Jonas David's Blog

me, having robbed one million dollars from the bank: ‘The bank stole a million dollars from me! they’re framing me by accusing me of what they did! it’s my money, I was trying to deposit it!

a million dumbasses who think ‘the truth is always in the middle’ flying to my rescue: ‘these are both extreme points of view, the truth is probably that no money was stolen by anyone, or maybe only a few dollars was stolen’

the jury at my trial: NOT GUILTY

Have you ever been in a Home Goods, Hobby Lobby, or other such store where the walls are lined with mass-produced ‘art’ designed by committee and spat out of a factory, and have you ever been to a real art gallery full of unique works made by individual minds, and which do you prefer?

Human art has become a luxury for the rich. Corporations have taken the innate desire and need for art that all of us have and mass produced gruel to satisfy that desire at the barest minimum possible, and they have fed us trash for so long that the majority don’t realize they walk around with malnourished souls. They’ve done it with art, they’ve done it with food, they’re doing it with with music and all forms of design, and now they’ll do it with books. 

In a generation or less, contemporary human-written books will be as rare a sight in someone’s home as is contemporary human painted artwork. Bookshelves will be lined with novels by “Penguin” or “Harlequin” with no person’s name on the cover, manufactured by AI and perhaps a team of editors given no credit and paid the bare minimum. And that’s yet one more outlet for the soul removed as a possibility of income

because you are not a star, you are not a beautiful spark of creative energy with something to show the world, you are a shovel, and you will dig your ditch and do nothing else, and wouldn’t we love for machines to work the slave labor jobs and disgusting or thankless jobs we’d be glad to eliminate, jobs one would weep with gratitude to never have to do again, but those are not the jobs that are replaced and removed, those are in fact the only jobs left.

The creation of all human joy, art, film, literature, music and even relationships–human dialogue, sex, all of it has been or will be replicated and monetized while people are still digging ditches night and day, scrubbing toilets and shoveling shit, digging holes in order to fill them back up the next morning so they can afford to have virtual sex with their robot paramour then watch a movie shat out by a computer. 

Do you want this world? Do you love digging your ditch? Do you shrug and say ‘well that’s how it is,’ do you sigh and think ‘this technology isn’t going away, I guess I’ll just learn to live with it’? Or are you sick to fucking death of your place on this earth shrinking and shrinking, sick of every single thing you love having the edges sanded off and the life drained from it so it can be mass produced and shoved in your face 24 hours a day until the last dollar has been extracted and you can’t stand the sight of it anymore? Do you actually want that? Do you look forward to that? 

When was the last time you were excited about the future? For me it was before I woke up to the fact that every new technology is only used to drain more money out of me, and that the goal is never for a better world or even a better product, but instead to flood the market with the cheapest most easy to produce shit possible, so that it’s all you’re aware of. 

Electronic books aren’t more affordable because they are cheaper to produce, like people thought they would be, they are instead more expensive because they are more convenient. And the convenience of AI writing will cost us. Not only will it cost yet another piece of the human soul, but it will cost actual money, because that is all they ever want. We’ll all pay for it, and gain nothing but a profusion of bland gruel in return.

Is there no going back? Is the ‘genie out of the bottle’? well I don’t want to go forward into the soulless hellscape being built for me.

Ban all AI, burn the datacenters, Butlerian jihad

how many hours per week do you scroll through instagram or your social media swiper of choice watching beautiful people shake or flex their bodies for you or throw amazing basketball shots or do backflips off cliffs, and how many times do you pause and think is that real? – the number of times for me has been sharply increasing over the past couple years. ai has made it incredibly easy to fake anything. the number of fake videos and fake people and fake animals and fake landscapes, fake celebrity pictures, fake everything is rising at an exponential rate. the real is becoming drowned out. the rule and exception are in the process of swapping. i have found myself losing interest (though it’s true i had little interest to begin with) in swiping through this increasingly fake series of videos and images. what is the point? why do i care about what amounts to a drawing of someone doing an incredible feat or crazy stunt, or drawings of very pretty people, or drawings of strange animals or beautiful landscapes. but it’s even worse than looking at drawings. if they were drawings at least the act of creating the drawing would contain some human interest. as it stands, i find myself rapidly losing patience for all that cavalcade of attractions yelling for my attention with their carnival enthusiasm. if any of it could be and increasingly is fake, then why bother looking at all?

