Thriller runs 13:42. I have watched it maybe thirty times across my life, which is a generous estimate and probably too high, and that comes to something under seven hours. Seven hours is the entire duration of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video inside me. Not the totality of his influence or his whole corpus, nor the residue or whatever the video did to what I expect a music video to be, but the raw stretch of this particular clip running in my perception, front and center, unmistakably there. Seven hours out of fifty-one years. Then the light goes off and he is not there.
I do not find this sad, and I did not go looking for it. It is just the accounting, and once you start doing the accounting on one thing it becomes difficult not to do it on everything else, which is what happened last night and is the reason for this essay.
Because the same arithmetic applies to every notation anyone has ever left behind. A post, a photograph, a comment thread from 2009 nobody has opened since — none of it is alive. It sits in whatever storage arrangement somebody is still paying for, inert, until a person comes along and reads it, at which point it briefly runs again inside that person, on that person’s equipment, for exactly as long as their attention holds and then a little longer while the resonance thins out. That is what remembering is, as far as I can tell: not retrieval out of a vault but a short re-lighting, in living hardware, of something that was dark a second ago and goes dark again shortly, and most of it goes dark for good, not because anyone erased it but because nobody looked.
Which makes the unknown billions the ordinary case rather than the tragic remainder. The handful who have been re-lit continuously, in one head after another, for thousands of years — whose names and inventions and labels stopped being individual traces at some point and turned into the scaffolding that everybody else’s thinking gets built on without noticing — those are not a sample of what happens. They are the survivors, and mistaking survivors for a sample is the oldest error there is.
Full stop. Transition.
Last night I was writing something down, hit a period mark, and went through it instead of stopping at it.
I do not have a better description. There is a moment where you are assembling a sentence about a thing and then you are not assembling anything, you are on the far side of it, and the sentence you thought you were building turns out to have been a tunnel. Ah, yes. Then you keep typing, because typing is how you find out what happened, and the screen hands the letters back as lit-up OLED crystals so that you can read your own cognition a beat later than you had it and elaborate on it as though it came from someone else. Some of the returning is done by an alternative intelligence these days, which changes the latency and not the signature. I write, the surface gives it back, I take it up as slightly-other, I go on from there — banging on the walls of digital paper fabric, stenciling each letter into bits and bytes, speaking out from behind the wall for a shared glimpse of what a connected hive mind could actually look like.
Everything below is downstream of that loop, including the part where the loop breaks my own framing.
Because I had been counting. Seven hours of Michael Jackson, femtoseconds of entanglement, everyone remembered in aggregate in the instant. But summing needs a duration to sum across and a vantage point outside the instant from which to do the summing, and I have neither, and the reason I have neither is that every attempt to step outside and check is itself just another instant. So either the larger thing is present whole right here, or it is something I assemble inside the moment and then call larger.
I mean the first one. I should say plainly that I cannot prove the premise it rests on — that the present instant is all there ever is — and that I am not going to pretend the breath argument below amounts to a proof. It is where I stand, it is load-bearing, and it disqualifies most of the arithmetic that carried me to it. Fine. The ladder can go.
What it also disqualifies is the word fractal, which I used first and which is wrong. A fractal part resembles the whole: same structure, smaller scale, self-similar down and down. What I want is stronger. A hologram cut into pieces does not give you pieces of the picture — each fragment carries the entire image, from one angle, dimmer. Not a share of the everyall, not a sample of it. The whole thing at my angle at my brightness, which is why a single encounter did not feel diminished by being single. Under an aggregate I would need more instances and better ones. Under holography, repetition adds nothing except another instance of the same complete thing.
The dimness is not a rhetorical concession, by the way. Holograms cut small get grainy, and mine is grainy, and it still works well enough as a resonance surface that I can go over it for hooks and loops and topology, which is all I wanted from it.
Michael’s Tuesday, and the breath underneath
The equal side of the coin. Even at twenty percent of a life spent onstage or practicing for it, Michael Jackson still slept, dreamt, ate, digested and mostly just breathed, and there is no objectively qualitative measure that enriches anyone’s experience past what a single human mind can cognize in a day. He made magnificent things and had enormous impact and the Michael of Michael was very often in between thoughts and appointments, taking some time, being. Reach is a fact about other people’s attention rather than about the texture of anybody’s Tuesday.
I notice I want that both ways — the thousands-of-years people as evidence the scaffolding is real, then reach as immaterial the moment it suits me — and both readings do not stand together. I am keeping the second one and paying for it, and the price is not abstract: if this were read broadly I could probably make a living from it, and it is not read broadly, and the frame I am building here is serenely silent on that. Holography says every fragment holds the whole. It does not say the fragments are equally bright and it does not pay rent.
I have not really read Hemingway, which within this frame means his reality-to-me is close to nil — no larger than a Substack post that stops existing the moment I lay it down and go to sleep, or the pen name on top of it, which is also just a label somebody could re-light and probably will not. Hemingway will be ordinarily forgotten too. Slower, sure. Same direction.
Underneath all of it, the one thing that does not flicker. Attention is intermittent, recognition is a flash, the femtosecond is by definition already gone, and beneath that runs an involuntary vegetative motion I did not choose and cannot suspend past a few minutes even with the training the record-holders do — air in, chest rising, oxygen saturation held inside the narrow band that lets a biological scaffolding seat a consciousness at all. Every glimpse of the larger thing sits on top of that. You can only unsaddle because there is a saddle.
Kumbaya, and the part that is not
Flower-power, Hare Krishna, Kumbaya. Those are the first-whim labels and I would reach for them too, and they are not the objection.
The objection is the inference. Recognizing yourself as a fragment of a larger operation does not automatically yield compassion — organicism has an ugly history exactly here, where the part exists for the whole and therefore the part is expendable, a conclusion available from precisely these premises, taken before, at scale, with paperwork. What blocks it in this version is the geometry, which is why I bothered with it: if every fragment contains the whole image, no fragment is expendable, because losing one loses the whole picture at that angle and nobody else is standing where you stand. That is an argument rather than a mood, and it is the only reason I let the compassion claim through the door.
I want to keep the thing itself non-conscious, though. The hive mind is not aware of itself any more than an ant colony is aware of itself. Colonies compute what no individual ant computes, and none of that colony-level intelligence loops back down to inform the ants, and I have no reason to assume our version differs — a mechanism in play, forking with every billion thumbs and facial expressions and shared novelties, actively expanding, not looking at us. Which is a strange thing to feel affection for and I feel it anyway.
That leaves one piece I have not resolved. If the fragment already contains the whole, then other people are not needed to verify it and not needed to complete it, so what are they for? A hologram reconstructed from many angles is sharper than one — that is a reason for other people which is neither validation nor propagation, and it may be the shape I have been circling all morning without landing on it. Books did this before, asynchronously, which is why somebody once called them the most potent psychedelic available. This medium is faster and dimmer and there is more of it.
The vehicle worked as intended at least once, on one node, this morning, self-exploratory and Self-exploratory at the same time.
Full stop. Transition. High five.
