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Introduction: Viral or Vital?
What does it mean to be “vital” as opposed to “viral” in this era of digital, informational excess, sociopolitical instability and ecological catastrophe?
Last week I released this song, “Don’t Be Viral (Just Be Vital)” — it’s the second installment in an ongoing series examining the status of art, education and personal identity in the Digital Age. Its fundamental thesis is that we are inundating ourselves with an ever more suffocating layering of informational excess — a phenomenon I call metafication, wherein the layers of self-presentation and virtual re-presentation that we place upon the world come to obscure our access to the world itself, and our capacities for flourishing. The series seeks to describe this phenomenon through both philosophical and personal lenses, and to offer ethical frameworks for dealing with it. See below for the introductory essay.
Nathan Dufour Oglesby
The stakes of being “viral” or “vital” extend far beyond aesthetic trends or personal well-being — virality now shapes the very structure of power. In an era where influence is dictated by digital reach, virality can propel individuals to astonishing political heights, as for instance Trump’s newly appointed FBI director and others who have risen to power through the force of online momentum. Moreover, the digital landscapes in which these power shifts occur are controlled by axes of technocracy that comes to affect every aspect of our lives.
This piece examines the ethical, psychological, and sociological implications of “virality” across these various domains, with particular attention to its spiritual dimensions and ramifications.
As is the case with my method of “rhapsodic pedagogy”, I like to explore concepts like these not only through analytical essays, but through songs — which, as I’ll expand upon in the next installment, is in fact the original vessel for philosophical discourse, one that is often more “vital” than expository prose.
And so here, instead of supplementing it with a separate prosaic appendage, I’d like to indulge in a lyrical analysis of the song I’ve posted here, to expand more thoroughly on the concepts it explores with poetic compression. (You may want to listen to and/or watch the music video first, and then read the analysis second.)
And now without further ado, let us ask — Viral? or Vital?
The Etymology of Viral and Vital
You can tell a lot about what we value from the words that we use.
Etymologies are my favorite starting place for conceptual analysis. Since language in many ways conditions our experience, discovering the root meaning of a word is something like pulling up the hood of your consciousness, and having a look around the engine. Discovering words’ origins can not only shed light on how our thinking works, but even some of the ethical structures that may spring from that understanding.
There’s a quote from the Roman philosopher Seneca on this point —
Mira in quibusdam rebus verborum proprietas est, et consuetudo sermonis antiqui quædam efficacissimis et officia docentibus notis signat.
There’s a wonderful accuracy in certain words; and the usage of ancient terminology signifies certain things with extremely effective indications of the duties implicit in them. (Epistle LXXXI).
Without getting into the weeds of asserting that we can in fact get an “ought” from an “is” (which I think we actually can, in a sense), the implicit claim of this song is going to be that the root meanings of these words “vital” and “viral” imply the following ethical propositions:
1) life is good and
2) devoting your life to going viral isn’t.
For instance, sometimes I think about the word “viral”, and how “going viral” is something you can do with your life. …Which is ironic, because “viral” literally means something antithetical to life — from the Latin virus, which literally means “poison”.
The antithesis works in two senses — both in the sense of poison as a substance that terminates the life-force, and in the modern biological sense, in that a virus is typically understood as a non-living, mechanical process, exhibiting no agency or organicity, as opposed to a living cell or bacterium.
I could spend my life trying to spread like a virus.
It boggles the mind that so much of the power dynamics of our current lifeworld rest upon this function of “going viral” — careers begin this way, fame and fortune are accrued this way, power is obtained this way — power that can ultimately have political and cultural exigencies reaching far beyond the casually “social” domains ostensibly offered by social media. “Virality” in current discourse is almost exactly synonymous with “success”. The way to be powerful in this life is to be poison-like in the sense of spreading one’s self, or the image of that self, in the manner of a virus.
“Virality” is almost exactly synonymous with “success”. The way to be powerful in this life is to be poison-like in the sense of spreading one’s self in the manner of a virus.
The Self as a Virus: Replication and Psychological Contortions
In some ways I feel like I have actually been seeking to do this over the past years — to be a poison, even if an ostensibly salutary one — and that this song, and this series of which it’s a part, are my way out. Beneath all this analysis is a deep psychological need to heal myself of a certain cart-before-the-horseness that has taken over my consciousness in these years of digital self-promotion, this dubious and sometimes psychopathic content creation career. (Thanks for reading btw 🙃)
On the other hand, from the Latin word for life, vita, we get the word “vital” — and so, “vital” means “living”, and “viral” is what destroys it.
Vita is from the Indo-European root *gwei-. It shows up in Latinate words with a “v-” consonant, and in Hellenic words with a “b-”, hence it is also directly related to bio-, as in biology, or biography, or “link in bio.”
To be viral implies self-replication in endless iterations of your own code or image.
Modern biological science understands a virus as an “obligate intracellular parasite" — it requires a host cell in order to replicate its DNA, and that replication of itself is effectively its only function. The “host” in this analogy can be understood on one level as digital space itself; but it can also be understood as human attention, and human consciousness — the space in our daily thoughts and attention taken up by viral content, by the accidental or intentional proliferation of the image of someone or something, or ourselves.
This analogy also relates to meme theory, or memetics, as explored by Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore. The viral spread of memes online is only one form of a para-biological structure also seen in the spread of ideas (e.g. religious ideas, political ideologies) in human minds, which, like viruses, are inorganic and yet exhibit a kind of agency in their vast replicative and evolutionary success.
To be vital is to affirm the relations that make up your being, for to live is to live with.
In this line I’m making a very compressed metaphysical claim about the structure of matter, and the structure of reality.
Aristotle asserted that there were ten fundamental categories of being, coterminous with the categories of thought — substance, quantity, quality, place, time, situation, condition, action, passion, and relation. Among these, “substance”, the “being” of the thing itself, he considered primary, and the others are effectively sub-categories that account for the different ways that beings can be.
My own metaphysical viewpoint, for which I’m mostly indebted to A.N. Whitehead, is that in fact the fundamental category is relation — there is no such thing as “independent” being — to be is always to be with. This alternative view is not unique to Whitehead; it can also be found in the thought of other “process” philosophers like Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. We call them “process” philosophers because they emphasize the fluid, changing process of things over fixed, eternal being.
Another implicit view I take from Whitehead is that not only is reality fundamentally relational, it is also fundamentally alive, in a generously expanded sense of that term. The ever-interrelating processes that make up the world are not only physical, they are also psychical, in that the various relations we find them expressing (like the interaction of particles in the strong and weak nuclear forces, for instance) are expressions of a sort of vital agency rather than an impersonal mechanical force imposed on them by “laws of nature.” This is arguably a more parsimonious view, since otherwise, where did those laws of nature come from? (One might say “God” —I do indeed think there is God, but a God who does not so much impose, as invite. More on this later.)
I'm not saying that it's bad to go viral.
Ngl all this aside I’d still fucking love to.
But why not be a cell that lives well with the host? Why not be content? …And in the way you live, and in the content that you post…
Good question, Nathan. Why not? Why not just “be”, instead of "conflating “being” with “being seen”? My life is a long experiment in sluggishly applying the advice offered by my own philosophy songs.
Don't be viral, just be vital —
If you vibe with just your side, that's suicidal —
Given the organismic structure of the world offered here, if an entity’s imperative of self-preservation becomes too strong, such that its actions vitiate the well-being of the whole, that entity is literally being suicidal, insofar as the satisfaction of its self-interested purposes will also neutralize the substratum of its existence.
When you find your mind divided,
Then be mindful that the final
Light inside you lives to find you.
It's divine.
In addition to needing to hear these words myself, I’m glad to say that this is one of those songs that musically arrived rather than having to be constructed. There can be structures of virality even within one’s own mind, where a certain part of the psyche dwells parasitically, destructively and obsessively on the larger whole. Aspects of my creative work have sometimes had this internally viral tendency, contorting my being, instrumentalizing it, making me the tool of myself — which, as you might imagine, doesn’t even end up making for very vital creative works.
