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\u2019m 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\u2019s possible that I\u2019m deluding myself\u2013 it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the other hand, the essay-writing that I\u2019m doing here\u2026 the difficult thing is that I haven\u2019t quite properly<\/em> settled on what I\u2019m writing exactly, or who I\u2019m writing it for. So maybe it\u2019s worth taking a moment to define those things?<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/em> I wrote it kinda off-the-cuff, thinking about my childhood tv-watching, but I think it really captures the essence of what I\u2019m doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019ve been averse to saying this explicitly for some time because I feel like it\u2019s too strongly framed. I don\u2019t 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\u2026 surprising, more entertaining, more unexpected. I really enjoyed that thing I did in interestingness on demand<\/a> where I chopped up passages from Coleridge\u2019s Rime of the Ancient Mariner <\/em>and scattered them throughout the essay. Did anybody else like it? I don\u2019t 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<\/em> of these essays, too. I want to experiment with difference voices, different frames.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And maybe some amount of frustration I\u2019ve been having is that I\u2019m thinking so much about all these external, incidental things\u2026 ahh, there\u2019s a relevant Ray Bradbury quote again:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf 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.<\/strong> You don’t even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is\u2014excited. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Damnit Ray, you got me again!!! My job is to do what I <\/em>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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n How can I help myself remember? I think it would be interesting to be even more deliberate about\u2026 creating psychological \u201ccontainers\u201d, separating the maker from the manager\u2019s concerns. Part of being a 1-man operation is that I have to care about all the elements. Nothing is somebody else\u2019s 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\u2019s a mess. I don\u2019t like it. I had naively assumed that being a free agent would mean experiencing a sense of freedom, but this doesn\u2019t happen automatically. There\u2019s some initial relief, sure, but over time there are all these subtle psychological traps that creep in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I do see the humor in how there\u2019s a paradox where\u2026 while I want to establish a publication with the tagline \u201csurfing all the channels at once\u201d, I can\u2019t do it literally<\/em>. 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 \u201csurfing all the channels at once\u201d, I might have to isolate some channels one at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And now it\u2019s 245am, and I feel like I didn\u2019t do what I set out to do, which was to write and publish a substack post. I probably wrote several good threads today\u2026 scanning my timeline\u2026 yes, so it turns out I do a lot of writing all the time, actually! I\u2019m too hard on myself for not publishing polished essays every 3 days. A polished essay every 3 days is something that\u2026 if you asked me this when I\u2019m fresh-faced, just had my morning coffee, feeling awake and alert, I\u2019d probably say \u201cabsolutely, I could do it. I could do every 2 days, even.\u201d But now at the end of the day, I\u2019m tired, and it doesn\u2019t seem so manageable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My estimates vary and fluctuate that way. Regardless, I\u2019m looking for a compromise that\u2019s like\u2026 maybe a rough, sketchy essay every 3 days? That seems manageable? I know that I\u2019m 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\u2019s \u2018good precious\u2019 and \u2018bad precious\u2019. Good precious makes things beautiful. Bad precious makes things stale. I\u2019ve been writing for 20 years and I still find it challenging to properly discern when I\u2019m in one state or the other, and to adjust accordingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a subtle thing. If I\u2019m honest with myself I know that I spent a lot of today\u2026 kinda waiting. Lots of people would call that procrastinating, and maybe that\u2019s correct, but I don\u2019t really like that frame. Especially having learned more about my creative process over the years. I often \u2018procrastinate\u2019 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\u2019s more like\u2026 sure, there\u2019s some amount of insubordination going on here, but if it\u2019s net positive, what\u2019s the issue? Shouldn\u2019t I in fact be happy, when I end up with better outcomes from improvising than from following mediocre orders? What if the problem isn\u2019t that the maker-self is disobeying the manager-self, but rather, that the manager-self is mismanaging the maker-self?<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the drafts I attempted earlier today involved me retelling the story of my 1000wordvomits project<\/a>, but then I got bored of talking about that. I\u2019ve 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 \u201cinability\u201d to stick to the matter of hand can also be framed as my compulsion to seek out interestingness<\/a>, and resonance<\/a>. Every weakness implies a kind of strength. Every abundance brings about a different kind of scarcity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s do a quick recap for my own reference, I don\u2019t expect readers to clickthrough on these \u2013 manic posters who quit after 6 months<\/a>, haters are part of the show<\/a>, creative discernment<\/a>, hyperlink density<\/a>, riffing on twitter<\/a>, non-snail thought experiments<\/a>, heroic boy quests<\/a>\u2026 yesterday I wrote about \u201chow the world works\u201d fanfiction<\/a>, new faces in scenes<\/a>, and before that, I wrote about puritanism<\/a>\u2026 my latest thread on thingification<\/a>\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n abandoned draft<\/p>\n\n\n\n all the channels, previous attempt<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to take a moment to explain the tagline of this substack.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I first started this substack, I titled it \u201cvisakanv\u2019s essays\u201d as a placeholder, before changing it to \u201cvisakanv\u2019s switchboard\u201d as a slightly better placeholder. I haven\u2019t yet written the essay that explains that, though \u201ca switchboard is a nexus of branching paths<\/a>\u201d might allude to it. Eventually when thinking about \u2018high voltage living\u2019, which an idea i\u2019ve expressed in some twitter threads, and have considered writing a book about, I settled on \u201cvoltaic verses\u201d, which I\u2019m very happy about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Right from the start, though, the tagline that came to me and remains resonant for me is \u201cin this house we surf all the channels at once\u201d. And I figure I might as well take some time to expand on that idea. Wait before that, first here\u2019s a tweet from 2 years ago:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s struggles with family, and also experiencing the multiverse. I can\u2019t claim credit for the phrase, loads of people were using it before I did, but it\u2019s so interesting to me that my use of it coincides with a movie starring Michelle Yeoh, who\u2019s a Chinese woman from muslim-majority Malaysia, in syncretic Southeast Asia. I know that Michelle knows what it\u2019s like to surf all the channels at once.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Twitter-game dump\u2026 managing your psychology\u2026 plaintext literacy\u2026 attention metrics\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n I used to channel-surf quite a bit as a kid when I used to watch tv. There was \u201cChannel 5\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were the other local language channels \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I was about maybe 12 or 13, my parents got SCV, which opened up a range of new channels. There was Nickelodeon<\/strong>, which was a window into American teenage pop culture \u2013 I would watch Kenan & Kel, and All That, The Amanda Show, Hey Arnold, As Told By Ginger, The Wild Thornberries. There was Cartoon Network<\/strong> \u2013 Dexter\u2019s Lab, Powerpuff Girl, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Johnny Bravo. There was MTV<\/strong> \u2013 I think I had my sexual awakening watching Holly Valance\u2019s Kiss Kiss \u2013 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\u2019ll 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\u2019s 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\u2026 Punk\u2019d, Cribs, Pimp My Ride, The Osbournes, Celebrity Deathmatch. Discovery Channel, NatGeo, Animal Planet \u2013 watched enough Steve Irwin to feel really sad when he died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n what happened to Tila Tequila? Why was she the most popular person on MySpace<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731<\/p>\n\n\n\n Advice<\/strong> \u2013 my first thought is that I never really wanted to be an advice columnist. My second thought is that that doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s Health magazines, GQ and Esquire at the Esplanade library.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Memoirs<\/strong> \u2013 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 \u2013 I know I\u2019m still young, and haven\u2019t accomplished anything, and yet. I now like how Montaigne prefaced his essays: \u201cI am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.\u201d This is true of anything I write, too. But I don\u2019t particularly\u2026 want to write a series of standalone memoirs right now, or if I do, I don\u2019t particularly want to publish them\u2026 how do I really feel about it? It would be nice to have those memoirs already published \u2013 I have some in notes and docs here and there \u2013 but it doesn\u2019t feel like a top priority\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nerdposting<\/strong> \u2013 I haven\u2019t done this in a while and it makes me a bit\u2026 something\u2026 to notice it. I feel less like myself, like I haven\u2019t 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\u2026 I would like to know about those things! I once spent a whole day at least reading about telephones and switchboard operators\u2026 what did I do with all that information?<\/p>\n\n\n\n While searching around some old tweets I found one where I talked about \u201cthe existence stack\u201d, where I\u2019m imagining a Line Of Action that runs through many layers \u2013 \u201cfrom 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…\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Showrunning principles<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want every post to have some insight. Something for you to chew on, think about. Someone recently screenshotted a reply that I did<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2731 <\/p>\n\n\n\n wanted to add somewhere that huxley was someone who surfed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n went looking for some Huxley to support me and even before we get to his arguments, the way people described him is an antidote to Thingification. Huxley "surfed all the channels at once" (the tagline for my substack that came to me n insisted on itself) https:\/\/t.co\/oqA3O0KgUQ<\/a><\/p>— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) June 28, 2023<\/a><\/blockquote>surfing all the channels at once<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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inaccurate estimates<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
insubordination vs mismanagement<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a>TV<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
So what are the channels of voltaic verses?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n