michael-dean-k/

I had a horrific dream last night. We were in an oversized living room, and there was an inter-dimensional parasite that would one-by-one, burrow into each person’s ass. Whether you then exploded or not was somehow a testament to your character. It went up mine at least twice. I survived, and the second time the parasite coiled up and turned into an egg. I think I won this tournment? Was this a Harry Potter dream? Actually no, this thing was slimey and shadowy and probably from the Stranger Things univese. Actually, I probably had this dream because Season 5 of Stranger Things just dropped.

Stranger Things features possessions, ghosts, monsters, and every breed of supernatural evil, but all packaged in a way to be maximally accessible. It is a cultural juggernaut, the beast of Netflix. It gets billions of views, and is the #1 show in 90 countries. It is cross-generational and nostalgic for both kids and parents, resurrecting songs from the 80s back onto the billboards.

Is it weird that a hit show normalizes paranormal and grotesque violence? I mean yes, in the end, I’m sure the kids will win, but are we not poisoning our subconscious? I guess this reflect a general hesitation to the whole genre of horror. I do think there is something valuable to virgin eyes—if you see CGI evil, even once, it could haunt you eternally. Many other cultures see Halloween as soul-damning (my sister-in-law, a true Orthodox Christian, recently went upstate to visit a monastery on the night of Halloween, to avoid the inevitable images of teenagers dressed as cadavers).

Even if a SM feed is filled with all of your favorite ideas, friends, and thinkers, it would still be poison from the sheer volume of randomness. Even the act of seeing two things in feed, forces you to shift from one context to another, forcing you to shift frames, destabilizing and disembodying you.

Alternatively, if you had a feed of a hundred things, but they all revolve around the same content, all spawned from a singular intention, I think it would be less dizzying; it’s more enables depth into your present, embodied frame. There is less of a “slot machine” effect. 

It’s not that feeds or algorithms are bad; they only became bad when they strip context. The logic of most feeds, however, do not care if you feel oriented. They have a simple reward function, show you as many different things as they can, to see which ones drive behavior. They are running a real-time self-adaptive experiment on your preferences, in the hope to discover which patterns might nudge you into their desired behavior (whether it’s towards an ad or towards an on-platform paid subscription by a beloved writer, they are effectively the same—it’s an algorithm that is not being real with you, and not respecting your attention).

I feel like a broken record in prescribing a solution, but it’s basically Plexus (RIP): show nothing until you post, and then from what you post, share a feed of semantically related posts. Substack, as a writing network, is a unique position to build this. It has a lot of long form content: not just notes, but essays, podcasts, and videos. It should be looking at the granular units, semantically embedding paragraphs, and then those become atomic objects that help populate the “semantic feed” generated after every Note.