handle the hospital bed.
Anyway. For some reason I find the cyborg/steampunk aspect of all this hilarious.
And I think many nondisabled people would be horrified by the kind of jokes I and the disabled people I know make about things like this. To them, disability is supposed to be Deadly Serious All The Time. But I have enough serious stuff in my life I need something to laugh at. And I just don’t see disability as out of bounds for humor the way some people do.
Plus I really do see a lot of disabled people as real live cyborgs. I first heard of that when I visited MIT and I love the idea. Because it’s true. Many of us are part flesh part machine. And that’s a really cool thing.
Unfortunately a lot of people who are into science fiction cyborgs would be horrified by this idea. Because they see disabled people as beneath ordinary people. And so the idea that disabled people are enhancing ourselves by becoming cyborgs is totally out of the question to them. The only real enhancements are to people who aren’t already disabled.
And I remember a poem I heard by Connie Panzarino, about how she could kiss, or perform oral sex, without coming up for air, due to her ventilator. And that’s utterly cool. But disabled people aren’t allowed to have utterly cool elements to our assistive tech. That’s reserved for nondisabled people.
People with feeding tubes can eat and talk and move our hands (provided we can talk and move our hands) all at once, and that’s pretty cool too. Without our mouths full at that.
So many sci fi fans can’t stand the idea that disabled cyborgs can have abilities most people don’t have, and not just replace nondisabled people’s abilities. They see our assistive tech as always being an inferior replacement for their own abilities that we lack. And it’s not. Sometimes it gives us abilities they don’t have, whether large or small ones. My feeding tube gives me a kind of freedom I never expected to have. Eating is easier now. Even easier than it is for the average person, aside from some obnoxious side effects. But the actual act of eating is immensely easier. You just plug the tube in, turn on the pump, and forget about it until you run through your bottle of food. It takes longer but it takes no concentration at all. I’m eating at the same time as I am writing this and I am not even thinking about it.
They generally (with a few exceptions) see cyborgs as nondisabled people with mechanical or electrical add-ons that make them have superior abilities to the average nondisabled person.
So they’d argue that we are disabled so it doesn’t count and our add-ons replace standard abilities we lack so it doesn’t count. And a lot of other technical details. None of which are necessarily actually true. What seems to be at the bottom of it is that disabled people are inferior to them and therefore we shouldn’t be going around interfering with their dreams (or nightmares) of a future where ordinary people can have technological superpowers.
Of course you get the bionic woman and Darth Vader and some other exceptions. So we are in there to some extent — usually as disabled people whose assistive tech gives us abilities far beyond the average person. They rarely of course come up with the realities, like being able to eat without thinking or using your mouth or hands. Or being able to kiss or (etc.) indefinitely without coming up for air. Or being able to change our height on a whim. Or other things many disabled people can actually do. Because that would require actually getting to know us.
And when we do end up with a huge advantage, they tend to feel threatened by us rather than the fascination they show for our fictional counterparts. They don’t see it as fair that a disabled person could surpass them through our technology — they’d rather our assistive tech always remain a poor substitute for the abilities they already have. And I don’t know quite why that is but I’m sure again it has to do with us being supposed to be inferior, in the end. Because that’s what most of their uneasiness around real-life cyborgs comes down to.
Wow I didn’t think I’d end up writing something this long. Also — only call someone a cyborg if they’ve given you permission. It can feel dehumanizing to some people and many disabled people would never identify with that word in a million years even if most of their body is kept operating through assistive technology.
But I love to use that word, at least jokingly, on myself. Because it gives a twist to my technology that most people aren’t expecting. They want to see tragedy and ‘cyborg’ suggests enhancement.
It also is more accurate to my feelings about the technology I use. I use, off the top of my head (some full time some part time some rarely at all): An electric wheelchair, a hospital bed, a Hoyer lift, a communication device, a bipap, oxygen concentrator and portable tanks, a feeding tube, a feeding pump, a tube to drain my stomach, a bidet, and an Interstim implant to aid urination.
Some of those make my life easier. Others have literally made the difference between life and death. And all of them I have loved and welcomed. Everyone expects disabled people to see these things as tragic and confining. But many of us see them as tools for freedom and for life itself. And by the time I get them, I’ve long since gotten over any bad feelings about them. By that time, I welcome them as life changing in a near-completely good way.
And that’s why cyborg is a term I like. It suggests something that enhances life and gives you new abilities that you otherwise wouldn’t have. And I especially use it for things that are either inside my body (like the Interstim implant and the tubes) or connected to it for long periods of time (like the oxygen or the bipap). But it’s possible to use it for other things too, depending on how far you stretch the word.
I wish sci fi fans would embrace disabled people as everyday, present-day cyborgs. I also wish they’d embrace our more everyday enhanced abilities — kissing without having to come up for air, and other things you really have to know disabled people well, to figure out. As well as not acting threatened and crying foul when our technology-enhanced abilities greatly surpass theirs in a major area.
None of this is exactly a big thing for disability rights. As in, if all of what I wish, came to pass, it wouldn’t be one of our major achievements. I have no illusions about that. But it would be nice if we were understood and recognized and welcomed into the realm of cyborgs, by the sorts of people normally interested in this stuff. :-)
And I love the idea that all these tubes and noises and stuff seem rather steampunk, even though they’re partially electrical. That’s just cool, however much the era involved would’ve been awful (and deadly) to me in reality.
