Technecropolis Archaeology, Part I: The Technological Necropolis

The computer is dead. Long live the flesh.

This is one of those posts that I typed up in an effort to realize the idea I have in mind… It is disorganized, and highly exploratory. I continue to try to understand this idea under the “Technecropolis Archaeology” series, as the concept includes many disparate fields of study, and requires hours of dedicated research to make deeper connections and validate my intuitions. [this note was made on 24 february 2025]

This is Not a Golden Calf

What began as an entry into the “Why I Hate Art” category of armchair cultural critique—as a hysterical female thinker, who so arrogantly dispels my feeble-general-public-masturbatory-anthropological-fantasies-of-awareness-knowledge-and-sentience-fetishism onto the digital world—I came to realize just how deeply I loathe imagery. Imagery is idolized in art, but it is not restrained to that criminal, white-collar, money laundering, image-industry. The entire social world is an image-machine. However, my iconophobia isn’t novel or new, making research into exactly why I hate art an overwhelmingly broad inspection into the bowels of history. I can’t simply point to Instagram and explain why I dislike art, when the aversion to images is one of the earliest taboos ever recorded (see Exodus 20:4).

There were always faint glimmers of this personal hatred, going back to my paranoia over the shape of letters and language itself—anxiety about the way my mouth moves when I speak, how words form it, how words take control of the muscles in my jaw and cheeks; the way ears look like funnels, exposed and draining airwaves; how faces are sculpted by the vibrations they receive (I can conduct free plastic surgery on you by screaming into your face for 90 days straight). Specifically, the letter I conjures in me, a great deal of fear, distrust and anxiety, particularly, because, if repeated enough, “I” literally becomes prison bars (the image of which is the origin of this newsletter’s icon). Consider the psychic restraints created by how much typing, literature and writing begins with I, I, I. First person, singular: I, I, I. Consider English as the lingua franca of the internet. Consider: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII.

The creation of “I,” from a line drawn in the sand, the sign of division and separation — a line, like “I,” presents an automatic duality — a boxing in and a closing out. It is the representation of a duality sensed between bodies in a tribe, tribes on a planet, stars in space: I, alone, and the rest of this. “I,” also, maybe obviously, creates an individual. Just look at the word individual — the etymology of the word, and its appearance: in, div, dual:

<in>dual</in>

The individual is contained within the dual division, inseparable from the larger “in.” “I” creates a dual opposition: I, and everything outside (many people forget: the outside always remains within). “I” is a war zone, haunted by the empires fallen in the fight to spell ich, to define what, and who, an “I” is. Who gets the privilege to be a singular, capitalized entity? “I” is wrought with the rules inherited from the past, all the I’s and former its that came before it; the blood shed to bring “I” into its current existence, to keep it there, to democratize it. Socially mediated, and dependent on language, “I” keeps us confined inside of it. “I” is the beginning of image, literally and figuratively. From “I” comes the frame, the right angle. The line provides definition.

You and I, negative/positive, white and black, hot and cold, zero:one