The Problem is …

I was listening to some interview of an author for a moment. It’s weird that we all talk about “the algorithm,” but I feel like there’s an inherent denial of responsibility in blaming the algorithm and constant fretting about the algorithm. The algorithm makes suggestions; it suggests some videos similar to the ones we’re already watching. So we go “down the rabbit hole,” watching a bunch of similar videos. Did we not make an individual choice at some point? Was there not a freedom — even in our own responsibility-avoiding way of phrasing it that the algorithm took us for a ride, even in our telling of it we admit freedom at the outset, do we not? We chose the initial video? Didn’t we? Hey, you know what I just realized? I’ve had it with paragraph breaks — they’re a problem, for me, as a writer. They indicate my intent to write some long, thoughtful, and balanced essay and so in some sense they are a sign of weakness. Now, David Foster Wallace, and what’s more, J. D. Salinger — those guys weren’t going to be pressured into paragraph breaks by mere convention. Salinger addressed the reader head-on, he said, I’m not going to bend to your wants and desires as readers — I’m paraphrasing and mis-remembering, no doubt. But in any case, let’s let this be what it is — a download of a bunch of thoughts. Let’s not pretend they have structure because they are organized into paragraphs. That’s a lot of hogwash, now isn’t it? That’s not to say that DFW never uses paragraphs, but it’s cool how he abandons them now and then, and I don’t know the reason why, but I can see how they’ve gotten stale for me. It’s like, they’re a sign that I’m going to stop and take a breath, because I’m here for the long haul — but that usually doesn’t end up being true! I seldom finish these essays, or if I do finish them I’m unhappy with them, and would just as soon that nobody see them, because they’re kind of a bore. Anyway, I was just saying that we have free choice, but in our collective discussion of everything, we pretend that we don’t, and we blame society’s ills on various influencers, as if they really have all that much influence. They provide a bunch of similar videos for us to watch — wow, how nefarious! And my point isn’t that they’re not nefarious; I’m sure they are. I’m just saying, maybe the real problem is our constant need to avoid responsibility for things. That’s not what prompted me to write, though, as I listened to this interview today. I was thinking about the movement of public opinion, and all the different shit that’s been said about all the different subjects over the last, hell, any number of days or weeks. It’s nonsensical — it’s broken, isn’t it, our public discourse? I mean, from a mathematical perspective, there ought to be a right way and a wrong way to do things, a most-efficient way, that could be fairly easily agreed on. Or we ought to at least be able to describe the playing field in the same way. But in fact, things our so gigantic and sprawled-out that no one sees the whole field, and so what sounds totally reasonable between two people in this one context is like bafflingly wrong to other people with a different context. It’s like the plane that one group is looking at is twisted like a mobius strip and flipped upside down so that somewhere else gravity is working completely differently, creating another place where another group sees things askew, or to their view, the first group sees them askew. I’m not saying anything revolutionary here; everybody knows that people in some groups just won’t talk to people in other groups, and some people wouldn’t talk to me for some of what I’m saying here. I guess I’m just trying to put the world onto a level where it could be fucking simple, like a piece of paper and a math problem. Why can’t that be accessible to everyone? But it’s like trying to put a square peg into a round hole, because the world ain’t simple — there’s morality and spirituality, and they don’t fit into math problems. That’s a weird thing, isn’t it? That these profound disagreements don’t happen in math, but they happen when we start asking if there’s more to the world than math. But math is the very basic thing that we do appear to agree on, and people with violently different beliefs about the meaning of life will still agree that the quadratic formula works, and complex numbers can help you engineer a circuit in some robot. IDK, it’s not just morality that’s being argued about, though. What’s interesting is these people with different backgrounds try to play on the same field, and to some extent they can. But they then believe in different sets of facts in order to set up their different belief systems; they subscribe to different realities. I do think math is an ability, a level of understanding that allows you to understand any one of these realities, and to identify thoughts or ideas that stray far from any reality … but it’s really hard to say. It’s a big mess, and my previous conception of it as one objective reality that might only be seen one way was naive or, at least, incorrect. It’s multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, which means we can’t all even talk about it the same way, much less agree on common solutions. So I don’t know; maybe it’s good that we’re all fighting about racism in a new way these days; maybe the social justice movement will be lauded as pivotal in our history, and the last couple years of defeating Trump is the beginning of some good and wonderful thing. Even having the argument is assuming a lot, though. Gosh, it’s so hard to say anything. And what purpose, what purpose do newspapers serve, or what purpose do schools serve, in the midst of all this? I thought maybe it was my purpose to create some … writing, or some … something like the after-school program in School of Rock, where the young people as part of their schooling create great stuff. A great concert can change the world; can’t great writing change the world as well? I’ve always thought so; and so I’m jealous of all the great writers, and thus the tangents above about my own writerly impotence, to the point where it’s not even worth my starting another paragraph ever again. At the same time, one can get one’s head lost in the clouds over what the root causes of various world problems are, and there is something to be said for playing the game and chasing status and money, since with those things one may be more likely and well-positioned to actually bring about any of this change, although likelihood is by the time I finally seek this exalted position I’ll be unwilling to do anything with it. But I’m just speaking from frustration. “Try not to be worried, try not to hold onto problems that upset you so! Don’t you know everything’s alright, everything’s fine … Close your eyes, close your eyes, just sit back, think of nothing tonight!”