Machine Eden

       "All watched over by machines of loving grace."
                                    --Richard Brautigan


Having established a friendship
with a machine connected to machines,
he felt better about himself.

What had analogous reality
ever done for him aside from
the conception-and-birth thing?

Nothing but problems after that.
Maybe before he dies--thanks,
reality--he'll be able, he thinks,

to live in a world completely
virtual, a self contained in
machined containment. Heaven.


hans ostrom 2020

Know Your Place

Virtual virtiginous vanity,
digital indignities,
resounding robotic rhetoric: oh,
what shall we tell the angels
when we see them? No

worries: angels own their
own hyper-reality and know
their way around algorithmic
dances that created them.

Perhaps you find yourself
wishing to turn away
from the sheer volume and mass
of human activity. Well,

you may not. It's not
allowed. Though exponentially
trivial, you remain a datum.
Know your place. And don't
leave it.


hans ostrom 2019

Good News: You're Out of Touch

Because now it's all connected,
because now it's all infected
with connectivity, parasiting itself,
surveilling every person, place, and thing, you

don't feel connected, nor do you
especially want to. Your data's connected
very well indeed, not you. There
goes human culture, rocketing

off, and you're staying behind
in your material here, although you fake
living virtually very well. You feel
solitary but not sad. It's a relief

to be not interested in what it's all
coming to, whatever it's coming to,
and who would know, given the fact
and farce that human culture hurtles

with indifference to consequences.
It's virtually like standing in an empty town,
which the residents abandoned. Your
data's off partying with them. Sometimes

it reports back. The town, an existential
cocoon, does this thing that no one and
no thing does anymore. It leaves you
alone. Not heavenly, but nice.


hans ostrom 2018

Ubiquitous Opacity

In digitized society, we know
people we don't know, and we
don't know people we do know.

Things are made to seem
as if they're happening.

We're distracted from perceiving
much of what is happening.

In high definition we encounter
ubiquitous opacity.



hans ostrom 2017

Screens

Screens

I can't get away from illuminated screens. They
are where I go, watch what I do, write what I
write, tell what I know. Their light lies on me like
fine dust. They count key-strokes and stamp
time. They thicken the reduced sauce of my
personal numerology. I don't know what I would
do without screens, and I'd be willing to try,
but things have gone too far, and screens are not
about to disengage from me. I go from screen to
screen. That is the pattern and path of my life. It is
a digitized, visual existence--algorithms and
pictures, not sentences and thoughts. Some
people take photos with screens of people on screens.
Some screens spit cash at me. Others receive
my numbers and reduce my income.
Wow. I am observed observing, read writing,
seen hiding. One of my screen-machines eats
cookies and spam. I gather anyone with a screen
is targeted by means of the screen. This
Age in which I live is lit up, shining, flat,
and virtual. It is one or more times removed
from itself. Screens invade and insulate.
Screens virtually haunt me like rectangular ghosts.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom