No Mind No Greed No Hands to Reach

“No mind, no greed, no suffering No thought, no hurt, no hands to reach...”

Thats how Michael Gira describes what it would be like to take a screenshot of our life, to be able to suspend ourselves in time for a moment, to blur the continuity of the world in order to live free of drives.

The platforms built in the same way as TikTok offer a nightmarish version of this “screen capture” idea, giving us the hability to be suspended in time in a continuous present staring at a screen in watching an infinite stream of content.

This continuous present builds itself in the form of a conversation between us, the users, and the algorithm: a conversation in which, through our most basic cognitions, the algorithm mechanizes our desires to make portraits of its users in the form of interests for advertisements.

The user-algorithm conversation is constructed so simply that, through mediation devices, we could have non-human biotic entities play the role of the user in it. This is the exercise of symmetry that this piece intends to do, to establish a system that mediates between a plant and the algorithm.