Are you locked in a cage of your own choosing?

“And that as the Internet grows, and as our ability to be linked up, like—I mean, you and I coulda done this through e-mail, and I never woulda had to meet you, and that woulda been easier for me. Right? Like, at a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier, and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. Which is all right. In low doses, right? but if that’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die. In a meaningful way, you’re going to die.” David Foster Wallace from “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself” by David Lipsky

Like any typical American nowadays, I haven’t read any David Foster Wallace (yet). No, I just watch films about him and listen to him give talks on Youtube (because I am a lazy poser). Yet, the pull to Wallace’s work is strong for me. Like me, he grew up in the Midwest playing tennis way too seriously and read books as this other thing he did. It’s a funny thing to find someone’s making art that looks like you and were raised in a similar hyper-american milieu.1 Yes, ask anyone from the Midwest and they will tell you how shockingly American the Midwest is. There is a reason why for decades Columbus, OH was the epicenter for testing products that multinational conglomerates wanted to take to a national market in the US.2 That’s why I think we should consider what Wallace has to say when he talks about the influence of the media on us from his perch in Illinois when the world was about to change forever in the late 1990s.

And no, I am not talking about the inception of midwest emo. To any person from the midwest, you only listened to emotional music; all music is midwest emo. This served an incredibly important purpose to channel the feelings that come with not seeing the sun during the entire month of February. Every song was a potential soundtrack to the meloncholic beauty of a jaunt through your local grocery chain store at 9:00 PM in a bunny costume. As a midwestern youth, you would imbibe any form of music, even the B-52s “loveshack,” and make it downright dreary, OK? That was a prerequisite for growing up in the midwest.

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No, I think what Foster Wallace captures in this quote is how media can shackle us in a prison of our own making. I think he captures how many of us now sit alone in rooms inundated with images on our phone from people who do not love us. No, they just want to influence us to buy what they are selling. In this way, I think he is right that in many meaningful ways TV and social media, controlled by large multinational corporations, loses its emancipatory potential and empowers us to lock ourselves into a cage of our own selection.

I think there is a lot of emphasis on social media being this brand new way that we could ruin our lives. At least, that’s what people are saying a lot nowadays. Well, before we were all wasting our lives away doom scrolling social media, we doom scrolled the live TV guide. Before that, did we ruin our lives with radio? I don’t know. I wasn’t alive. My mom lived in this sort of TV prison after the divorce from my dad crushed her. I sat next to her for hours watching anything from home shopping network to lifetime movies to the sci fi channel. She would rarely leave the house. We just sat there with the curtains drawn with the warm glow of the TV to keep us company. She would use TV as a crutch to get through the depression of her divorce from my Dad. She vowed to change that when she was receiving her chemo, but she ran outta time. I saw first hand how media can in meaningful ways make us die.

I would like to say I am different, but I am not. I have used video games as a crutch these last few years to deal with my own depression. I have watched my legs no longer allow me to do what I used to be able to. I lost my mom. I have been crushed by 21st century work. I have watched the world die around me along with most of my dreams. With the losses mounting, I can’t say that I have been the best death worker ever, always keeping my eyes open to the death. No, like all of you, I am human. I have been deeply despondent in the face of all the difficulties and numbed out on mindless entertainment to the point where it felt like I had already died in meaningful ways.

Have you died in meaningful ways with a cage you locked yourself in? Well, you are not alone. Maybe we can bring ourselves back to life together?

“When you move every time a bell rings, it means something. You can do too much time, I think. It makes you institutionalized (where) you can’t think for yourself.” Person living in San Quentin Prison interviewed in Live at San Quentin (1969)

In the US, it’s so ironic to me that so many folks waste a lot of hot air blustering about freedom and justice when they have locked themselves into some cage of late stage capitalism. Here, I am talking about the folx who literally sit with a distant light on in the corner of the room and watch the talking heads on CNN or Fox News. They choose their favorite flavor of corporate spin, sit back, and let some rich folk make up their mind for them. The same thing happens on social media, but its more decentralized. Folks drone on and on about how you should be spending your money, what political candidates you should support, and what social causes you should be contacting your reps and senators about. And yet, again, here we find ourselves alone in the dark with some warm images to give us comfort from the difficulties of a collapsing planet. Let’s be clear. That form of being influenced is not like the total loss of autonomy of being imprisoned, but it is surely a form of being institutionalized in the sense that you are allowing someone else to make up your mind for you. You are allowing them to dictate what you think and how you will respond.

Instead of letting someone else think for you, I just want more people to go through the difficult process of defining their values and choosing what actions they will take in any situation based on those values. For instance, I am not interested in purely taking a side in the current situation in Gaza, outside of continually denouncing the obliteration of Palestinians in a bombing and a ground invasion by the far right Isreali state. No, I am against all states and political parties that play with innocent civilians lives like they are chess pieces. I will not condone islamaphobia or anti-semitism. I will not support billions of dollars for bombs when we have people here in our own country dying for lack of housing, food, or shelter. I won’t collapse my world to make it easier for me to respond to the horror and tragedy. No, I will stand for the dignity of all human life and reject those virulent forms of racism, bigotry, and antisemitism that rear their ugly heads. Palestine should be free of military oppression that seeks to annex their land and Israel should be free of far right rule and the fear of attack. We should all be free from easily preventable suffering that comes from a misuse of our collective resources as a species.