in mid 2019 i posted about how i’d read only 400 books in my lifetime, according to what i have been able to remember and track on goodreads. at some time this year that number will reach 600. +200 books in six years is, at first gut reaction, terrible. but really that is more than thirty books per year on average. way more than the average person reads. yet it feels so very very small. to say ‘i can’t read enough’ does not convey the sad frustration of such a situation. i literally am unable to read enough to satisfy myself. there is not enough time in life to read everything that i want to read. more of me and my must be sacrificed to books. chess must be sacrificed, work must be sacrificed, study and photography and ‘the out doors’ must be sacrificed, sleep must be sacrificed, relationships, ‘normal behavior’ must be sacrificed to books. then, maybe I will begin to feel satisfied, and lessen the nagging pang that tells me I’m wasting the majority of my minutes by not reading.

i’ve been reading them. i have not updated my list of books here in a long time. i have not written about a book in a long time. but i have read them, 40 last year. the most interesting and exciting and new of them all were probably the ones by juan emar. i say ‘new’ but they were written in the 30s. and yet there is simply nothing like them, before or after. these stories are written in an utterly insane and yet intensely captivating way. one such story begins with a character riding a horse across a field to another town and noting “Two things above all contributed to the splendor of that morning: 1) the temperature; 2) the rural perfumes” and then goes on for the next twenty pages (i do not exaggerate) to describe the temperature and smell of the air in a very precise and specific yet meandering and wild way that somehow is completely riveting. “A hundred kinds of weeds grow among the myrtles, and in these weeds live a hundred kinds of arachnids and insects. This total of two hundred kinds gives off a uniform smell, calm and clumsy…” In other stories he describes the color of every object and piece of clothing and wall or patch of floor with extreme and loving detail, using the most wild hallucinatory descriptors such as ‘skull blue’ or ‘the hue of paper soaked in salt water’ or ‘somewhere between the color of semen and cooling lava’ – the most wonderful, lovely thing about them though, was their unpredictability. their capability to go anywhere at any time. i am so sick of the shape of stories, of ‘characters overcoming obstacles’ or whatever one is supposed to write about. I am so very tired of knowing from the first sentences everything that can and cannot happen in a story. how these stories can have been written nearly a century ago and yet still be more ‘fresh’ than a million things written today is nearly incomprehensible. reading them is like suddenly breathing a crystalizingly icy breath of arctic wind while dying of boredom in a sauna.

it was, as most things seem to be, short lived. the truth is i got bored. there was no interaction or reaction, neither on substack nor on reddit, so although I got more views there than i ever have on a single post here, the result was much the same. void. posting a story on reddit had much the same result as posting it in the mail to myself. what is the point of posting? why do I post here? it is a sort of record of things, at least. these posts may or may not outlast the paper notebooks on my shelves. they are each a different kind of preservation. in the end I must never write for others but only for myself. to do things in hopes of pleasing or exciting others can only lead to disappointment and depression and ultimately to pure and utter failure. the silence must be embraced, leaned on, counted on, loved, expected. it is my lover in the dark, it is my age old friend. it is meant to be. or else i just haven’t paid enough money for the algorithm to make my posts visible to anyone.

I have decided to post. the words have been written and sit dead but not decomposing because not even bacteria is consuming them. I have decided to post, where? not here. does anyone read wordpress anymore? I don’t know. The engagement is low. The likes and comments do not exist. It used to be I’d post and the algorithm would shove me in enough faces that someone would click like or comment, but that hasn’t happened in years. am I posting into a void? will it be different anywhere else? I don’t know. All one can do is try. just keep shouting and flailing your arms and hope someone looks. light yourself on fire and scream as you melt and maybe someone will glance up from the ten thousand eight second reels they’ve swiped through in the past hour. i dont know. do I care? I try not to. there doesn’t seem much point.

anyway, i made a substack. there will be fiction there. here’s the first one:

https://open.substack.com/pub/jonasdavid/p/the-hole

last month i was in oklahoma city and I visited the art museum there, and afterward I sat in a nearby coffee shop and wrote a story that I imagined while looking at the art exhibit. that story was recently published and you can read it here.

if you haven’t noticed I am very influenced by thomas bernhard. in fact i am not sure what i would be writing today if i had not read thomas bernhard’s novels and decided to steal his voice just to entertain myself and then found that I wildly enjoyed writing in that style. anyway, i owe it all to that bitterly dead austrian.

Probably the final word for this book, only 3 pages left. For this one McCarthy uses the second dictionary definition.

Spavined – old and decrepit

The sentence:

“Dervishes of leaves rattled across the yard and in the wind the oaks dipped and creaked, and in the wind even the spavined house hung between the stone chimneys seemed to give a little.”

I’d guessed it was related to incandescent, and was right, but it also recalls cadent, which gives it another feel.

Candent – glowing from or as if from great heat

Getting near the end now, only a few pages left of The Orchard Keeper:

“But that was all he heard, through the door now, running down the long hall toward the wide-flung outer doors where a breeze riffled the posters and notices on the wall and past them and again into the candent May noon.”