This website is my best attempt at how to approach mass media in a way that is both good for me and the people who engage with it.

What seems to distinguish say the internet and websites is the particularly disconnected quality. You can have passions aroused: get angry, sad, hungry; with no means of sating them. Things like rage bait is the popular example but it's pretty widespread. The whole economy of most games with their lootcrates and algorithmic loops are engineered to keep you in a perpetual state of dissatisfication so you keep engaging the game so you are satisfied. There needs to be a carrot on a stick you can never reach. There is no fact no real carrot.

Passions are ordered to attain some object or to avoid some evil. None of these goods are properly attainiable though and by keeping perpetually wanting you can detatch them from reality and have them hold themselves seeking after the carrot you present. This is harmful for the presenter and the viewer. There is no order to the work of art or the relationship between creator and consumer.

So is there a proper use of mass media in this disconnected format?

So far as I can tell there are and it's under two aspects:

1) The thing complete in itself

This is most visible through art. A song, a movie, a drawing. There is a natural completion to things. It does not create a perpetual demand upon you, you come into a full relation with the song through the listening and if you listen again it is because you found good in it you delight in and want to do so again. There is no compulsion or manipulation, the thing that is attracting to you is just what it is. You like the song because of the song.

The thing I like about this is the direct relationship between your conception and what your passions are aimed at. You know what the song is, in it's entirety. That is what you desire. By engaging with it you are in a real sense training your passions to be directed by your reason, you see something with clarity and are pursuing it. With say algorthmic content where it's just about conditoining people and seeing what increases engagement, there is no clarity to things. They use heuristics an a/b test things and find some color or banner increases engagement, there is no rationality behind it. In that situation your passions are being aroused by something that is no rationality to, so any engagement with it can only be damaging to your ability to act rationally. There is in principle no proper object.

The compeletness of an artistic work means it is bounded and distinct and you in a sense know what you are engaging with. Despite the disconnected nature of mass media you know what you are seeing. If you are watching a documentary or a news report or someone claiming something is happening, you do not actually know that. Those sort of things involve the real world, ideological interpretive lenses and other things that are not self-disclosive and complete in themselves.

On that note it's important to touch on the interpretation of an artistic work. There is in theory that real world and ideological aspect of artistic work. Say anarchist folk punk, music I have always enjoyed despite not having that world view at all. The lyrics are suffuse with the ideology however I still think the song in itself is complete in a way that does not depend on reality in the sense that it distorts your passions. It is a sort of expression of the affective state of the artists who participated in it's creation, it captures something about how they see reality and their stance however in a way that goes beyond ideology. They use the words of ideology because those are the ideas they use to understand that experience but the experience itself it captures is something more fundamental. I may dispute the ideas however the fundamental experience of reality they have had, that they express using some of that language and perhaps even experience because of those ideas is however something with it's own substance.

The song is a product that comes from that experience the ideology is in some sense present as a tool of expressing it, but the song would still have value to someone who knew none of the words or ideas because of that fundamental experience it seeks to express. That's what I mean by completeness, I do not actually think it's in any sense guaranteed that if you understood their ideological influences the song would become more complete. If you say took an effort to understand the authors strain of anarchism do you actually have the same conceptions he does? You may be use the same language and phrases, but his use of the language and phrases or filled with all the associates and experiences he imbues with the words. I would say even that by understanding the ideological influences of the song your ability to get at that fundamental experience the song expresses is if anything lessened.

There is an internal harmony and order in an indvidual artists use of language that is calling upon their actual history with those terms and that's where the order arises. If you approach it in an ideological matter as though it were a treatise you begin more to call upon your own associations with the terms and to sort of reduce the song and it's structure into something that can be captured by propositions. This isn't a neccessary trap of course, and I think it's quite feasible that it is posisble to say use the ideological underpinings as a lense to maybe see other things in the song to appreciate however I do not think they call into question it's completeness at all.

The thing as it is, is complete. Your comprehension or any particular persons comprehension of it never will be, in order for it to be incomplete as a piece of art just because it has ideological contents to an extent it would require that an artwork is only complete when someone attains a total comprehension of it. Is this ever possible? Do you understand how the guiar and it's variations from standard tuning, the rhytmic pushing and pulling away from the beat. The small inflections in the voice, the recording process. Are we ever able to catalog and unify all these things? To even say it is absurd. The idea of comprehended completeness depends upon a shallowness that can only be granted through a reduction into some ideological frame. You can only say you have a mastery over some work in an absolute sense when you have violently reduced the work into a definition and terms you can comperehend.