In this case, the song invited me — rather than invading me from within, in the manner of a virus.
What is meant here by invoking the “divine”? If we don’t need God to impose laws on cosmic process — if the entities themselves generate those laws as patterns of elective interrelation among themselves — then do we have a need for God at all?
Along with Whitehead, I would say Yes. The forms of relation offered to creation are divine in origin, in that possibility precedes actuality. Those who know about philosophy controversies will recognize that a very distinct gauntlet has just been thrown. This view precedes from my (unprovable) conviction that free will is real. For there to be freedom among the entities that interrelate, there have to be possibilities offered for their interrelation. For there to be possibilities, there has to be a place or entity in which those possibilities reside, since everything that exists needs to exist somewhere. Hence, I have a sense that there is a transcendent source that offers relational forms to the matrix of the cosmic process.
That’s the loquacious, argumentative version. The simpler version is that there’s a Source, and the Source regards us. The even simpler version is that I love God.
Don't be viral, just be vital.
Don't blindly value that by which you're lied to —
Notwithstanding the fact that I spend so much time writing and thinking about it, it still amazes me how much energy and time we give these platforms that are demonstrably designed to manipulate us. Like all effective manipulation, it rarely takes the form of outright untruths — rather, it takes the form of inundating us with things that are true, in such a way that we become ironically disconnected from reality and truth itself.
For your life's not measured by
How many like you or subscribe to
What your finite self’s confined to —
You're divine.
Kleos vs. Kenosis: The Glory of Being Seen vs. The Gift of Self-Emptying
Relational beings that we are, it is almost irresistible to measure your worth by your recognition. I sometimes conceptualize this with another dichotomy, between kleos and kenosis.
The former, kleos, is the cornerstone of the archaic Greek value system — the “glory” or “honor” that it was the duty of the ancient hero to obtain: to live beyond death by remaining on the lips of poets and in the minds of men, ages hence — Heracles, Achilles, Odysseus, etc.. In this view, to be = to be known.
But from a Christian viewpoint, which, broadly speaking, comes to replace the Classical worldview derived from the one above, the fundamental relation is not ultimately between creatures and other creatures, but between each creature and its Creator. Hence kenosis, the word St. Paul uses in Philippians 2:7 to describe the “emptying” to which Christ consented in His worldly incarnation. Insofar as the creature is willing to empty their own finitude, they enter into union with the infinite Source whose act of creation is the original self-emptying.
Social media is a kleos machine in what could be a kenosis world. This dichotomy is not as morally stark as the viral-vital one; kleos (glory) is not in and of itself a bad thing. But the moral way to obtain it is to let fall the bounds of one’s finitude, to give oneself to the world, to be the gift, and go back to God — which, arguably, is the way of the true hero.
Social media is a kleos machine in what could be a kenosis world.
Don't be viral, just be vital —
For that prize that you would die for is an idol —
Since now we’ve cracked into theology — “You cannot serve both God and Mammon” (Matthew 6:24).
Economically unbalanced as the world currently is, the most relevant form of gain for those of us who don’t already have monetary capital is to build the externally quantifiable social capital offered by views and followers — virality is capital.
If you're vying for rank or title
Then you might as well be idle;
Though the virus is societal,
You'll be fine.
Yes, you will. You already are.
You might have heard it said before:
“Our kind is like a virus” —
A cell within a planet,
Like the cells that live inside us.
We're kinda like a cancer,
We can't help multiplying, thus
It makes it kinda difficult for other cells to vibe with us.
Here is a more common formulation of the ecological metaphor at the heart of this song — that human civilization is a carcinogenic phenomenon. In some cases this is suggested as more than a metaphor, if one takes the ecosophical perspective the planet is in fact a unitary organism (e.g. Gaianism). A cancer is of course a biotic process whereas a virus is abiotic; but the basic analogy works either way. In this sense, virality is what happens when a part of the whole begins to dominate over the other parts, at the expense of the whole’s wellbeing. This conception shows up in various places in eco-philosophy — for instance in Gregory Bateson and Arne Naess.
But are we really akin to a cancer, or a virus for that matter? As we’ll return to in a later section, it may be that this very logic of thinking of oneself or one’s species this way is destructive and unhelpful, and fails to motivate the transformations toward which it aims. Aspects of this thinking were ascendent in the mid-20th Century environmental movement, especially when one of the primary concerns was overpopulation. Consensus about overpopulation has shifted and become more dynamic since then, but the fundamental maybe-it’d-be-better-if-we-weren’t-here-at-all perspective has persisted, for better or worse.
This has ecological consequence,
And also psychosocial technological concomitants —
Another way to formulate the viral-viral dichotomy would be to contrast autogenic (self-making) with ecogenic (home-making) processes — things that merely make more of themselves, vs. things that work with other things to make a home, thus mirroring, or really integrating themselves with, the nature of reality, which exhibits an ecological holism. (Eco- literally = “home.”) We could also say egogenic vs. ecogenic, since it sounds even cuter, though it does illicitly mix Greek and Latin roots.
The technological and ecological aspects of the dichotomy are interrelated. Not only do our viral tendencies in digital space structurally mirror our viral proliferation in the terrestrial ecosphere; but those very technologies require immensities of energy to perpetuate themselves — the physical energy cost of the internet and other media systems. In this sense, immaterial as it may seem, every digital replication of yourself does take up physical space, minuscule though it may be. Its literal mass is negligible (the mass of the electrons used to store information on a device) — but the energy required to store is part of the increasing share of global energy costs taken up by the internet (estimated to be nearly 2%).
Replicate and replicate yourself until you feel
That you've been seen enough by others to convince yourself you're real.
Unless I’m on an extended hiatus from social media — long enough to fully “detox” — I do, in the short term, often have the curious feeling that if I do not post, I do not fully exist.
And so you're caught unconsciously
Locked in the clot of the crossed ideologies,
Clockin’ all your thought in your content constantly —
Kinda hard to sleep and to keep on being a conscious being.
“The clot of crossed ideologies” refers to what has Herbert Marcuse called “the flattening of discourse” — the phenomenon whereby forms of mass media constrain the conceptual imagination of society, congealing it into ideological blocks that are increasingly estranged from one another and unable to see outside themselves, and thus easier to subjugate and control. The major social media platforms almost literally enshrine this model as their modus operandi, well beyond the most vivid prophetic nightmares of Marcuse and other 20th Century critical theorists.
See the link that's on my page
Between the dream fading and the meaning of my age —
Livin’ in the vision of the image that I saved,
In this free self-expression
To which I am a slave.
Another meditation underlying this song is a sort of double-layered pain that has set in in these recent years of being a digital creator. I still have traces of the longing to “make it” that I had when I was young. But at the same time there is an equally persistent revulsion at what “making it” would look like in the current culture. Perhaps this is a particularly millennial feeling — to pine, with the fullness of my being, for the “before time” when the internet and social media weren’t a thing — but at the same time to be powerless against the urge to thrive in it, to be viral in it. The regretful virus.
In spite of all my rage, I'm just vibin’ to the choir —
‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre’ —
Everything is energy, but I’ve been gettin’ tired —
I'm tryna hear the voice beneath the lightning and the fire.
A few allusions and quotations here. The first of course is to Billy Corgan.
The second line is from W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, a prophetic take from about 100 years ago about how the world felt like it was spinning out of control — good evidence for the notion that this current crazy is just always what it feels like, at any given moment in history. For Yeats the “gyres” had a very specific meaning — part of his mystical, cosmological system which charted the spiral-shapes (gyres) of different eras of human history, past and future, while also mapping the interiority of the poet’s inspiration.
The last line is a reference to the revelation of God to Elijah in 1 Kings 19:11-13. —
There was a strong and violent wind rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the Lord—but the Lord was not in the wind; after the wind, an earthquake—but the Lord was not in the earthquake; after the earthquake, fire—but the Lord was not in the fire; after the fire, a light silent sound (NAB).
