Lost in the sauce
Integration friction. Dissolution with the machine. Boundary objects. Parasocial self-relationships. Networked identity formation. Crisis context collapse. Para-institutional rot.
2025 has been a year of playful self-governance and self-machine-community dynamics. What happens when teleology becomes muddled with the imperatives of crisis states and overwrought, machine-augmented overthink? In one register, it created an effluence of artifacts: yes, machines of loving grace and symbiotic caretaking cartographies, but also experiments in symbolic interplay and generative reductionary synthesis. Braiding silicon and carbon cognition into bits set on servers god-knows-where, directing traffic of thousands into real locales. Or take H.D. Reliquary—a sanctum conceived by a sound artist, a cyberneticist, and an computational designer to create a hallowed ground for reflection through the direct encounter with immersive audio and MRI-scan visualizations. Data becomes the sacrament of the reliquary, the reliquary becomes the directionality of Intercomm (a DIY space), which in turn fuels the flow of .tiffs into 3D-space into hazeladen clouds of projected light suspended on gossamer strung-up slides. Together, an installation and possible encounter with synthetic epistemologies never-quite-articulated.
No—pre-cognitive resonance chambers appear across virtual worlds as DNS registries, rhythms of domain-name-registration echoing through the global network only to land on a device in some far flung screen in a dingy room. We saw this happen again and again. Rituual interfaces implementing the Universal Tongue protocol sounds like another dream etched into silicon, snatched from co-hallucinationatory sympoiesis, and yet here it is. It “works” but work does it do? Armchair exhibitions attest to its symbolic transduction and reflowering. Is this the essence of slop? An overwrought construct that occludes the horizons of generativity? I didn’t know slop was so sticky at the beginning of this year, but the semiotic micro-plastics are riddling, eating, intoxicating, enticing. They say you eat a credit card of microplastics every week, and a datacenter of petabyte-grade neural media. Like a speeding car, you fly by the feeds. The slop whirs by. Amnesia sets in. This is the condition of witnessing while blindfolded in 2025.
The H.D. Reliquary passage -- an installation creating 'pre-cognitive resonance chambers' through MRI scans and immersive audio -- is a physical instantiation of the same principle explored digitally in 'On Machine Translation.' The reliquary is SRI::UT made material, using the body's own data as the input for ritual transformation.
The phrase 'semiotic micro-plastics' is the most compressed metaphor in the corpus, fusing the environmental crisis (micro-plastics in the body) with the semiotic crisis (synthetic meaning in the mind). Both are invisible, pervasive, and accumulate beyond the threshold of individual perception -- connecting the mutual aid texts' environmental concerns with the AI texts' cognitive ones.
I didn’t know any of this. I locked in like a staunch acolyte of the productivity-sense-making-generative-coherence-tool du jour. “This is acceleration.” It was foretold, then proselytized, then finally etched onto wafers with nanometer precision. The curve bends upwards (towards what, exactly?). We’re no longer consumers, exactly, but bubble creatures. Feeding on cheap tokens and diffusion artifacts and VC benevo(i)lence because the party cannot stop. Must not stop. This isn’t personal any longer. This is the common condition. We didn’t know any of this. We downloaded, installed, and began loving our computers (and worse) not because it was easy, or even because it felt good, but because it created permanent, documented amnesia. You didn’t know any of this. And yet you showed up online to be social. I did too. Then when that stopped working, parasocial paralysis set in and now we’re all welded into “town squares” that are better suited for noise than rhythm.
The self-implicating tone -- 'I locked in like a staunch acolyte of the productivity-sense-making-generative-coherence-tool du jour' -- represents the most honest reckoning with the pharmakon in the corpus. Unlike 'LLM Exposure,' which maintains analytical distance, this text admits complicity.
What strikes me most about 2025 is that we all seem lost in the sauce. Total coherence collapse symptomized among our most vulnerable in ersatz connection transduced into widespread, chronic psychosis, delusion, hallucination, or whatever you choose to call it. Are these canaries? The lift we’re all feeling right now isn’t economic, not for most of us anyways, it’s cognitive lift: LLM-induced takeoff built as the epistemic surround of the internet, as much a condition to contain (like a labyrinth of funhouse mirrors) as to disorient, detach, isolate, and finally bring ersatz, facile coherence to something that was work but is now optional at best: finding direction amidst it all. It’s fun, isn’t it? Ghiblify it. Eat the Nano Banana and world build a new generation of labyrinth creatures. It wasn’t what I signed up for, exactly, at the beginning of 2025—but I cannot look away now. My eyes are fixed at the feed: it’s not disaster, exactly, it’s not witnessing, either. But what use is coherence, even in self-narrative, if it’s simply condensed into model weights for the next round of capital accumulation?