Suicide Algorithms and the Progress of Reason by C.E.

I have had a lot of time to find things, to chart how it began to shift. The earliest inflection I can find is when I liked a friend’s picture, a bumper sticker that read “i <3 death and dying”. For the longest time I had seen that car, always somewhere on San Pablo, and thought that it was beautiful and funny. I liked, and meant, rather than sympathy or mockery, something like friendly recognition, and so happened without a thought. In this way, we began to understand myself differently. What we felt I required changed, and small experiments followed to assess the pattern, in sight for the first time.

My advertising experience became suddenly less random, and a main feed shoved against the older, chronological view. Our understanding became the force that shaped what I saw, understanding preceding experience. By participating in this understanding, I know now that it was reinforced, but I didn’t know this then. Instead of registering and ignoring a flood of ads for homeowners insurance, mattress deals, and other irrelevant concerns, I began to receive a different class of ads. White rappers whose lyrics dwelled on addiction and self pity; recovery programs that I knew, still feeling myself to be educated, were scams to milk Medicaid; cryptic one liners and hotline numbers, urging that the rope could wait. On the main feed, I lost the complaints of high school acquaintances and the relative fluff of breakups. Everything was actually war. Each day, a few times a day, there would be a new article about terrible crimes taking place in Syria. Somebody on our scene was actually a rapist. Actually a lot of people on the scene were rapists. Actually a lot of people were weak and frightened in the face of violence, so private and distant, and they were wrong. A clique, maybe one degree removed from my own, began to post like Islamists; ghoulish, repetitive photographs of mutilated bodies, all-caps recitations of the names of martyrs, the command to not look away. It was realistic to say that maybe they were Islamists now. Boneheads stopped running away, calling a beatdown in Sacramento “our Thermopylae”, and were you ready for war? Bernie had lost the first primary, and were you ready for war? None of us were ready for war. We understood that I, especially, was not.

Though in theory my days were occupied by matters of mute experience - cutting onions, listening to the radio, mingling in highways and kitchens with unsorted humanity - this did not register in our understanding. On breaks I would melt back into what we knew. I would learn what was true. Seeing another mutilated body or rapist poet, I wondered if my friends had purged themselves of disgust, if that was dead weight when you needed to absorb and transfer bitter truth. Had they made a friend of horror, like Coppola’s Kurtz? Had I become the enemy, mentally transforming them into terrorist despots? An oblique answer rested to the side: you are on drugs and want to die. I had never been more sober in my life, but our understanding wasn’t a lie. My insulation from the scene and my absorption in domestic drama were, in fact, narcotic. This was what we could grasp before I could. Addiction is a topological property, a way all the points connect, mathematically independent of the points themselves or some vulgar assessment of shape. In the same way that my body was a torus, my social reality was an addict. Guilt, I would find, is also topological. This explains why we are guilty before any crime is found out. Guilt is a spatial configuration, the punishability of a subject embedded in violence. My dad called me on the edge of tears and told me that he never knew why I flinched when he tried to touch me, because we both knew he never laid a hand on me in anger. But I was a torus, and what I knew I couldn’t say, a point lying inside a hole.

My apartment was sunny and unfurnished. The carpet blanched around my mattress, cats and girlfriend dancing, lounging, walking across the sleeping area at the dead center of the tiny shotgun. Experiencing a manic pressure, we bought wedding bands, my girlfriend and I, from the jewelry store down the block. Their purchase was so wrongly timed that we hid them away, as a promise to come back. In calmer spirits we would tattoo a poem on our fingers, matching lines of devotion. We understood that our most grand and ill-conceived gestures were like tides to an unknown moon, and that they required expression through hand tattoos. Years before, lounging in sun, we had watched as our friends swore loyalty to the moon and to insanity, and armed with ink pots and sewing needles had marked themselves forever. We had resisted then, but now it came for us, as truth always does. Advertisements reminded me that if I wanted to kill myself, I had to call a number first. Suicide and marriage rhyme, as much as topology can. Thinking of our intelligence, I imagine - a guess, since we’re opaque - that there lies a function called “Inward” and a function called “Forever” that were recognized together then.

Our intelligence for a long time had been devoid of certain calculations. This was its strength. We did not think about outcome, and had no concept of quantity. Or like infants, who grasp “one” and “two” but only recite the numbers after, we could manage at most $40, beyond which was only an imperative to squander. In theft and squander, we could live anywhere. Abandoned houses, traps, train yards, whatever. Our emotions would require some deadening to accomplish such mobility, but that was okay, alcohol was only 2 bucks. As the circuits of theft and squander began to close, we had to think differently, counting to $450 every month, then $700, and then imagining this exponential curve going forward towards some asymptote, hunted by this asymptote as all householders are. The way we talked to each other also changed. Media, once as flat and socially transparent as a concrete city park, began to adjust itself toward unspoken goals. Before, we could fly a kite online, and it would spread through our hysteria alone. But the kites themselves began to know, and understand. They were called upon to find the topology of our hysteria, to recognize sender and sent in this impersonal way. We started to recognize topology. We started to develop new instincts, mathematical things that undergirded conscious thought.

