The one where a cloying ambivalence about progress is both earned and symptomatic of early onset middle aged curmudgeon:

Yes, it is possible to conceive of a future in which the bulk of activity is isolated human-on-technological interface and it is not that much different than the present. It is the Inferno. The strength of the dependence is not a signal of the facility with which we wielded it. Growing food and raising high IQ pigs for the sake of at-home bloodletting and husbandry is an option, and so is worm-farming with your corpse. Not having good options doesn’t grok with being desperate. Faust struck a good deal, we always hear, but it wasn’t one of adhesion.

Removing humans from human life isn’t entirely possible, but organizing principles powerfully order and condition even if they don’t become inexorable totalizing commands. Already we cut out the human as much as humanly possible. It’s cleaner. Less blood, less shit, less conscience-rending despairs.

How many rungs down or up the level of abstraction we travel will matter in determining whether this diagnosis of misery will gain in precision or in accuracy. It may feel less like a ladder and more like an anhedonic treadmill, for those who are troubled by consciousness. No need to chafe or buck. Be a good sheep, cared for and tended in a world where the both wolves and shepherds carry staffs and stand guard on the periphery.

I obviously cannot sleep, and I am missing the Jon Fosse book I left at home before I made the foolish mistake of embarking on this journey into AirBNB anonymity and Western European theme park urbanity.

The one in which the ascendancy of the empirical quantified self is seen as a synthesis of the unencumbered self and the rise of a dissolute fetish for compute

Liberalism doesn’t care who or how screw, whether you worship God or which one, whether you parent live born children or kill ones who are still baking, etc. It is famously non prescriptive about values other than the value of buying and selling freely and on terms that are set with little to no interference, except when interference is bought and paid for.

T. Goia

And but so let’s not consecrate that dopamine story quite yet, as it seems to imply that even the most vapid and attenuated forms of consumption have a kind of content, however vapid and attenuated.

Sam Kriss speaks to this assumption as being too generous:

According to some middle-aged critics, our current age is the age of short-form, attention-grabbing, dopamine-boosting content. TikToks, essentially. But the individual TikTok is actually a fairly conservative and old-fashioned object: a short film, scripted and choreographed ahead of time, and then exhaustively edited afterwards. It might last seconds rather than hours, but the TikToker is still doing essentially the same kind of thing as, say, Fritz Lang. But most people don’t actually watch TikToks. Next time you’re next to someone doomscrolling through short-form video, watch what they actually do. Most of the time, they never actually watch a single twenty-second video through to the end. Flick down, vaguely register the general content of the video, immediately flick down again. Flick, flick, flick, for hours at a time, consuming literally nothing. Or, rather, consuming nothing except the algorithm, the pure flow and speed of the machine that gathers the entire world together and beams it directly at your face.

It’s not a question of attention spans: in the zombie era, people will engage with media in whatever way allows them direct access to that pure flow.

(Zombie post from skibidi stack, Numb at the Lodge)