For the past year and a half, I have had a feverish but ultimately fruitless obsession with detaching myself from the hellish depths of the digital. Why I wish to create this distance will be overwhelmingly obvious to anyone who has lived through the transitional years from the nifty days of “1000+ songs in your pocket” into the current dystopian age of AI-generated Spotify playlists. I honestly feel stupid to be having a full-blown existential crisis over this, but I cannot possibly be alone in melting down over every aspect of our lives being looked at and absorbed into a meaningless amalgam of mediocrity.
The worst of it is what this has revealed to me about people. So many people are exceedingly happy to have no soul, no spirit, no love or labor, and will giddily lick up vomit off the floor if given the permission to. But I am not. I am not one bit happy to be consumed by the machine.
I am flesh and blood and dreams and tears, sparks and slumps and blocks and epiphanies, joy and elation and pain and struggle, original and derivative and artist and art. I will be pathetically unoriginal and technically laughable. I will embarrass myself through poorly framed photographs, syntactically broken paragraphs, horrendously colored drawings. I will be one of the thousand failed artists. I will be a ghost haunting the spaces between awful pieces of literature and painfully bad music. I will never be a competent engineer of instructions to the machine. I will never become an obedient data point for the almighty algorithm. I will live. And I will die. Happy.