As described in the introductory essay to this series, I think a central theme for the modern moment is the reclamation of silence — the turning of one’s attention to the “silent sound”, a turning which becomes almost impossible to initiate amidst the noisome twin seductions of the Viral Other and the Viral Self. (Almost impossible — but nothing is impossible with God (Luke 1:37)).
I'm inspired, I'm cryin’ in the wilderness —
Said everyone to everyone, struggling for influence —
Saying what the issue is itself becomes an insolence —
Stuck between your ego and your own indifference.
Here the reference is to Isaiah 40:3, the same words which John the Baptist will later quote in presenting himself and his ministry (John 1:23).
A particularly painful aspect of modern discourse about this very topic — the specter of technocracy — is that the most immediately inviting tool for sounding the alarm the problem is the very medium that’s causing the problem in the first place. There is something very urgent to be said about the technological and social mechanisms that are seducing our attention, constraining our discourse, and vitiating our lives — but there is also something about the very outcry against them that amplifies the process itself.
Prophets, Propaganda, and the Problem of Authentic Expression
I was recently in a discussion about the question, “Who are the real prophets nowadays?” The figure of the prophet is central to Judaic literature and to the Christian tradition that stems from it, and so takes up a very central place in the imagination of popular consciousness: the figure who boldly speaks truth to power, calling out the injustices of their time at risk to life and limb, who cries in the wilderness, “Make straight the way of the Lord” (Isaiah 40:3), demanding a realignment with the transcendent values from which a cultural moment has strayed. But what happens when this very function of crying aloud becomes so pervasive that it becomes indistinct and commonplace? When the cry for justice becomes a kind of identity game — when prophecy becomes a kind of brand?
And where now is the true wilderness in which to cry? Perhaps Isaiah predicts even this problem — that to truly cry out from the depths, one cannot even be heard, one cannot be understood.
Free. But what does this mean?
And what is this meme on my feed I'm enjoying?
And what does this feed really feed when I join it?
And why am I trying to be like a poison?
— Poise, then.
Sometimes in the process of recording I end up organically changing the lyrics I’d written, adapting them to the momentum of the song. That’s what happened here. But I think the original lyrics to this section were superior:
Free. But what does this mean? / Maybe being free means to join — / Maybe being free means free to leave myself / And this pain that I’m enjoying.
The moral friction I feel, using social media, is ultimately a matter of freedom: the freedom to be without being seen.
I made my point, now stay a while —
Stare at the void and wave and smile —
A billion people seeing something doesn't make it true:
So just be you, and when you do,
Part of the kenosis path in this digital age is to radically acknowledge the meaninglessness of “making it”, as discussed above. In The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus discussed the plight of writers in the mid-20th Century, when mass market publication, the culture of the cheap paperback, had made it so literary culture had become hopelessly diffuse. “There are so many writers now, of such mediocrity, because it’s so easy to publish — why even try?” In keeping with the theme of that book, Camus’ response is, You’re right, it’s absurd to try — but try anyway, for that very reason! Nearly a century, and very many mediocre books later, we have exponentially more of that absurd work cut out for us.
But what can viewed from one angle as a dizzying excess, can also be viewed as a coagulating singularity — an informational infinitude in which a kind of transcendence is externalized, where the relativization of the value of the artifact can in fact be liberating, freeing us from any attachment to authorial success or ownership.
Don't be viral, just be vital —
If you're only on your own grind, you'll go psycho —
For the vines that bind your mind are intertwined with your designs,
So leave behind what you have pined for, take your time.
As I’ve noted, one of the things I mean by “viral” here is the psychological phenomenon wherein a certain part of our own psyche overtakes the whole our mind, turning the whole to its singular purposes — in such a way that we make ourselves the tool of ourselves, wrenching ourselves into a slavish, goal-oriented forms of productivity. This is something I struggled with even in recording this song — obsessively recording different versions, excessively redoing take after take. It was in a viral-mind loop of this kind that I arrived at these lines about the intertwined vines — the ruthless self-instrumentalizations that twist around the self and strangle it, emanating from the self’s own fearful need to assert itself, to perpetuate itself, to survive at all costs.
Don't be viral, just be vital —
For you might go blind by writing your own bible —
Related to the “prophet identity” dilemma described above, there is also a recent proliferation of “theories of everything”, of grand systems that propose to solve all of our problems, but become themselves subsumed into the problem. A given book that purposes to offer an intricate diagnosis of our ecological, economic and technological crisis, and then offers a holistic solution for it, is often nothing more than an intricate ego-diamond, a many-sided mirror in which the author can delight in their own brilliance. We have the solutions. Writing about them, talking about them, conceptually reifying them, is not demonstrably leading to our implementing them. This is the essence of metafication — the triumph of the discussion over the action, the content over the thing itself.
This is why, instead of focusing on creating brand new holistic systems, I increasingly feel moved to advocate for the reinvigoration, and reintegration, of ancient sources of knowledge — ancient texts contain in germ the frameworks we need to reclaim balance amidst these dramatic technological reshapings of human experience. This is the jumping-off point of the eco-philosophy course I’ve been working on in recent years — to get people in touch with their chosen tradition of ancient wisdom.
While you might outvie your rival,
You'll still find them on arrival
Intertwined in endless cycles,
Endless time.
Perhaps it’s become trite to insist “we are all One” — it becomes a spiritual truism, a hackneyed phrase, invoked so often and so casually that it requires immense concentration to actually feel its truth, much like the most preeminent passages of the Bible and other ancient wisdom, as discussed above. But in proportion as I’m able to actually hold this proposition in mind, the quest for virality is emptied of its meaning. You are the person that “has more followers than you”, and they are you, as your respective constituent parts are continuously recycled in the relational process of creation, on and on in endless rebirths, world without end. The transcendence to be sought is not the relative recognizability of the particular biotic community in which this physical instantiation of you happens to aggregate, but in the inward orientation that observes the passage of relational forms with contentment and trust.
Got my mind on myself and myself on my mind
And myself on myself, I'm a hell, it's a grind,
Tryna find myself, a finite infinite
As I spread on the internet my motherfrickin’ image.
As I explore in the first essay in this series, the most potent distraction offered by social media is often not the other, but one’s own self — both the mirror gaze in which one simultaneously scrutinizes and adores one’s own curated disclosure to the world, and the curated disclosure of the outside world crafted by the algorithm’s hyperpersonalized specificity. We are one another, in the sense of the metaphysical unity described above; but this curatorial process creates a sort of false rendition of that unity, by showing us the forms of self that superficially “agree” with our identity constructions — those with whom we agree politically and socially, those who affirm the convictions and anxieties around which our identities are shaped.
I'm a cell on the map — then I got on the app —
I got followed by my shadow and I followed it back —
Notwithstanding the critique of kleos above, and the critique of the “quest for fame” implicit in this song’s perspective, I do think it’s important to integrate the part of ourselves that impels us to desire viral self-replication. In Jungian thought, the “shadow” is the unconscious part of ourselves comprised of the repressed aspects of our identity, the dark ego-desires that our moral frameworks condemn. The phrase “Don’t Be…” in the injunction “Don’t Be Viral” casts such a shadow — or rather, bears witness to the existence of such a shadow in myself. The person who has to insist that we “don’t be viral” reveals themselves to be someone who does indeed want to go viral very much.
On a track matter fact, I remake myself.
I create myself, until I hate myself.
The 2024 film The Substance offers an interesting meditation on viral self-replication. (Spoiler alert, for the section that follows.) A fading actress self-administers a mysterious serum that causes a second self to emerge from her own flesh, a “younger and better version” of herself more equipped to secure viral fame in a new generation. The two selves alternate over the course of the week, trading off days in a delicate interdependence. The shadowy organization that purveys the serum emphasizes that the the two selves are one, but in spite of this they each have their own subjectivity and agency — and because of this, the younger, newer self ends up excessively harvesting the energy of the elder self, draining her life force to depletion, and transforming her into a prematurely aged husk. As a result of this, the second self begins to deteriorate as well, since she has expended the energy source on which her existence depends — and so she attempts to save herself by injecting herself with the serum, to create a third self, a copy of the copy. But this in turn results in a grim feedback loop, creating a monstrous, deformed combination of the second self and the original self — the dysfunctional result of a virus trying to infect itself, having expended its host.
