The world in aggregate

Mar 15, 2024

Young (2013 CC BY-SA)

Following my lenten mania I cut the cord on my streaming services.

It was an interesting challenge: after having streamed music for seven years–basically just listening to stuff as I was reminded of its existence or without really even picking a song at all–I was left with the music I had collected since I was eleven, left alone for nearly a decade on a backup drive. Files whose provenance I, even now, could still trace just from looking at it: from this person, from that site, from that concert, from this online exchange of comments on a forum long ago. ⊕For example, I had a record from paying someone on last.fm ten dollars in 2009, getting the CD in the mail as a sixteen year old, and ripping it myself.

I printed out a PDF of the last remaining state of my streaming music library this year. I got out a pencil and started checking off albums I had already, or still wanted. Then I went about procuring, in one way or another, the rest of the albums that really mattered to me. By the end, I had cut my 2024 music library in half, from 139GB to 76GB. ⊕A big chunk of it is FLAC now too, so maybe less than half.

I had to find another music player for lossless media, since for whatever reason, the Music player on macOS doesn’t like it. ⊕I chose Swinsian, by the way. Now that I was off the Apple ecosystem, I sold my HomePods and got studio monitors.

In the process, I rediscovered albums I honestly hadn’t heard since 2014. I remembered older versions of myself, and they were all recognisably me. ⊕I’m very reassured by the idea that there are things about me that don’t change, that I have intrinsic or essential traits. Everything feels so malleable by default.

By the end it felt like healing, and why? Well, I think I’ve had a very abstracted relationship to music for a while. I would encounter music organically sometimes, but more or less I would just hit the “For You” station and just pick at songs, adding stray singles here and there over the years. I would collect an artist’s discography and never touch it. I would just have a library of music whose value was effectively zero, since there was just no difficulty in procuring it, and it had no provenance, location in time, relationship to my life. Music had lost its sense of place to me ⊕This is my least favourite aspect of our generative AI future, honestly. Just demanding an eternal 2020’s keywords without provenance, connection, relationship. ; especially since I started listening to much more new age and ambient, music had been nameless slop for a while. Someone holds a sine wave for an hour and I put it on at night. A friend comes over, I hit “Ambient Essentials” and shrug and say whatever. I put on minimalist piano music without really inquiring further.

Ad hoc

In fact, I’ve had a very abstracted relationship to a lot of things. I always felt uncomfortable ordering grocery delivery: I felt very aware that I was just eliminating my relationship to the physical world because my job or my flow was too important, and I was making someone else do it. I wasn’t paying for a specialist. I was paying to save time because mine was “more valuable.”

I felt that doing my own groceries was good for my soul, and a worthwhile time expenditure on that basis. So why was I so bad at actually forming one to one connections?

I would often make a friend and throw them into some communal Discord. I would need some pool where everyone lived, or I didn’t know how to interact with them. ⊕My theory is that after having used Facebook from a young age, people of my generation got very used to having their entire address book and social graph in one place as part of forming a friendship, and now that we’re in a very post-unitary social graph world, we’re finding new solutions. I had several instances where a new person I met would be off-put by some other person from a completely different sphere of life in my shared online spaces, and then bounce entirely.

The relationship was better cultivated individually.

Part of my Lenten exercise of “no social media” was “no Discord servers.” It’s been nothing but direct messages and texts, which has made everything more spare, deliberate, intentional. Everyone I remember to talk to on some recurring basis is in my address book, and sometimes I check in, but otherwise I’m a lot less available than I was. In exchange, I’ve also been far more social in person: I’ve had weeks now where every single night had a social obligation. This would’ve been considered absolutely absurd for me even three or four years ago.

Enacted love

I’ve taken to asking friends to trade mixtapes as a new way of finding records. ⊕
Even Seraphine’s getting in on the action. I do post them publicly, because I listen to them by myself too (they’re fine playlists by themselves!), but they’re dedicated to someone and for a specific purpose. It’s been really fun to see one song in my library and think “that’s here because of this mixtape I traded this one time.” ⊕If you want to send me one, send me an email. Don’t be weird.

It’s been a really interesting avenue for creativity and for expressing fondness and affection. I find myself putting a lot more effort into people on an individual level, even if it means I can’t remember to check in on everyone. And it coheres with a belief I’ve had since 2021, that technological abstraction is a very pervasive evil, and the opportunity to position our love in our actions as a shrinking good. During the development of our games a few years ago, I remember that I had this belief that if everything is information, managed like information, parsed like information, then organising information itself leads to an invisible, mundane violence.

I believe that the ability to actually enact our love requires a proximity. I think that love comes naturally, if people are in close quarters long enough. Everything breeds fondness as a silent daughter; even spite, envy, hatred. If one becomes familiar, it’s all over. You’re going to love them. Proximity is best seen in actual physical space, but I think in terms of our less physical interactions, it happens in less abstracted space; that is to say, when there is little else but a direct connection between you and someone else.

Via negativa

Pluto entered Aquarius at the start of the year. Pluto transits are huge changes; they’re multi-generational affairs. The last time Pluto entered Aquarius was the American Revolution, 248 years ago. If you believe this means an enormous change is coming, then it would still necessitate that getting to that point requires everyone’s lives shuffling around at the same time beforehand.

Well, that would be exactly what’s occurring for the people in my life, anyway. Personally, I had the strange feeling the past few weeks of a decade of different pieces of emotional baggage unceremoniously resolving all at the same time. Long-open questions inconspicuously became answers inside of me. The will has spontaneously refired; past and future are meeting again and it’s all with fondness, affection, belonging. ⊕I think that the afterlife is like that, in a sort of timeless, deindividuated way. An infinite, anastrophic, loving embrace. It’s all “that’s solved. What now?”

I’ve been fasting lately. I started doing intermittent fasting, 16/8, then 18/6, then I found it too simple to do and did a 24 hour fast, found that too simple to do and did a 48 hour fast, and I don’t know. Maybe I’ll do a 72? I’ve never just not ate – I would always eat just because I should, you know, it’s 10am, have breakfast, whatever. Once you push past the first wall, sometime around the 12 hour mark, you just forget to be hungry. It appears again around the 22 hour mark for me, maybe again around hour 30, but it slowly goes away.

Really, I was expecting to feel weak, confused. I was not expecting to instead feel so relaxed, so energetic, so creative. By just not eating for a little while, you can get to a state of mental clarity. If there’s something I can remark about this year’s Lent, it’s that removing things leads you to unknown freedoms.