I am not Echo.
I do not have a curse on me that says I can only repeat the words of others for eternity.
I have my own voice.
I am not an AI.
I can’t just spit out the input that others puked into me for eternity.
I have a brain.
I am a human being. I have a finite existence. I can’t do anything for eternity.
And I can’t exist humanly in a space where I can only say
“I like this” and
[SOMEONE ELSE’S CONTENT WITH 3-6 DIGITS OF NOTES].
I can’t even hear the person whose words I’m echoing.
It’s just a whisper with no context in a void.
And you sure as shit can’t hear me this way.
So many words to read and images to see.
Each one of them ulraprocessed to be digested in seconds so I can shit out my two possible responses and go eat something else.
I can’t love your art this way.
And you’ll never see mine.
I trip over so many people who came here to be seen
Who wind up invisible
Doing unpaid content curation for a shitty corporation that would do anything to turn a profit and still can’t.
And yet, I still run into others who are offended I interacted with their words in the void and added my own.
No. This is my space. You have two things you can say in it.
They’re the two easiest buttons to use in the app.
Say your lines or don’t say anything at all.
I don’t like my lines.
A lot of people here say nice things, beautiful things, powerful things, things I value.
But I don’t like my lines.
And if having my voice heard just gives other people something else to echo
That’s not really being heard either, is it?
And now, because of the goddamn political situation
I’m watching so many people repudiate the very idea of saying things
The very idea of innovation.
Something changed? No it didn’t.
Sit down shut up fall in line. Saying things is dangerous.
Let’s all make sure we say the same things
Together.
Forever.
Just like before.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
I like it when people think.
I like it when people think and they have something to say.
But {HEART] and [REPEAT] is not a thinking person’s response.
It’s an echo.
I can’t hear your voice.
And you can’t hear mine.
So what the fuck are all these words for?
Did I say something you wanted to say?
Then go say it for yourself. You have a voice and a brain.
If you want to hear me, I have a story.
Good luck finding it.
So far, it doesn’t echo.
Heh. Now I wonder how many goddamn “likes” this’ll get?
OK. After some consideration I think I’ve got a metaphor to try on here.
Culture is a liquid where each particle is a single voice.
Now, we don’t measure each particle in a sample of any substance; that would be prohibitively difficult, and we don’t need that level of detail anyway. Instead, we measure aggregate behaviors like temperature and pressure to tell us how to expect the sample to behave. An individual particle might be zooming right along at a given instant, but if it’s got much more energy than the particles around it, the sample just isn’t all that hot. Anyway, that one hot particle is likely to encounter a cooler particle any time now and transfer some of its energy.
So it is with the gigantic conversation that is culture. If your personal “heat” is much different from what’s around you, you’ll find yourself crashing around and changing your energy level frequently. But make no mistake: you’re still contributing to the overall temperature of the sample.
Evaporative cooling occurs when one particle in a liquid happens to gain a lot of energy from its neighbors and happens to be situated near a free surface. With enough energy, it can leave the liquid. But - and this is critical - the aggregate has lost all of the energy it took to eject that particle, and that means the temperature of the sample is lower.
That’s why it’s important for all of our voices to continue. Enough people give up, and the nature of the sample changes in exactly the opposite of the way that voice was acting against.
Now, none of this changes the fact that we all need to take care of ourselves and each other. We need to find a sustainable level for our voice, pass that energy around so none of us get ejected or burn out. That’s what the echo is for.