Not only does this encapsulate the ecological metaphor running through this piece — it also captures the psychological paradox involved in viral self-replication. The original self is not separate from the replicated self — “the two selves are one” — and yet the original resents the replicated self. The more energy we put into our image, and into spreading it — the more Narcissistic we become, the more self we create — the more estranged from ourselves we become. Self-obsession is ultimately identical to self-loathing, and shallow self-love is the mask of self-hatred.
‘Cause an ad for your truth is still a goddamn ad
Tryin’ to get you to buy what you have in your hand —
Tryin’ to sell the understanding that you already have:
That while it's never what you really want it isn’t so bad.
Even our most vital expressions can become merely viral when they congeal into ideological assumptions or tools to reinforce our identity. Even propaganda for a good cause is still propaganda — and much of what we purvey as “art” in digital spaces is in fact just that, propaganda. J.M. Martel explores this phenomenon in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice.
Even our most vital expressions can become merely viral when they congeal into ideological assumptions or tools to reinforce our identity.
I spread myself like I'm some kind of virus —
Tryin to claim a space within your mind, a colonizer —
Another context in which the virus concept shows up in our discourse is in the dialectic of the colonizer and the migrant.
It is a conspicuous indication of the moral climate that Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” is one of the most popular songs in recent cultural history, and that one of its most salient barbs portrays Drake as a “colonizer”. In popular discourse, at least in the ethos of the left, few accusations are worse than that of being a colonizer — and the figure of the colonizer is essentially equatable with the figure of the virus, the vampiric entity (the “culture vulture”) that survives on and drains the life force of its host — the human virus, the historical culprit for the world’s contemporary ills.
On the other hand, the right’s version of the “human virus” is the migrant, who drains the resources and compromises the safety of the nation state. The two figurations are complementary.
But both figurations, I think, are ultimately unhealthy and wrong-headed. In this fundamentally relational lifeworld, there is no such thing as a “pure” entity — this applies to bodies and ecosystems, but also to human populations, and to national and cultural identities. Just as my body is not 100% my own DNA, nor could it live and thrive if it were, so no entity lives and thrives by being “made only of itself.” We speak of colonists and migrants with language that is akin to the ecological language of “invasive species” — but this concept itself is ultimately contradictory, for all species are invasive at some point in ecological history, all seeds have migrated from one climate to another in the unfolding of planetary evolution, all things interpenetrate and survive on the heterogeneity of the system.
The demonization of the migrant is patently fascistic; that of the colonizer can be fascistic too, but in a subtler way. The colonizer, of course, is not the same as the migrant — the colonist arrives not as a suppliant, but as an oppressor, as a brigand and thief. But the mythologization of the colonizer as the ultimate evil has in it the germ of the fascistic viewpoint, insofar as it seeks order in sameness, in the homogeneity of blood or of soil, in a fetishized and fictional conception of indigeneity. And this mythologization is sometimes less effective in actually liberating and alleviating the sufferings of the colonized, than it is in fomenting an identity-based, politically disastrous reactionism among those it labels as colonizers.
The virus can ultimately only be defeated by being reconciled — by being recognized as also alive.
I'm a spreading cell, the cell of my being,
Am I even me? Am I in a meme?
I just wanna live, I don't wanna be —
I don't need to cover the world up in me.
Just as selfish self-love is the mask of self-hatred, so the desire to be at the expense of others — or to cover the world in one’s own particular being — is a mask for a deeper desire to not be at all. Intoxication with the spread of one’s own image is not the affirmation of one’s own being — the source reality that subsists beneath and lies beyond that image — but the will to negate that source. But the Source cannot be negated; it is that which simply is.