I am just pleading with you to remember that their are all sorts of people trying to actively shape your thoughts and actions. This is the hallmark of what I took away from Michel Foucault’s conception of power in Discipline and Punish. In that text, Foucault noted that we should not just be looking to how the powerful says no to us but how they also craft the stories, objects, and events that we use to find meaning, who we are, and how we will spend our time:

“But it should not be forgotten that there existed at the same period a technique for constituting individuals as correlative elements of power and knowledge. The individual is no doubt the fictitious atom of an ‘ideological’ representation of society; but he is also a reality fabricated by this specific technology of power that I have called ‘discipline'. We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’ , it ‘represses’, it ‘censors', it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks', it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production.” Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

This is why I am as critical of mass media as I am of social media. I want people to make up their own minds about what their values are and act accordingly. I don’t want people to make a call based on what one talking head or person on social media has to say on the matter. I can guarantee you that most of the people in either domain don’t love you and just want your money, clicks, attention, or support.

I won’t tell you what to do, but I will tell you what I am doing. That’s prolly more useful anyway, since I am advocating people think for themselves and then act based on their values. That whole shtick would be pretty disingenuous if it didn’t involve any action. After much handwringing, I am going to stop dissociating and email my representatives. I don’t care if my emails don’t do anything. For my own conscience, I need to take what little avenues I have available to me to act on my values. I will write up my own emails and not rely on any scripts. I will call for a ceasefire, public transparency for all arms sales to Israel, and humanitarian aid to all those Israelis affected by the initial attack and all the Gazans pummeled by bombings and a ground invasion. I will try to email everyday for a week and report back next week with how I did.

Honestly, it’s sort of a marvel I’m even functioning with where I am at mentally. I have just sorta hit this wall with taking in any more information or striving to get stuff done. Depressed?  Maybe. Agitated? Surely. Exhausted? Most definitely. So, I have shifted gears to just doing things and not telling stories that make any grand claims of being anything more than reports of my feelings based on the experience.

Riding bikes especially reminds me that you can do things and just not make a big deal out of it. Like you can go ride to see if the leaves changed on any of your oak trees. Oak trees are always some of the last to change their colors here. My 100 year old bur oak tree is just now starting to change after our recent snowfall.  The thing is, I really like doing things that don’t require a lot of thinking, like riding bikes. I enjoy putting a record on my little speaker and trying to ride roads I haven’t gone down in a few weeks or months. It’s not a sexy activity. No one could give two flying fluffs about it. I’m just doing the mediocre, bearded man thing and rolling the synchronicity dice to see where it takes me. 

On a recent ride, I hit paydirt. I took the long way to one of my local bike shops (treehouse cyclery) to run a silly errand.  On the way, I ended up running into a friend I hadn’t seen in years who is having an art show next Saturday. We had a very big hug and chatted about rather mundane topics. It was really the best for my heart. I felt less despondent afterward. Then I hurriedly carried on to my bike shop and talked rather quickly and animatedly to Kolby and Alyssa, who co-own the joint. I really never can be cool, calmed, and collected around people that I want to be buddies with. I am a decidedly unchill person. I bought some coffee beans and nuuns electrolyte tabs for a ride later in the weekend and set off back to the house. On my way out the door, I announced to Kolby and Alyssa, “I have exhausted my social energy and will now retreat to my basement.” With that, I walked out the door and rode home. 

Honestly, if it weren’t for the stupid, made-up errands I do on my bike, I would just be staring at the idiot light boxes all day. I agree with Vonnegut on this account who when asked why he goes out to buy an envelope instead of just ordering some online:

“I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, I ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.”

Exactly, roll the damn dice, jangle yer darn bones, and see what mischief is afoot out there. So, I go on a silly 12 mile bike ride to get two things that I could just have delivered to my house in the idiot box. And, you know what, I always feel better afterward. No matter how cynical and despondent I feel, I always feel better after dancing around a bit on the pedals.

I also started designing stupid bumper stickers that have been floating around my head for the last few months. This one, “Azazel curse the whole world no exceptions,” is an x-files deep cut that riffs on the sort of plain vanilla northern sun bumper sticker that says “god bless the whole world no exceptions.” In “Die Hand Die Verletzt” (episode 14 of season 2), a demon named azazel takes human form as a substitute teacher and punishes a gaggle of lapsed satanists who used their relationship with azazel to gain control of their local school board. As someone who does not worship a monotheistic god, I really get sick of people saying god bless you. No, they won’t, because I am not the member of a monotheistic religion. Consequently, the azazel riff is just a cheeky way to push back on that overwhelming message we receive everyday in a christian-dominant nation. This is mostly just for me and my buddy Glenn.

I also made an homage to Jade, who grows a lot of the food I eat year round.

Again, just a stupid inside joke type dealy-bob. I will get like 10-20 vinyl stickers printed. I will slap one on the cargo bike and give the rest to Jade for community supported agriculture members.

I got some other ideas in the works too, including:

• I keep a copy of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish under my pillow and I vote.
• Keep honking, I’m entering an ecstatic state while listening to Enya’s 1992 album “The Celts” at MAXIMUM VOLUME.

Anyways, that’s enough from me. I hope you are well, dear reader.

Best,

James