Welp, someone on Tumblr asked, “What is the honest point of The Bug Report? It’s meaningless wordsalad.”
Let me offer a rare instance of self-explication, since the Bug Report has been once or twice critiqued for alleged nonsense. In fact, Bug Report #5 was written in direct response to such claims, but I fear I erred on the side of subtlety. So for the sake of future smooth sailing, I’m going to unpack some of its rather literal content, 9th-grade English style.
“A mob carrying scissors gathers outside the doctor’s office. Madness and unreason, they cry, and then cut the building from its foundation, jetting it into space.”
That mob? That’s the people who say this writing makes no sense. “Madness and unreason” refers directly to messages like Tumblr’s “What is the honest point of The Bug Report? It’s meaningless wordsalad.”
Anyhow, the proceeding paragraphs then ask the simple question: what sort of world does this mob want? Apparently one where things are meaningful and unsaladlike, where rationality reigns.
So I write, “the mob approves of this world where people are called billionaires because money, in all its pustulant qualia, is a more reliable metric than behavior.”
A desire for rationality is synonymous with a desire for fixed meanings and systemically predictable relations. This is, perhaps non-coincidentally, the mandate of late capitalism. Knowing the dollar value of everything allows it to be translated universally (à la through a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, as mentioned later in the piece).
This presents a problem for “meaningless wordsalad.” To be clear, nothing is actually meaningless, but lots of things waver in indeterminacy, and golly, that’s a buzzkill in those board rooms where capitalists and rationalists trade handjobs of joyless affirmation. Over time, by the way, more and more things have been resolved into stable dollar signs: ask any insurance adjustor what the value of a human life is. Despite culture’s soft-focus poetics of ineffability, he’ll give you a cold hard number. This is part of what separates “late” capitalism from previous versions. (System 7 ahoy.)
Anyhow, the rationalists who bristle at Bug Reports are doing the dirty work of those engineers wishing to streamline all non-productive parts of life. They want to externalize those costs and write them out of the spreadsheet. That’s why I write, “They buzz efficiently without earlobes and appendices.” Those are “useless” body parts. It’s also why the man at the cave later on has no nipples.
For all that it mounts a defense of the arbitrary, the Bug Report is exceedingly intentional. (Have you read actual randomness? This ain’t it.) And again, what I’m doing in the present post is literal explication—not even interpretation. Sheesh.
“The last time anyone said SPASM, a huge pair of scissors neatly beheaded her” means that the rationalist paradise is incapable of admitting any truth known foremost in the body (as opposed to the frontal lobe), and indeed any pleasure. Pleasure is sticky, gooey, and its meaning is subjective and fluxy. Or at least, it’s not allowed in the discourse of certainty.…
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