Such did I mutter, here where my meat is —
And then I put that on my social medias —
Gotta keep focused on what is immediate —
Try to be mindful of matter where you meet it —
Rediscovery of the vital is ultimately a matter of the re-encounter with matter — with our material selves. Experientially, this means reconnecting with our bodies; ethically, it means shifting our emphasis from the meta-layers of our politics, and our proliferated information spaces, and returning our attention to the concrete concerns of our food and energy systems.
My body is only “concrete” in a relative sense; the relations that underlie it are ultimately fluid, an energy field rather than a solid substance. But it is through my apparent finitude, the specificity of the singular I that I am, as a collaboration of diverse biotic processes, that I feel the relational infinitude of the source field.
Your ego's not your soul — whatever that is —
It isn't your image, it's you that lives —
Whoever you are, in your truth or your lie —
Don't even hate the virus, maybe even it's alive.
Here the panpsychism informing this song’s outlook comes full circle — even the virus, biologically speaking, must be considered a form of life. The divisions between living and non-living are arbitrary, and insofar as we can see them as a gradient rather than a dichotomy, we open up ethical perspectives that can heal our current sociological and ecological contortions. Similarly, if we view the digital realm, and our presence in it, as something sheerly extraneous, sheerly parasitic, we do nothing to heal the fracture between the two worlds.
The Path to Vitality: Reintegrating the Self
We live our lives in each dying cell,
Be beside ourselves, and be @ourselves,
And we shatter our cells, and at last go free —
‘Cause all you really have to do is be:
The phone smashing footage here was actually from another incident, a year or so ago, one in which I did indeed smash my phone is a wrathful desire to eradicate my own image, and the image of the Other, in one blow. The phone is the site of the false self, and of the false other — the contact point between the two, the site of the fracture between the worlds. But shattering the mirror does not heal the mind that has lost itself in gazing upon it.
Don't be Viral, just be Vital —
For the fire inside your mind will survive you —
The irrationality of trying to go viral consists in the impression that the part of ourselves that truly has value — the fundamental sentience, the feeling self, the primary layer on which our self-reflective identities are built — can and will be eradicated with death. But from the viewpoint I’ve offered here — the Christian panpsychism in which I find myself more and more rooted, drawn by a kind of magnetism and solaceful delight — this impression is erroneous. The source of value is the Self of self, Who discloses to the matrix of the the world its possibilities of being, withdrawing from infinity to give the gift of finitude, the weird gift of consciously remembering Who you truly are, insofar as you separately are at all.
“And Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone’ (Mark 10:18). Anything that is, is good, insofar as it is, and comes from the Source — from where else would it come?
Anything good that could spread to any corner of the internet, anything that could be seen by ten people or by ten million, insofar as it is worth seeing, is not from you but from the Good itself. Anything that needs to be seen is seen, and anything that needs to be preserved is preserved — and this is salvation.
When you find yourself divided,
Just be mindful that the final
Unifier lives inside you,
It's divine.
The viral-vital dichotomy is part of an ethics of integration — integration of the realms of the virtual and the physical, integration of the impulses to self-glorification and self-emptying, of the non-living and the living, of matter and spirit.
The viral-vital dichotomy is part of an ethics of integration —
of the virtual and the physical, of self-glorification and self-emptying, of the non-living and the living, of matter and spirit.
Our digital extensions of reality are only fractious if we are not grounded in the subsidiary layers on which they are built — if our absorption into them prevents us from being rooted in the primary structures that instantiate our bodies. Vitality is another word for attunement to this integration.
It is possible to create digital spaces that are centered on this integration in a way that social media is not. As I’ll continue to return to in this series, the center of my own efforts in that regard is the online community Grokkist, a place for sharing educational and artistic creations, and live dialogue around them. Mentioning it here is not meant to be an advertisement, but an invitation.
Autogenesis is an illusion — ecogenesis is what really goes on, for it is not only the selves that create the community, but the community that creates the finite selves. To say “don’t be viral” is ultimately redundant, in the same way that “don’t be evil” is redundant — for strictly speaking evil is not, it is nothing but a partial, illusory avoidance of the goodness of being. What there is, is good — the peace, the simplicity and the freedom of the Presence that is vitality itself.