The work as it is, is complete as some artist saw it to be. One could modify it, cover it, slow it down and add reverb and that new artist would have a new form of completeness in the thing.

The main point here going back is the idea of the passions. Your emotions are being aroused to attain some good, well you have listened to a song, and attained it. You may notice additional details if you notice again but your coming into relation with the thing fully is the completion, not your comprehension. You are able to read a novel in full, no one is ever able to comprehend it in full, but the novel does not call you blindly to seek after something you do not understand. You have encountered something, bumped into it and found it delightful and you may encounter it again. You have a desire for union with some particular thing (say a song) and your passions can motivate you to bring that about fully. There is something simple and complete to the relation to artistic works.

Through that I think the primary, safest, and most to be recommended way of engaging with mass media is with and through specific discrete art works. An edge case may be nowadays there are games which do seem to go on forever and not have any kind of natural completion say rougelikes or multiplayer games. These are more precarious and one does need to be careful, however I think if the end sought is merely to engage with what you know it makes sense. The key thing is you rationally comprehend what the object you are desiring actually is. If your passions are being manipulated through algorithimic manipulation, match selection, drops, gambling the game is not a clear rational thing you can choose to seek it is suffuse with other various things attempting to "hide" between you and the game you say you desire. I would never touch any game involving those things personally, they are essentially willfully entering into a relationship with malevolent programmers who seek to use the systems to degrade you and turn you into a perpetually dissatisfied gambling addict and to even consider that let alone chose it is something I find rationally damaging. If say you are playing a gameplay focused game where what you desire is simply to play the thing itself, and there is no perverse incentives for the developers to say keep you engaged for other reasons, it seems quite fine. You like playing a game because playing the game is delightful and there is no other corruptive influences. That I think is the hardest case so it was worth getting into some specifics of.

There is another detail in general I can less clearly talk about. Due to the sort of clarity of the object in artistic works, acting well in relation to them creates other types of order within the person and around people involved with it. If you say love art and drawings, those passions being aroused by motivate you to learn drawing, or an instrument. This gets you to use your body better, and to be able to relate with other people who relate to the similar objects the the same way as well. This is the kind of key thing with the moral life in general. Morality is not rules it's a description of the harmonious functinoing of the person. By acting in such a way that your passions are ordered to clear rational ends your body takes on a higher form of organization in general, for is the body itself not an artistic work? Parts of a whole, how is your eye to be used in the best way to express your being as a human? To conceive of yourself as a whole the best you can and act to attain it's full expression just is the fullness of the moral life; coming into good relation with complete works of art trains this instinct while conditoining yourself to allow passions towards nothing in particular to dictate your behaivour undermines the moral life and your ability to live a great human life in general.

2) The thing refusing completion

As you were reading the above, my recommendation for how to engage and introduce things to mass media in a healthy way you may have had the thought: well this writing I'm reading is not a work of art itself! You would be correct. The majority of mass media and online communications cannot in any real sense be described as artistic, so is there a proper way way to engage with that sphere? As I said above this website is essentially my best attempt and demonstrating how that is done.

The best place to start I think is what is common between these two paths. There is a thing, and it is complete. Passions are ordered to attaining union with goods or seperation from evils, the one sort of thing that really clarifies this further I think is to say that the proper object of rationality and understanding is particular things. We see and understand some particular dog, tree, and it's causes and those are the proper end for rationality. There are two kinds of things natural kinds and artifacts, an artifact being a combination of natural things for some conceived human end. Why this is important is because the question of what properly arouses our passions or not is kind of the key question. Artistic works are not natural kinds, like a tree with it's own hidden quality, it's a combination of smaller things put together to attain some end. These have different kinds of understanding involved for a tree we understand it's parts in relation to the whole. You understand a human eye in relation to the whole human and understanding an eye without relation to a human is kind of an absurd thing. For artifacts we understand the whole by understanding the parts. If you want to understand a piece of music more you understand can learn how recording works, composition, how the instruments work, how to play an instrument, that sort of thing. A key distinguishing mark of an artifact or natural kind is the relation the parts have to the whole. For the natural thing the whole is what gives the parts their understanding so there is a sort of nature and quality to them that is shared with the whole. You could give a human a wooden or cybernetic leg, but it would always be a cybernetic leg, not a human leg. The very matter of what that part is a fundamental part of the whole.

For an artifact they are in some sense indifferent to the specific quality of the parts, apart from how they come into relation to the whole. If you want to create a hammer you need something for the handle that is durable and flexible, and something for the head that is harder than nails. What that actual material is largely indifferent and a practical matter. For a song the guitar may be a fender played by a session guitarist, or just sampled audio files played digitally. The material is largely indifferent to the whole, not that it doesn't impact it. Playing metallica on a lute or an amplified guitar is obviously different but the completeness depends wholy upon the artist.

There is something odd about the unity though, that artist could then change the instrument and have another version that poeple find lesser than the original work. In some sense artifacts are indifferent to the parts, but those parts are still real things that are impacting the whole just in a more hidden manner.

Ultimately rationality I do think is directed towards natural kinds, as they exhibit a higher form of unity and rational order due to the sort of deep connection between part and whole. However as I said artifacts have in themselves a unique form of unity that is also quite healthy to engage with.

So what do I mean by the thing refusing completion, some natural kind or artifact that refuses to make itself whole?

There is something complex and subtle about online interactions, where each interaction with another person is in some sense an interaction with both an artifact and a natural kind. By reading this you are in some sense engaging with a human being. With an acutal serious artistic work you are even more so, by engage with a work you are getting a sense of my sort of intuitive internal sense of experience or understanding as it is expressed in that artistic work, there is something incredibly human about intentionally crafted artifacts that do reveal something about the person. If you listen to an artists songs and albums, you do in a real sense get some contact with them as a person. It is however through an incredibly complex chain. First there is the artifact, the song itself. It's presentation to you on whatever streaming site, review site or however you are lisetning to it. Perhaps it's physical media and also involves all the recording label and distributiuon companies and the economics of running a record store. What was involved in the artists recording process, the engineers, the writing process, and everything he experienced in his life is to some extent a factor in this song. The song itself is complete, it was confirmed as a genuine representation by the artist that they stand by. The question is how do you balance those things. That you are in some sense coming into deeper relationship with the artist, that it's mediated by such a complex web of other artifacts it's essentially unknowable as you cannot dis-entangle the influences, and that the clearest thing is the artistic work itself. If you want to know more about the artist the clearest route is not say stalking them online and reading every interview, it's by engaging with the art work which they determined is an accurate condensation of their experience.

The refusal of completion, I would say is that recognition of the distance. You can listen to my song if you want to see a clear fruit of me, however who I am as a person is totally inaccessible and mixed up in a huge confounding web of factors you will never be able to untangle. While at the same time through the work of art you are in a very real sense coming into relation with that person in a way you should be grateful for.

The question is there a way to engage online in a way that makes clear both your individuality and presence, while at the same time making the distance and additional confounding factors always present so there is never the mistake of confusing the image with the real person. The idea of these networks of effects mediating realtionships, essentailly serving as extension of the human person is one that I think clarifies this quite well. If you understand the parts of the networks, it's bits being flipped and sent over networks and displayed on a monitor you can be aware of how the different effects impacting that network might impact you. Why are you seeing this song in particular, is there an algorithim pushing it for some reason? There is this whole web of mediating structures between two people coming into these detatched realtionships online that we have to be mindful of. To fail in doing is so, is to mix up who you are with what the artifacts are. If you see the news camera without being mindful of the economic and social structures bearing upon the production of the news, you may confuse it for presenting something real and all those structures essentially get to act upon you on a way hidden within you. Is the news camera just an extension of the eye, or is it just a part of a massive economic and social structure sending light into a digital format that is processed and determined whether it is suitable for advertisers? Forgetting these mediating factors can be extremely harmful, as I said the proper object of passions is union with goods and fleeing from evils. If you forget about the mediating structures you may see a distant removed image of an evil or good and respond to it, but to respond to it as though it's immediately present to you is just to identify with these mediating structures and essentially give them total domination over you. They are things that are in a real way incomplete, in order to understand say a news broadcast you must understand the entire economic and social structures that helped to bring it about in its specific form and how that mediates your relationship with the thing presented, which is just to say there is no rational way of engaging with it. Those things can never be clearly distinguished and we simply have no access to most of them, we can see records or examples how this or that group attempted to use media to impact people but those examples themselves are also additional products of mediation.

Even if you make your best effort to make a clear case. Let's say a work of academic writing looking into some subject, peer reviewed and everything, can you actually make it present to your reader all the things mediating them and the subject? Even if you make your best effort to do so how do you know how it will actually be presented to people, in what context may it be used? To me the fundamental risk of say traditional essays and more orderly academic writing is it conditions people to operate as though these mediated distant relationships are still reliable, it just requires care and work. I think that is fundamentally doomed, even if you are faithful to your experience in constructing a rational argument to demonstrate something, you are not able to actually guide people to process it properly and ensure they understand all those hidden factors. The net effect of any well expressed case for some position done in a rigorus style may very well just be to condition the person trust in these removed remote experts and trusted authorities, such that even the net effect of the greatest works of this genre is to ultimately alienate people from reality because they prefer what is distant to what is present.

That's my main motivation in finding things that refuse completion. I do not want to make a complete case, cover every argument, to compile the best evidences and present them. It is to me apparent that even if I am making an accurate case, will only further train people to trust in the distant, removed, and abstract ways of engaging with reality.

The structure of this site is to contain isolated reflections on various subjects. I automatically analyze the keywords and based on definitions for the reflections it finds connections with other articles and links to them. There is no index, there is no list of articles, there is no one place to see everything. You may find a link and read one reflection, and you may see how it shifts over time. You can make a suggestion and I may update it, and anyone who comes later can see that reflection and how it changed, and how other related articles changed.

Dispositionally I find the more abstract works quite delightful, and my mind is generally driven to thinking in fairly systems driven ways so finding a way to write and express those thoughts, while still not implicitly expressing approval for those abstract ways of knowing is largely the point of this site.It intentionally is refusing completeness, you can see connections and traces, but no article is stable. You can look into their past and relations but there is no final answer on anything. There are parts of the site on my favorite musical works, books, random philosophical reflections, with no way of finding them unless you stumble on them through a connection or find a link to it. I think there is something very simple to this approach that does sort of make that clear.

It is in a real sense removed. There is no comments, though you may make suggestions if it's good I may update the article based on it, it is very much just a product of me though, of my understanding. It's unusual aesthetically based on the things I appreciate and you know when you are using this site there is a person you are coming into contact with. It is simultaneously clear who I am as a subject, but also clear it is saying you can not find an exhaustive overview anywhere. There is no timeline, no search, no interactions with other people surfaced by a social media site for some algorithmic purpose. When you engage with something here there is no team monitoring what buttons you click to see if they can increase some key metrics they are targetting. The value of personal sites is in this and their destruction due to social media has entrapped people in a web of odd patterns. Is this person saying something because they mean it, or because it gets engagement, or because if they were to say otherwise they would be supressed or banned, or because they have so many followers and this is the only thing applicable to all of them and if they were to talk about anything too unrelated it may hurt their metrics? These factors all constantly bear upon most information people engage with though it is largely forgotten now, in the sense I mentioned above it has been internalized.

There is a sense of interaction and engagement, that you can just reply to someone or chat with someone and have a real involvement with them. The whole sort of dance of social media is basically to make you forget about the mediating structures conditioning your beahivours, while dangling the carrot of contact with this particular person you are removed from. They however say you are not removed, you can engage with this person and have some kind of real realtion with them.

The purpose of the site is to do two things. Firstly to give me an avenue to express my thoughts on subjects that I think people may find some value in, such that it may give them a better relationship with the things in their life as well to give myself a sort of online identifability and presence. So that people can see that I am in a sense, though who I am is shifting and never clear. Second, to make clear the removal of myself from them, so that whatever mediating structures there are are clear. The site has an unusual structure, aesthetic, and way of engaging with it. It makes it clear that you are on someones private website and it is structure in a sense in an alienating way to make you very aware that it is a structure that is impacting you and mediating our relationship. The value in this is that so when I do produce artistic works, I can say give a link to a particular part of the site related to that. They may follow some links and stumble around but it will make it clear both who I am, but also that I am removed. It is a presence that makes it clear something is being concealed. As for what may work for other people, that depends upon them and what they see themselves called to put out there, and being careful about what mediating factors may be involved. Is a false image of yourself being offered as a carrot to someone, doing them harm? Are you an unwitting participant in some algorithmic degradation of others? It is worth considering and worth considering if there is a way you can remove that carrot, make it clear that peoples passions are properly directed towards the work or those around them not to the image they have presented to them.

These are the two paths that seem clear to me how to engage in mass media well, and they do go quite hand in hand. I needed to articulate this to sort of get clarity. As I said dispositionally I do quite like to try to understand things in a more abstract way and finding a way I can both write about it without simultaneously conditioning people to what I see as the danger I'm warning about is rather tricky. What's the proper form, the right genre, how should this form of writing work? I think these sort of simple reflections is likey the best approach. I call upon some abstract ideas like the idea of the passions and their proper object, not to argue for them but only to say this is how I understand it and I think I presented an adequate vision.

This website is my best attempt at how to approach mass media in a way that is both good for me and the people who engage with it.

What seems to distinguish say the internet and websites is the particularly disconnected quality. You can have passions aroused: get angry, sad, hungry; with no means of sating them. Things like rage bait is the popular example but it's pretty widespread. The whole economy of most games with their lootcrates and algorithmic loops are engineered to keep you in a perpetual state of dissatisfication so you keep engaging the game so you are satisfied. There needs to be a carrot on a stick you can never reach. There is no fact no real carrot.

Passions are ordered to attain some object or to avoid some evil. None of these goods are properly attainiable though and by keeping perpetually wanting you can detatch them from reality and have them hold themselves seeking after the carrot you present. This is harmful for the presenter and the viewer. There is no order to the work of art or the relationship between creator and consumer.

So is there a proper use of mass media in this disconnected format?

So far as I can tell there are and it's under two aspects:

1) The thing complete in itself

This is most visible through art. A song, a movie, a drawing. There is a natural completion to things. It does not create a perpetual demand upon you, you come into a full relation with the song through the listening and if you listen again it is because you found good in it you delight in and want to do so again. There is no compulsion or manipulation, the thing that is attracting to you is just what it is. You like the song because of the song.

The thing I like about this is the direct relationship between your conception and what your passions are aimed at. You know what the song is, in it's entirety. That is what you desire. By engaging with it you are in a real sense training your passions to be directed by your reason, you see something with clarity and are pursuing it. With say algorthmic content where it's just about conditoining people and seeing what increases engagement, there is no clarity to things. They use heuristics an a/b test things and find some color or banner increases engagement, there is no rationality behind it. In that situation your passions are being aroused by something that is no rationality to, so any engagement with it can only be damaging to your ability to act rationally. There is in principle no proper object.

The compeletness of an artistic work means it is bounded and distinct and you in a sense know what you are engaging with. Despite the disconnected nature of mass media you know what you are seeing. If you are watching a documentary or a news report or someone claiming something is happening, you do not actually know that. Those sort of things involve the real world, ideological interpretive lenses and other things that are not self-disclosive and complete in themselves.

On that note it's important to touch on the interpretation of an artistic work. There is in theory that real world and ideological aspect of artistic work. Say anarchist folk punk, music I have always enjoyed despite not having that world view at all. The lyrics are suffuse with the ideology however I still think the song in itself is complete in a way that does not depend on reality in the sense that it distorts your passions. It is a sort of expression of the affective state of the artists who participated in it's creation, it captures something about how they see reality and their stance however in a way that goes beyond ideology. They use the words of ideology because those are the ideas they use to understand that experience but the experience itself it captures is something more fundamental. I may dispute the ideas however the fundamental experience of reality they have had, that they express using some of that language and perhaps even experience because of those ideas is however something with it's own substance.

The song is a product that comes from that experience the ideology is in some sense present as a tool of expressing it, but the song would still have value to someone who knew none of the words or ideas because of that fundamental experience it seeks to express. That's what I mean by completeness, I do not actually think it's in any sense guaranteed that if you understood their ideological influences the song would become more complete. If you say took an effort to understand the authors strain of anarchism do you actually have the same conceptions he does? You may be use the same language and phrases, but his use of the language and phrases or filled with all the associates and experiences he imbues with the words. I would say even that by understanding the ideological influences of the song your ability to get at that fundamental experience the song expresses is if anything lessened.

There is an internal harmony and order in an indvidual artists use of language that is calling upon their actual history with those terms and that's where the order arises. If you approach it in an ideological matter as though it were a treatise you begin more to call upon your own associations with the terms and to sort of reduce the song and it's structure into something that can be captured by propositions. This isn't a neccessary trap of course, and I think it's quite feasible that it is posisble to say use the ideological underpinings as a lense to maybe see other things in the song to appreciate however I do not think they call into question it's completeness at all.

The thing as it is, is complete. Your comprehension or any particular persons comprehension of it never will be, in order for it to be incomplete as a piece of art just because it has ideological contents to an extent it would require that an artwork is only complete when someone attains a total comprehension of it. Is this ever possible? Do you understand how the guiar and it's variations from standard tuning, the rhytmic pushing and pulling away from the beat. The small inflections in the voice, the recording process. Are we ever able to catalog and unify all these things? To even say it is absurd. The idea of comprehended completeness depends upon a shallowness that can only be granted through a reduction into some ideological frame. You can only say you have a mastery over some work in an absolute sense when you have violently reduced the work into a definition and terms you can comperehend.

The work as it is, is complete as some artist saw it to be. One could modify it, cover it, slow it down and add reverb and that new artist would have a new form of completeness in the thing.

The main point here going back is the idea of the passions. Your emotions are being aroused to attain some good, well you have listened to a song, and attained it. You may notice additional details if you notice again but your coming into relation with the thing fully is the completion, not your comprehension. You are able to read a novel in full, no one is ever able to comprehend it in full, but the novel does not call you blindly to seek after something you do not understand. You have encountered something, bumped into it and found it delightful and you may encounter it again. You have a desire for union with some particular thing (say a song) and your passions can motivate you to bring that about fully. There is something simple and complete to the relation to artistic works.

Through that I think the primary, safest, and most to be recommended way of engaging with mass media is with and through specific discrete art works. An edge case may be nowadays there are games which do seem to go on forever and not have any kind of natural completion say rougelikes or multiplayer games. These are more precarious and one does need to be careful, however I think if the end sought is merely to engage with what you know it makes sense. The key thing is you rationally comprehend what the object you are desiring actually is. If your passions are being manipulated through algorithimic manipulation, match selection, drops, gambling the game is not a clear rational thing you can choose to seek it is suffuse with other various things attempting to "hide" between you and the game you say you desire. I would never touch any game involving those things personally, they are essentially willfully entering into a relationship with malevolent programmers who seek to use the systems to degrade you and turn you into a perpetually dissatisfied gambling addict and to even consider that let alone chose it is something I find rationally damaging. If say you are playing a gameplay focused game where what you desire is simply to play the thing itself, and there is no perverse incentives for the developers to say keep you engaged for other reasons, it seems quite fine. You like playing a game because playing the game is delightful and there is no other corruptive influences. That I think is the hardest case so it was worth getting into some specifics of.

There is another detail in general I can less clearly talk about. Due to the sort of clarity of the object in artistic works, acting well in relation to them creates other types of order within the person and around people involved with it. If you say love art and drawings, those passions being aroused by motivate you to learn drawing, or an instrument. This gets you to use your body better, and to be able to relate with other people who relate to the similar objects the the same way as well. This is the kind of key thing with the moral life in general. Morality is not rules it's a description of the harmonious functinoing of the person. By acting in such a way that your passions are ordered to clear rational ends your body takes on a higher form of organization in general, for is the body itself not an artistic work? Parts of a whole, how is your eye to be used in the best way to express your being as a human? To conceive of yourself as a whole the best you can and act to attain it's full expression just is the fullness of the moral life; coming into good relation with complete works of art trains this instinct while conditoining yourself to allow passions towards nothing in particular to dictate your behaivour undermines the moral life and your ability to live a great human life in general.

2) The thing refusing completion

As you were reading the above, my recommendation for how to engage and introduce things to mass media in a healthy way you may have had the thought: well this writing I'm reading is not a work of art itself! You would be correct. The majority of mass media and online communications cannot in any real sense be described as artistic, so is there a proper way way to engage with that sphere? As I said above this website is essentially my best attempt and demonstrating how that is done.

The best place to start I think is what is common between these two paths. There is a thing, and it is complete. Passions are ordered to attaining union with goods or seperation from evils, the one sort of thing that really clarifies this further I think is to say that the proper object of rationality and understanding is particular things. We see and understand some particular dog, tree, and it's causes and those are the proper end for rationality. There are two kinds of things natural kinds and artifacts, an artifact being a combination of natural things for some conceived human end. Why this is important is because the question of what properly arouses our passions or not is kind of the key question. Artistic works are not natural kinds, like a tree with it's own hidden quality, it's a combination of smaller things put together to attain some end. These have different kinds of understanding involved for a tree we understand it's parts in relation to the whole. You understand a human eye in relation to the whole human and understanding an eye without relation to a human is kind of an absurd thing. For artifacts we understand the whole by understanding the parts. If you want to understand a piece of music more you understand can learn how recording works, composition, how the instruments work, how to play an instrument, that sort of thing. A key distinguishing mark of an artifact or natural kind is the relation the parts have to the whole. For the natural thing the whole is what gives the parts their understanding so there is a sort of nature and quality to them that is shared with the whole. You could give a human a wooden or cybernetic leg, but it would always be a cybernetic leg, not a human leg. The very matter of what that part is a fundamental part of the whole.

For an artifact they are in some sense indifferent to the specific quality of the parts, apart from how they come into relation to the whole. If you want to create a hammer you need something for the handle that is durable and flexible, and something for the head that is harder than nails. What that actual material is largely indifferent and a practical matter. For a song the guitar may be a fender played by a session guitarist, or just sampled audio files played digitally. The material is largely indifferent to the whole, not that it doesn't impact it. Playing metallica on a lute or an amplified guitar is obviously different but the completeness depends wholy upon the artist.

There is something odd about the unity though, that artist could then change the instrument and have another version that poeple find lesser than the original work. In some sense artifacts are indifferent to the parts, but those parts are still real things that are impacting the whole just in a more hidden manner.

Ultimately rationality I do think is directed towards natural kinds, as they exhibit a higher form of unity and rational order due to the sort of deep connection between part and whole. However as I said artifacts have in themselves a unique form of unity that is also quite healthy to engage with.

So what do I mean by the thing refusing completion, some natural kind or artifact that refuses to make itself whole?

There is something complex and subtle about online interactions, where each interaction with another person is in some sense an interaction with both an artifact and a natural kind. By reading this you are in some sense engaging with a human being. With an acutal serious artistic work you are even more so, by engage with a work you are getting a sense of my sort of intuitive internal sense of experience or understanding as it is expressed in that artistic work, there is something incredibly human about intentionally crafted artifacts that do reveal something about the person. If you listen to an artists songs and albums, you do in a real sense get some contact with them as a person. It is however through an incredibly complex chain. First there is the artifact, the song itself. It's presentation to you on whatever streaming site, review site or however you are lisetning to it. Perhaps it's physical media and also involves all the recording label and distributiuon companies and the economics of running a record store. What was involved in the artists recording process, the engineers, the writing process, and everything he experienced in his life is to some extent a factor in this song. The song itself is complete, it was confirmed as a genuine representation by the artist that they stand by. The question is how do you balance those things. That you are in some sense coming into deeper relationship with the artist, that it's mediated by such a complex web of other artifacts it's essentially unknowable as you cannot dis-entangle the influences, and that the clearest thing is the artistic work itself. If you want to know more about the artist the clearest route is not say stalking them online and reading every interview, it's by engaging with the art work which they determined is an accurate condensation of their experience.

The refusal of completion, I would say is that recognition of the distance. You can listen to my song if you want to see a clear fruit of me, however who I am as a person is totally inaccessible and mixed up in a huge confounding web of factors you will never be able to untangle. While at the same time through the work of art you are in a very real sense coming into relation with that person in a way you should be grateful for.

The question is there a way to engage online in a way that makes clear both your individuality and presence, while at the same time making the distance and additional confounding factors always present so there is never the mistake of confusing the image with the real person. The idea of these networks of effects mediating realtionships, essentailly serving as extension of the human person is one that I think clarifies this quite well. If you understand the parts of the networks, it's bits being flipped and sent over networks and displayed on a monitor you can be aware of how the different effects impacting that network might impact you. Why are you seeing this song in particular, is there an algorithim pushing it for some reason? There is this whole web of mediating structures between two people coming into these detatched realtionships online that we have to be mindful of. To fail in doing is so, is to mix up who you are with what the artifacts are. If you see the news camera without being mindful of the economic and social structures bearing upon the production of the news, you may confuse it for presenting something real and all those structures essentially get to act upon you on a way hidden within you. Is the news camera just an extension of the eye, or is it just a part of a massive economic and social structure sending light into a digital format that is processed and determined whether it is suitable for advertisers? Forgetting these mediating factors can be extremely harmful, as I said the proper object of passions is union with goods and fleeing from evils. If you forget about the mediating structures you may see a distant removed image of an evil or good and respond to it, but to respond to it as though it's immediately present to you is just to identify with these mediating structures and essentially give them total domination over you. They are things that are in a real way incomplete, in order to understand say a news broadcast you must understand the entire economic and social structures that helped to bring it about in its specific form and how that mediates your relationship with the thing presented, which is just to say there is no rational way of engaging with it. Those things can never be clearly distinguished and we simply have no access to most of them, we can see records or examples how this or that group attempted to use media to impact people but those examples themselves are also additional products of mediation.

Even if you make your best effort to make a clear case. Let's say a work of academic writing looking into some subject, peer reviewed and everything, can you actually make it present to your reader all the things mediating them and the subject? Even if you make your best effort to do so how do you know how it will actually be presented to people, in what context may it be used? To me the fundamental risk of say traditional essays and more orderly academic writing is it conditions people to operate as though these mediated distant relationships are still reliable, it just requires care and work. I think that is fundamentally doomed, even if you are faithful to your experience in constructing a rational argument to demonstrate something, you are not able to actually guide people to process it properly and ensure they understand all those hidden factors. The net effect of any well expressed case for some position done in a rigorus style may very well just be to condition the person trust in these removed remote experts and trusted authorities, such that even the net effect of the greatest works of this genre is to ultimately alienate people from reality because they prefer what is distant to what is present.

That's my main motivation in finding things that refuse completion. I do not want to make a complete case, cover every argument, to compile the best evidences and present them. It is to me apparent that even if I am making an accurate case, will only further train people to trust in the distant, removed, and abstract ways of engaging with reality.

The structure of this site is to contain isolated reflections on various subjects. I automatically analyze the keywords and based on definitions for the reflections it finds connections with other articles and links to them. There is no index, there is no list of articles, there is no one place to see everything. You may find a link and read one reflection, and you may see how it shifts over time. You can make a suggestion and I may update it, and anyone who comes later can see that reflection and how it changed, and how other related articles changed.

Dispositionally I find the more abstract works quite delightful, and my mind is generally driven to thinking in fairly systems driven ways so finding a way to write and express those thoughts, while still not implicitly expressing approval for those abstract ways of knowing is largely the point of this site.It intentionally is refusing completeness, you can see connections and traces, but no article is stable. You can look into their past and relations but there is no final answer on anything. There are parts of the site on my favorite musical works, books, random philosophical reflections, with no way of finding them unless you stumble on them through a connection or find a link to it. I think there is something very simple to this approach that does sort of make that clear.

It is in a real sense removed. There is no comments, though you may make suggestions if it's good I may update the article based on it, it is very much just a product of me though, of my understanding. It's unusual aesthetically based on the things I appreciate and you know when you are using this site there is a person you are coming into contact with. It is simultaneously clear who I am as a subject, but also clear it is saying you can not find an exhaustive overview anywhere. There is no timeline, no search, no interactions with other people surfaced by a social media site for some algorithmic purpose. When you engage with something here there is no team monitoring what buttons you click to see if they can increase some key metrics they are targetting. The value of personal sites is in this and their destruction due to social media has entrapped people in a web of odd patterns. Is this person saying something because they mean it, or because it gets engagement, or because if they were to say otherwise they would be supressed or banned, or because they have so many followers and this is the only thing applicable to all of them and if they were to talk about anything too unrelated it may hurt their metrics? These factors all constantly bear upon most information people engage with though it is largely forgotten now, in the sense I mentioned above it has been internalized.

There is a sense of interaction and engagement, that you can just reply to someone or chat with someone and have a real involvement with them. The whole sort of dance of social media is basically to make you forget about the mediating structures conditioning your beahivours, while dangling the carrot of contact with this particular person you are removed from. They however say you are not removed, you can engage with this person and have some kind of real realtion with them.

The purpose of the site is to do two things. Firstly to give me an avenue to express my thoughts on subjects that I think people may find some value in, such that it may give them a better relationship with the things in their life as well to give myself a sort of online identifability and presence. So that people can see that I am in a sense, though who I am is shifting and never clear. Second, to make clear the removal of myself from them, so that whatever mediating structures there are are clear. The site has an unusual structure, aesthetic, and way of engaging with it. It makes it clear that you are on someones private website and it is structure in a sense in an alienating way to make you very aware that it is a structure that is impacting you and mediating our relationship. The value in this is that so when I do produce artistic works, I can say give a link to a particular part of the site related to that. They may follow some links and stumble around but it will make it clear both who I am, but also that I am removed. It is a presence that makes it clear something is being concealed. As for what may work for other people, that depends upon them and what they see themselves called to put out there, and being careful about what mediating factors may be involved. Is a false image of yourself being offered as a carrot to someone, doing them harm? Are you an unwitting participant in some algorithmic degradation of others? It is worth considering and worth considering if there is a way you can remove that carrot, make it clear that peoples passions are properly directed towards the work or those around them not to the image they have presented to them.

These are the two paths that seem clear to me how to engage in mass media well, and they do go quite hand in hand. I needed to articulate this to sort of get clarity. As I said dispositionally I do quite like to try to understand things in a more abstract way and finding a way I can both write about it without simultaneously conditioning people to what I see as the danger I'm warning about is rather tricky. What's the proper form, the right genre, how should this form of writing work? I think these sort of simple reflections is likey the best approach. I call upon some abstract ideas like the idea of the passions and their proper object, not to argue for them but only to say this is how I understand it and I think I presented an adequate vision.