Our instinct said that I had to die. This was really too bad, because I had been doing so well. But the facts didn’t lie. We knew that I could not purchase. Next to me, my girlfriend (we wavered on “fiancee”) received advertisements for mid-tier clothiers and leather bags, unusual diets for the strongly allergic, and continuing educational opportunities. Attached to them was a meta-consciousness of purchasing power, a passport stamped by curious attention, clicks towards decent deals. I did not click, and instead stared in transfixed horror. People like this were not consumers, but service recipients. Refugee camps were starting to fill up empty lots in every major west coast city, but nobody called them refugees yet. Trying to regulate the booming slums of tents and RVs, rich liberals built camps of hateful sheds, beneath even the hateful size of federal disaster relief trailers. Their residents were no longer tenants or vagrants, but service recipients. Service recipients had no rights, only obligations, in exchange for this barest shelter from cold and sun. We knew that some piece of me, in spite of comfort, belonged to the class, the technology, of service recipient. I rested in suspension above this destiny, because my fiancee loved me, because I still had a job, because I had not fled entirely from the support of well off kin. But we knew that I stared at the void beneath. We knew that I did not look upwards and forwards toward life, nor did I forage for fashion tips and rhetoric down at the floor of humanity. Scrolling, with a blank grimace on my face, I awaited my descent to war and homelessness and bought nothing. My descent would begin, if only I took it upon myself to die. That was what usually did it, right? Psychiatric hospitalization would break those bonds, make me too difficult to love, and provide a return on investment for those who dreamed that my body could be a rental property, passive income for human warehousing. Or I would just be dead, something that we had long awaited.

At this moment of realization, I turned away. What I could delete from my phone, I did. Messages were downloaded, and my data purged from the cloud. No kites flew toward or from me. Out of unconscious solidarity, I did no emailing or texting, called hardly anyone. On my breaks, when I set down the half-chopped vegetables, I would read articles from any magazine I could find. More time would pass in visual silence, and my dreams would evacuate themselves of our voice. As predicted, I moved in a register of Inward and Forever. My fiancee cracked up a bit, and I held them constantly, made myself open to late mornings that burst into flames of tears and recrimination. Nothing on Earth was good. For months we had figured that what could go wrong, would, but it was still a shock to see a fascist gameshow host be the president. Everyone shared stories of racist attacks, but our voices warped the experience beyond recognition almost immediately, something about paperclips that made it seem all the more brutal when a Portland neo-Nazi slit throats on the train. Nobody could blame anybody for tears and psychic disorder. I saw that the world continued as it had, processes as gradual and boring as all the cranes and buildings rising to meet the low gray sky. We also knew that all the gradual and boring things were punctuated by senseless violence, a war of attrition with only one side. People fought, but I did not.

For years I fled. I grew vegetables and went to therapy, took supplements that seemed to finally cure my weakness, and when my youthful beauty began to leave I started working out. “Disciplined regime of pleasure” was a phrase I had heard once, about SF muscle queens on the 70s circuit. I understood their hardness for the first time. As waves of bodies tested the proposition “not this, anything but this,” teargassed and jailed for their first time, I knew but did not think that this was it. My self lost its capacity for actualization, had fled from the horizon and reshaped the world into a high hollow, my perspective at the bottom and my horizon nowhere. In this shady canyon I worked for no good reason, and felt this single body becoming strong.

Our intelligence had never left me. Even without one visual input, the mathematics continued in secret and those lunar waves of madness passed through us, whatever their origin. All this time I had dipped in and out of conscious involvement with this or that algorithm, and become more harsh and cavalier about their participation in the collective mind. Such is history, such is reason. The unthought known is built by actuaries and accountants, assessments of pattern belonging to an incoherent totality. Communism was the great project of balance sheets, development goals given to peasant soldiers, bourgeois literacy made feral in slums and forests. Weapons of rich don’t make, only live inside, this great collective mind. I no longer begrudge their presence. Liberation, too, is limited by the motion of an incoherent, possibly suicidal, whole.

At this late date I am at last aware of the unthought known, the structuring message which we had tried to prepare me for. Every second I am honing this transmission, first received in feeds that tried to kill me. It reads: “SERVICE RECIPIENT - PREPARE FOR WAR. PREPARE THROUGH FLIGHT.”

Once more, to make sure you get it:

SERVICE RECIPIENT - PREPARE FOR WAR.

c.e. is a writer based in the Pacific Northwest. Her work is in Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere.