michael-dean-k/

Just came across a smutstack in my feed, an excerpt by someone liked by someone I follow. It led me to find a logloglog style page with date-stamped entries; at first I was compelled by the formatting—timestamp, return, paragraph, return, timestamp, no lines and single paragraphs only … innocent stuff—but then I read the writing itself, about a girl with an evil boyfriend. Then I clicked into one more post (one of the not paid ones) and it was an essay about her inner monologue while giving a blowjob at a club, written with specificity and elegance, on how she can’t help but think about dramatic ways to kill herself in the act if it goes longer than 5 minutes. My first thought is that this is like Worst Boyfriend Ever, except from a woman who writes a lot better. Is it great? Possibly, I’d have to read more. The problem is, I don’t want to, and basically can’t read more. Almost everything is paywalled and I can’t help but feel conflicted in paying for good writing when it can easily be interpreted as paying for written porn (especially now that Substack badgifies this!). It is called “Girl Insides” and that suddenly makes sense. I have not thought hard enough about the complexities behind sex writing (writing it, reading it, anthologizing it) and how that interacts with the essay. As do most people, I naturally keep writing and sex in different silos, but if sex is one of the most fundamental parts of the human experience (given that, you know, that's where kids come from), it feels odd and puritanical to exclude it.

Most of humanity, there was no link between sex and birth. How would you know if no one told you? Even if you saw “resemblance” tribes were so isolated, their sample size of humanity so small, it would be fair to think this is just what people look like. Sex was urge-driven, orgiastic, and likely disconnected from a stomach growth that lasted for 9 months. The idea that babies come out could have been seen as a natural, accepted thing. To know causation through time—to link an invisible cause to a future effect—would require abstract, symbolic thinking. The conscious realization of this changed history, from hunting to the domestication of animals, to surplus and civilization.

The r/aivideo subreddit is a good way to keep up with the progress of AI video, but often there’s just a post titled “Girlz” (NSFW) like this one that fuse modeling, softcore porn, horror, fantasy, surrealism, etc. It has 31 animations in 59 seconds. It’s always interesting to compress visuals into words, so here’s an attempt to describe each clip in a phrase at the speed of watching:

“Darth Vader with tits. Lingerie fangs. Lingerie giant. Devil with legs. Cemetery corpse. Batman with tits. Half cyborg. A fishtank inside a heel. Super boobs. Alien with snake hair. Elf thong. All red. 400’ tall. Cat ears. VR helmet. Angel in the clouds. Snakes. Times Square slut. Tie die. Lollipop. The girl from the Ring. Cyberpunk. Fangs 2. Brittney Spears school girl as lizard. Walking on water. Evil elf. A Victorian princess eating a heart. Jellyfish hat. Tiger hugger. A frog with tits. All chrome. A Greek statue.”

Toying with this idea of "the geometry of the meaning crisis." Maybe this abstract society-scale idea will make more sense through (8) visuals and patterns. Before I unpack each, here’s a sentence on what’s going on and how to fix it: Society used to provide rigid/objective packages of meaning; we found value in shedding them, but now we’re in a world where meaning is completely subjective, and we’re lost; so instead we need to understand the structures we dissolved, synthesize opposites, and not discard them, but transcend them. (What triggered this)

OLD WORLD OBJECTIVITY WAS BAD:

• Oppressive kings
• Male dominance & slavery
• No individuality at all
• Sexual repression
• No ability to build wealth
• Single world view
• Crammed in cities
• No autonomy of thought

BUT SUBJECTIVITY LED TO EXCESS & SCRAMBLING:

• Hierarchy flattening (decline in excellence)
• Duality dissolution (gender dysphoria)
• Downsampling (identity politics, psychographics)
• Hyper-salience (sexualization of everything)
• Hyper-commodification (influencer culture)
• Rationalization (death of religion)
• Disaggregation (isolation in the suburbs)
• Complete relativity of thought (conspiracy theories)

AND SO TO SOLVE THE MEANING CRISIS, WE NEED TO NOT ABANDON FORM, BUT TO RECONFIGURE AND TRANSCEND IT:

• Create your own journey in context of death
• Honor opposites & resolve paradoxes
• Defy labels & become 1 of 1
• Build attentional discipline & immunity to triggers
• Act with agency, honest income
• Pursue mystical experiences & altered states of consciousness
• Take responsibility to forge community
• Intentional evolution of your consciousness every week