michael-dean-k/

Screens are unfairly tainted. I'd love to write a post about how screens are underrated, a glorious technology that would be marveled at by basically any other generation in history. Screens are the scapegoat because they are the point-of-contact, the portal through which bad or selfish actors bend your pixels to their whims. I know people lament over "blue light" and the physical strain from staring at something for many hours, and of course that is real at excessive doses, but might that then be an software or psychology issue?

The main reason I started writing this was to riff on screen-time with kids. There is a revealing nuance in the advice, "no screen time for kids below 2 years old, but FaceTime with relatives is fine." Why is that? It's not the screen, but the nature of what's on them. FaceTime is fine because there is a fix and unchanging frame of which a fixed and unchanging person moves within. There is stability and coherence. We take this for granted, but infants haven't modeled this yet! They might not even have object permanence (ie: if they disappear from the frame, are they gone forever?). So by this logic, any piece of media with a stable frame is potentially infant safe; beyond FaceTime that includes single-shot lectures, text editors, etc. Obviously an infant will not be in gDocs, but the point is, if they see you using a static interface, there is little harm, it's simply another object in their environment.

By contrast, cartoons and commercials are the real issue. To explain this to my mother-in-law, I counted out loud the camera cuts in an ad, and it less than once per second. There is a whole psychology on why they do this, which I can guess, but should probably look into. But when an infant see this, I imagine the frame resets are alluring, but disorienting. If the frame changes every second, they're locked trying to make sense of this self-evolving landscape, an experience novel and typical from every other thing they've seen. It has no continuity.

By this logic, it also explains why feeds are worse than personal websites. You just stream past 100 things per second and have no steady frame. Even though my site is feedish now, it's all from a single person, so at least that's a constant. I'd feel okay with my daughter at 5-years old reading personal websites and having her own, but I wouldn't want her to be using algorithmic social media feeds at 15.

An otherwise simple walk to catch a train into the city had a dimension that I guess I’ll describe as “apocalyptic wonder.” I don’t mean that in the “end of the world” sense, but in the “unraveling” sense of the word. It was like every phenomenon—a passerby’s limp, a tasteless building, Broadway advertisements—came with a decision: I could see it with my usual categories, almost like through a foggy glass of analysis, or, I can imagine and wholeheartedly believe the most generous and profound interpretation possible. And when you inherit that 2nd option as a lens, it’s like one thing builds off another until there’s a cascade and you just have chills over extremely ordinary things. A grumpy commuter is not someone to judge, but someone deserving of parental love, and you imagine you and them as if you’ve been very close for a lifetime, and just for a second you infer some emotional dimension you would’ve never otherwise known. It very much feels Scroogish, like you’re a deadman with just one evening to remember life from its most charitable angle. I don’t know why I’m feeling this lucidity: could be a new surge of dad hormones, or the frigid weather, or the tie around my neck is too tight, or maybe this new frenzy of spawning new software to wrap around my problems is priming me to believe that I can just spin up my own mental frames to see anything anew, as I please, whenever. 

My friend Andrew, I imagine, would read this and joke that it’s a low-grade form of Claude psychosis. Maybe, but maybe the good kind? I’ve always thought there was something slightly off about seeing normal life with ecstatic wholeness, and that the line between psychosis and mysticism is thin. When LSD was first invented, it took them a decade or so to shift the framing from psychosis—they called it “psycho-mimetic,” a madness simulator—to psychedelic (“mind-manifesting), and eventually mystical, transcendental, entheogenic, etc.

I don’t know what it was, but now that I write this on the train, I’m right back in my regular head. And obviously I love writing, but it makes me think I really need to make sure I have chunks of boredom each day, non-linguistic moments in between things. Infant care sort of produces this feeling too, but it’s different because that is about fusing attention with another being; what I just experienced before was something like full immersion in a chaotic environment. Pure Horus. I guess I’ve found it hard to make time for this because, since time is so limited, there’s a pressure to prioritize and converge in the little time you have: I have a book to launch! (I will be announcing the essay prize winners in early March.)

Anyway I think I’ll post this to Notes. Usually I’d just post a riff like this to a secret corner of my website, but in January I stopped logging, and said I’d try to just use Notes as my public note-taker. So if I want to really remember anything, I have to share it. I think the idea of sabotaging the thing I love—capturing fleeting thoughts in prose—and forcing it through a habit of the thing I’m scared of—public judgment of my every idea through metrics—is a good principle to do more often. It’s weird to take something that really is more like a journal entry and open it up to strangers. I’d basically be okay sharing this with anyone I know, but it make me anxious to think a stranger could find this, and this would be 100% of what they know about me, and they’d have no idea about Essay Architecture or whatever, but I think that kind of disregard is exactly what I’m trying to go for on Notes. If my email essays are on topic and polished and narrative building, then each Note should be its own thing, out of context, unrelated to the last one. And so I’m glad to share something like this after a shipost about snakepit.

Our last meal as pre-child adults was at Panera—something quick and light on the way to the hospital (plus she craved it)—and as we ordered our “pick twos” on a digital menu, I was struck by the beauty of a jazzy Christmas song that would have otherwise been extremely ordinary. It was “White Christmas” by Booker T and the M.G.s. My guess is that the stakes of an extraordinary moment—in this case, one of anticipation—can totally rewire musical taste (or preference in anything, really). Works that we attribute meaning to sometimes have nothing to do with objective qualities of the art, but in the circumstance in which you experience it. 

On the experience of looking into late-pregnancy sonograms: it’s a lot like looking into clouds. Apophenia is in full effect. That looks like a face! Oh wait, that looks like 3 faces. What is that? There are multiple shapes, some big, some small, some cute, some aliens. In trying to idenify the boundaries of my daughtr just now, I saw Elmo, several monsters, and worms. Sometimes it just devolves into B&W abstract collages, something you might see in MoMA (I’d be surprised if a sonagram art exhibit doesn’t exist). Throughout all this looking, a very technical nurse is performing a technical feat: using one hand to place the sound wave, and another hand to operate a cockpit-looking interface, leaving acronyms like RUQ and RLQ to measure blood flow. She hesitates when you ask her if you can take pictures, because this is not a gush-sesison, but an important test for amniotic fluid, but she let’s you anyway because she is fluent enough to be confidently undistracted as you film the whole process … And then suddenly, as soon as your baby appears in crystalline focus, with her tiny skull, and arms, and legs, she seems to explode, and it takes you a second to realize that it’s just the nurse shifting to a different angle.

10:12 AM: Wow. Through a visual meditation in the park, I experienced a full erasure of perspective, and my perception was only this massive flat 2D panel of color, patterns, and light (abstracted from the 3D perspective of the park). Will write more on this later.

11:18 AM: After I drop my wife off at the train, I take a half-mile walk in the nearby park. This was day 3, and also, my third attempt to try to naturally hallucinate (see older logs). Day 1 was something like a mystical experience; Day 2 was a dud—possibly because I tried a different spot; and so Day 3 I’ve returned to the original location. An open question: can you do some [ perceptual-hacks / visual-meditations / (not sure what to call this) ] in any location, or is it that certain vantage points have a perception that can mess with your consciousness if you look at it right?

To summarize in one sentence, two days ago I found myself in “flat land,” meaning that while staring into a park, for about five minutes, my entire perspective collapse into a flat, complex, oscillating 2D texture. 

Today, from the same spot, I only got halfway there, but far enough to form a better thesis: the location matters, and there’s a particular way of looking. First, I need to step off the path and into the grass, because otherwise the path will be in my peripherals and it will be harder to unlatch from my default frame (I really need to work on my vocabulary around this). Anyways, I’d describe what I was doing with my eyes as a kind of “parallel processing”: I’d fixate my gaze at a point in the background, while simultaneously trying to expand my peripherals, horizontally and vertically. 

It takes several attempts, with subtle approaches on how to focus, refocus, and break focus. In the process there are some neat effects, such as changes in color and brightness, as well as wave-like oscillations (that I imagine are normal on a mushroom trip). But the particular effect of interest has something to do with contrast.

Maybe my working theory is this: by adjusting the contrast to extreme degrees, it actually alters your depth perception. For example, from this vantage point, with a normal gaze, you’d see a bunch of trees cascading from foreground to background. But when I tap into some focusing drill that seems to adjust contrast, if I follow it down, it’s almost like the leaves and their patterns (with shadow & light), come into such focus, that the trees (the main “object” creating depth perception) seem to disappear.

And this is I think the “secret” of this location. The foreground, the field, is full of leaves, but also, the background has trees still in the canopy. So basically, by adjusting the contrast, and creating a new gestalt that’s optimizing for leaf patterns, it can become so strong and overpowering, that the trees diminish in their hierarchy, until they practically evaporate, overpowered by pattern. The fact that this pattern was both in my foreground and background, paired with the trees losing all hierarchy, might explain why it felt like I was suspended in a 2D plane.