VOICES OF CYBORGS:
And I remember a poem I heard by Connie Panzarino, about how she could kiss, or perform oral sex, without coming up for air, due to her ventilator. And that’s utterly cool. But disabled people aren’t allowed to have utterly cool elements to our assistive tech. That’s reserved for nondisabled people. […] They want to see tragedy and ‘cyborg’ suggests enhancement.
No, I’m completely serious.
We’re presumably all aware that media— the books we grow up with, the TV shows we get attached to, the news we watch— can have a profound effect on our sense of self. If a boy grows up reading stories where the male hero always “gets the girl” as an expected trophy for his heroic actions, he’s going to feel, later in life, that the girl is owed to him. If a girl only sees people like herself modelled in sidekick roles, she’s going to think she’s not allowed to be the hero. If a person of colour grows up seeing any show that features them rapidly “whitewashed”, they’re going to get the impression that they’re not good enough for the mainstream public to see.
When the first self-aware AIs and ALs step out of the pod, they’re going to be stepping straight into a sea of media influences that depict robots in two ways. They’re either evil, or they want to be human.
If you’re a “good” robot in a sci-fi story, you’re rarely allowed to be proud of your robotness. That way lies the kind of hubris that turns robots into humanity-destroying war machines. The best kind of robot not only follows the Three Laws of Robotics, strives to protect humans, but also recognises the natural superiority of humans over the flawed robotic form. To this kind of robot, it’s obvious that xe is incomplete and that humans are complete, whatever that means, and so xe’s dearest wish, secretly or not so secretly, is to become one xirself.
We can take this trope as far back as Pinocchio and his dream of becoming a “real boy”. It’s difficult to ascertain in what way, exactly, Pinocchio is not “real”: he certainly thinks, feels, and interacts with the physical world. Yet he lacks flesh and blood, so he’s “incomplete”.
Even in stories that only feature humans, “humanity” is a greatly emphasised trait, ill-defined yet all-important, mysteriously and ineffably residing in the body of the human alone yet also able to be granted to other creatures on an honorary basis. The robot, wooden puppet or non-human animal who demonstrates compassion and thoughtfulness is dubbed “almost human”. Needless to say, such creatures must end up wondering what it must be like to be actually human, since that state seems to be so prized.
Future ALs coming into the world are going to look at these stories and feel that they, too, are incomplete: that there’s something magical about having human flesh and blood that would make them whole, make them better. It’s not enough to be thinking and feeling and interacting with the world. It’s not enough to care and have compassion. If you’re not human, that just ain’t worth a dime.
Where have we seen this before? In the self-hating black child who grows up believing that xe shouldn’t see anything beautiful or meritorious in xir appearance, because it’s not white. In the boys who don’t believe that girls have a right to their possessions, unless they’re pink, in which case they’re been marked as inferior and the boys are too disgusted to take them. In the constant messages that certain groups in society get that grudgingly say, well, you can be awesome, but it’d be even better if you were a white, straight, cis male.
In a world where AL is going to become a reality eventually— because we’re constantly striving to make it a reality; because we’re not going to stop until it is a reality— do we really want to add “human” to that list?
Worse, when we create a generation of robots who see no worth in their own bodies because they’re not human bodies— and don’t get me wrong, someone could legitimately be transspeciesed; but we’re not talking about individual identity here, but a race-deep dissatisfaction with self— are we going to be concerned?
Or are we simply going to smile smugly and think, “well, of course they want to be like us. We are superior, after all”?
And aren’t there already so many anime and sci-fi works directly addressing the AL’s mental anguish in trying to decipher what its purpose for existence is? I’m reminded of the entire plot of the Kubrick/Spielberg’s movie A.I., The Second Renaissance in Animatrix, the famous scene in Armitage III (“If humans didn’t want me why did they make me?!”), etc, etc, etc… With subtler unpackings of this topic in sci-fi works like Shariann Lewitt’s A Real Girl (“Many people never meet a neural processor.”)
I feel like it’s so obvious that robot servitude is one of the worst mentalities to persist unchecked. Instead there are so many “I fell in love/made a real human bond with an android” tales that sort of never address the robot’s perspective at the intersection of society’s violent oppression. It’s always permissible that someone in the story fucking hates robots/ALs and finds them disgusting and “less than human”, purely on some classist “it just ain’t natural” mentalities. There’s also always a character that has absolutely no interest in seeing ALs as persons, and no one really forces them to change. It’s a very tired tale that very flagrantly depicts fucked up oppressive power dynamics, and we don’t really seem that concerned with talking about the AL itself because we (governments, militaries, hospitals, and corporations) just can’t wait for a new free/slave labor class to take advantage of.
Or you know, maybe the kids by that time will be all into anthropomorphic body mods like in Batman Beyond and that struggle won’t be as forlorn as we’re predicting…
to add another layer: why are we waiting for the AIs/ALs? the future is already here.
there is a thing in society about defining the spectrum bands of person to nonperson, depending on how much the being in questions displays/adheres to/manifests “acceptable” signs of intelligence, culture, beingness, etc. different societies define this differently, though western standards, through colonization, imperialization, and globalization are increasingly stamping out cultures and peoples who think very differently.
the separation between “dumb” computers and AI/AL and animism: