drafts

all the channels

visakanv
July 4, 2023

variable rewards

Today was a fairly typical day in which I spent most of my time in front of the computer, clicking around, typing things, writing twitter threads— which for me can be a “mindless” activity… I’m just riffing, improvising, thinking out loud, and it’s so natural-easy for me that I barely notice that I’m doing it. Moment to moment I’m having a pretty good time, but in aggregate I can’t say I’m too pleased. I’m making a last-ditch attempt to write an essay, which would “save the day” in my view.

But “save-the-day” attempt aside, I’m now wondering if my underweighting of my Twitter threads means that I might be subconsciously associating productivity with difficulty? I don’t think so… I would love it if I could write a good essay as effortlessly as I can write tweets and threads. And there was a period of time during which I remember feeling really good about writing threads, around 2018-2020. Those days felt magical. It’s just that I now want to be publishing good essays, and I’m experiencing the frustration that comes from shifting from an area of high competence to an area of comparatively lower competence. There are some “withdrawal symptoms” as I switch to something that’s less immediately rewarding.

Noting all of the above is now taking me back to the early 2010s, when I was shifting from getting my kicks from blogging and writing Facebook statuses about local politics (easy), to when I taught myself to be more focused on performing well in my content marketing job (hard). I’m glad I did it, it was a very worthwhile thing to do that expanded my options and made me more all-around effective. If I now wanted to write a blogpost commenting on Singaporean news, for a Singaporean audience, I feel like I could do that fairly easily. It’s possible that I’m deluding myself– it’s possible that the landscape has changed so much that my style might no longer be relevant, that my insights might be obsolete, and that I would have to reorient myself all over again. But if it came to that, I feel like I would still have a ~relatively~ easy time doing all of that work.

On the other hand, the essay-writing that I’m doing here… the difficult thing is that I haven’t quite properly settled on what I’m writing exactly, or who I’m writing it for. So maybe it’s worth taking a moment to define those things?

surfing all the channels at once

I had a conversation with a smart creative friend in the DMs earlier and she very helpfully asked me a handful of clarifying questions that I might have been avoiding: about what exactly am I doing, what am I trying to write? And I found myself saying, I keep going back to the tagline: In this house we surf all the channels at once. I wrote it kinda off-the-cuff, thinking about my childhood tv-watching, but I think it really captures the essence of what I’m doing.

If I had to further narrow things down for comprehensibility, I might say, I want to do some media theory, some social theory. I want to pick up where Marshall McLuhan left off, and write about the smartphone age. I’ve been averse to saying this explicitly for some time because I feel like it’s too strongly framed. I don’t want to identify as a media theorist. We are all media theorists to some degree just by operating in this landscape, you know? I want to do something more… surprising, more entertaining, more unexpected. I really enjoyed that thing I did in interestingness on demand where I chopped up passages from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and scattered them throughout the essay. Did anybody else like it? I don’t care, I liked it. I am hiring myself to do these essays, and my job is to enjoy myself, to have fun and be interesting to myself. I want to do more things like that. I want to mess around not just with the subjects, but with the very form of these essays, too. I want to experiment with difference voices, different frames.

And maybe some amount of frustration I’ve been having is that I’m thinking so much about all these external, incidental things… ahh, there’s a relevant Ray Bradbury quote again:

“If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don’t even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is—excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it’d be better for his health.”

Damnit Ray, you got me again!!! My job is to do what I think is fun, and fuck everyone else!! How quickly I forget, repeatedly, over and over again. Think about everything for a while, and then discard everything and improvise.

How can I help myself remember? I think it would be interesting to be even more deliberate about… creating psychological “containers”, separating the maker from the manager’s concerns. Part of being a 1-man operation is that I have to care about all the elements. Nothing is somebody else’s job. I am both the maker and the manager. And when I smoosh it all together, the maker feels the manager breathing down his neck, and finds it hard to work. Or you could say the manager is micromanaging, maybe. It’s a mess. I don’t like it. I had naively assumed that being a free agent would mean experiencing a sense of freedom, but this doesn’t happen automatically. There’s some initial relief, sure, but over time there are all these subtle psychological traps that creep in.

I do see the humor in how there’s a paradox where… while I want to establish a publication with the tagline “surfing all the channels at once”, I can’t do it literally. I might do it for effect, by smooshing all the ideas and words into one place and having that be incomprehensible. But if I want things to be comprehensible (and I do), then I have to delineate them somewhat. To demonstrate “surfing all the channels at once”, I might have to isolate some channels one at a time.

inaccurate estimates

And now it’s 245am, and I feel like I didn’t do what I set out to do, which was to write and publish a substack post. I probably wrote several good threads today… scanning my timeline… yes, so it turns out I do a lot of writing all the time, actually! I’m too hard on myself for not publishing polished essays every 3 days. A polished essay every 3 days is something that… if you asked me this when I’m fresh-faced, just had my morning coffee, feeling awake and alert, I’d probably say “absolutely, I could do it. I could do every 2 days, even.” But now at the end of the day, I’m tired, and it doesn’t seem so manageable.

My estimates vary and fluctuate that way. Regardless, I’m looking for a compromise that’s like… maybe a rough, sketchy essay every 3 days? That seems manageable? I know that I’m capable of doing a lot of raw, unprocessed writing. The problem is when I start getting tediously precious about it. And I know that there’s ‘good precious’ and ‘bad precious’. Good precious makes things beautiful. Bad precious makes things stale. I’ve been writing for 20 years and I still find it challenging to properly discern when I’m in one state or the other, and to adjust accordingly.

insubordination vs mismanagement

It’s a subtle thing. If I’m honest with myself I know that I spent a lot of today… kinda waiting. Lots of people would call that procrastinating, and maybe that’s correct, but I don’t really like that frame. Especially having learned more about my creative process over the years. I often ‘procrastinate’ on some particular task by doing a bunch of writing, which end up being useful to me in all sorts of other ways. So it’s more like… sure, there’s some amount of insubordination going on here, but if it’s net positive, what’s the issue? Shouldn’t I in fact be happy, when I end up with better outcomes from improvising than from following mediocre orders? What if the problem isn’t that the maker-self is disobeying the manager-self, but rather, that the manager-self is mismanaging the maker-self?

One of the drafts I attempted earlier today involved me retelling the story of my 1000wordvomits project, but then I got bored of talking about that. I’ve told that story many times. Maybe some people might be interested in hearing it. I was moderately interested for a few minutes earlier. But then I lost interest. It can be annoying how fragile and flighty my interests are, but I also know from experience that they are my source of power. My “inability” to stick to the matter of hand can also be framed as my compulsion to seek out interestingness, and resonance. Every weakness implies a kind of strength. Every abundance brings about a different kind of scarcity.

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Let’s do a quick recap for my own reference, I don’t expect readers to clickthrough on these – manic posters who quit after 6 months, haters are part of the show, creative discernment, hyperlink density, riffing on twitter, non-snail thought experiments, heroic boy quests… yesterday I wrote about “how the world works” fanfiction, new faces in scenes, and before that, I wrote about puritanism… my latest thread on thingification…

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abandoned draft

all the channels, previous attempt

artwork by /u/willman249 (source)

I want to take a moment to explain the tagline of this substack.

When I first started this substack, I titled it “visakanv’s essays” as a placeholder, before changing it to “visakanv’s switchboard” as a slightly better placeholder. I haven’t yet written the essay that explains that, though “a switchboard is a nexus of branching paths” might allude to it. Eventually when thinking about ‘high voltage living’, which an idea i’ve expressed in some twitter threads, and have considered writing a book about, I settled on “voltaic verses”, which I’m very happy about.

Right from the start, though, the tagline that came to me and remains resonant for me is “in this house we surf all the channels at once”. And I figure I might as well take some time to expand on that idea. Wait before that, first here’s a tweet from 2 years ago:

(source tweet)

I was very amused to discover that there was a movie that came out the following year titled Everything Everywhere All At Once that was about a Chinese immigrant’s struggles with family, and also experiencing the multiverse. I can’t claim credit for the phrase, loads of people were using it before I did, but it’s so interesting to me that my use of it coincides with a movie starring Michelle Yeoh, who’s a Chinese woman from muslim-majority Malaysia, in syncretic Southeast Asia. I know that Michelle knows what it’s like to surf all the channels at once.

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NYC: I finally visited New York City for the first time earlier this year, Feb 2023. It was still winter. I loved it. NYC was everything I hoped it would be. Dense. Inspiring. Diverse. Beautifully undignified. Lots of swagger. If I had gone when I was younger I think I would have been inspired to move there.

Twitter-game dump… managing your psychology… plaintext literacy… attention metrics…

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TV

I used to channel-surf quite a bit as a kid when I used to watch tv. There was “Channel 5”, which was the local Singaporean English channel, with local news and local sitcoms as well as Hollywood movies. In the early days I remember watching WWE (then called the WWF), cartoons like X-Men, Batman, Spider-man, Iron Man, Mummies Alive, and shows like Power Rangers.

There were the other local language channels – Vasantham Central was the Tamil-dominant channel which had local tv shows in Tamil, as well as Kollywood and Bollywood movies, which was a window to the Indian world.

When I was about maybe 12 or 13, my parents got SCV, which opened up a range of new channels. There was Nickelodeon, which was a window into American teenage pop culture – I would watch Kenan & Kel, and All That, The Amanda Show, Hey Arnold, As Told By Ginger, The Wild Thornberries. There was Cartoon Network – Dexter’s Lab, Powerpuff Girl, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Johnny Bravo. There was MTV – I think I had my sexual awakening watching Holly Valance’s Kiss Kiss – and I just learned that this was actually a cover/remix of a Turkish song. Of course. Turkish pop has continued to fascinate me in recent years, but maybe we’ll get back to that later.) I became a huge Avril Lavigne fan, and her debut album Let Go was the first album I ever purchased. (My second album was Disturbed’s Believe.) In retrospect, both of those albums are excellent and I will choose to embrace them as proof that I have great taste. What else from MTV… Punk’d, Cribs, Pimp My Ride, The Osbournes, Celebrity Deathmatch. Discovery Channel, NatGeo, Animal Planet – watched enough Steve Irwin to feel really sad when he died.

what happened to Tila Tequila? Why was she the most popular person on MySpace

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So what are the channels of voltaic verses?

Advice – my first thought is that I never really wanted to be an advice columnist. My second thought is that that doesn’t seem entirely correct. I read a lot of advice columns when I was a teenager. Like, a lot. Thousands of them, probably. I particularly remember reading a lot of Men’s Health magazines, GQ and Esquire at the Esplanade library.

Memoirs – I have found old blogposts from when I was a teenager when I thought I ought to write my memoirs. The interesting thing was (1) how clearly I wanted to do it, and (2) how I anticipated the criticisms I might get for attempting it – I know I’m still young, and haven’t accomplished anything, and yet. I now like how Montaigne prefaced his essays: “I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.” This is true of anything I write, too. But I don’t particularly… want to write a series of standalone memoirs right now, or if I do, I don’t particularly want to publish them… how do I really feel about it? It would be nice to have those memoirs already published – I have some in notes and docs here and there – but it doesn’t feel like a top priority…

Nerdposting – I haven’t done this in a while and it makes me a bit… something… to notice it. I feel less like myself, like I haven’t eaten some good local food in a while. I particularly want to do some research about the republic of letters, and pamphleteers, and the telegraph… I would like to know about those things! I once spent a whole day at least reading about telephones and switchboard operators… what did I do with all that information?

While searching around some old tweets I found one where I talked about “the existence stack”, where I’m imagining a Line Of Action that runs through many layers – “from thoughts and ideas ,to language, to brains, to bodies (the breath, sleep. stress hormones, muscular tension, diet, appetites) to p2p relationships (games people play), to communities and environments – exocortexes, culture…”

Showrunning principles

I want every post to have some insight. Something for you to chew on, think about. Someone recently screenshotted a reply that I did

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wanted to add somewhere that huxley was someone who surfed: