6/17/25 — ART & CULTURE | ESSAY

i like the kind of internet you find in a friend: the one you go to school with that you are embarrassed for. it’s like crunchy peanut butter. because you can tell it’s real. the texture is a proof that it is not so removed from the thing it is made of — that it is made of the thing at all.

namely?

i have come to prefer bad lighting in a youtube video, your home instead of some artificial set up in the background, some pixelation because you are only recording on a phone, audio that gives away the fact that you are not in the same room with me — because you’re not. let us not pretend the world is so small and that we are any less alone just because we are logged in. peanut butter is made of peanuts. it’s okay to turn the blender off before these things get smooth.

i fear that the internet has become a kind of processed food. perhaps i shouldn’t. it always was. i fear that the internet has become a kind of ultra-processed food. perhaps i shouldn’t. perhaps it always was. i stick an organized taxonomy of food processing levels to the fridge some months ago. we cannot become habituated to processed food. i am reminding myself of that now. it makes it too hard to eat reality. i sit down to watch a very slow French realist film. i’m bored. i miss its subtlety. for someone’s time, not necessarily its own, i’m sure it is wildly overstimulating: every scene change and pan of the camera, magic. that the saturation is manipulated in every shot is something i have to become conscious of in hindsight.

i know film is not necessarily content creation. in as much as it is, i am highlighting how many levels humans have become removed from natural experience in even just the simple tricks of content creation like perspective and color. the lens is a striking enough feature. speaking into the void of internet without a physical interlocutor is a striking enough feature. and yet we have become habituated to it. so tolerant, we are, of the most primary levels of filtering, that they don’t even occur to us anymore. we drink more to feel the buzz. we are addicted to processing reality. more refined sugar because it’s starting to taste like food — and that is a bad taste — we have been trying to avoid it since the very first pour: since writing, since the telephone, since the internet, since filters, since AI — 

flour must be a whole food because bread is certainly not, right?

nature. 

namely, nature. nature, i think is a thing simpler than this. it is devoid of all our creations and preservations (technologies). today, we become so many times removed from nature for these things. language becomes writing, photography and film and audio become telecommunications, projection the internet. i am not sure if nature is our preferred condition. i am sure that limiting the number of levels we must remove ourselves from it is. 

again,

why are we so desperate to process reality?

it must speak to something very psychological and humiliating about the human condition. let me not avoid repeating the word nature. because humans have a nature too. it is the first level removed from reality, i suspect. and so we only become even further removed from it and ourselves, by continuing to manipulate the expression of our sensory experience — our sensory experience being a kind of reality processing system itself. it is still a self-fulfilling prophecy in this sense. we keep avoiding the second tier of experience, subjective-sensory experience, because we are removed from tier one: objective reality. we don’t like the feeling of that misalignment, i assume (however fundamental). i am, at least, confused by it. we are confused and dissociating ourselves from confusion. once the buzz wears off, another layer of it must come on: the cycle of habituation/tolerance.

what? and what of it? you are asking this of me. me who is writing on the internet, just to be clear (i hope the grit is getting stuck in your teeth. that this peanut butter is crunchy enough).

truth be told, i came here to inquire about whether or not the USDA would be giving me my food label for existing as home grown and locally sourced, full of faux pas, the dirt of this earth still scuffing my words — not waxed. but perhaps i am waxing poetic. it is a big claim to make: humans are addicted to dissociation because they fear confronting the fundamental confusion that is their reality (that they have less of a grasp on objectivity than they would prefer — that they are subjective creatures).

let us step away from all of this for a moment. at the core of it is something simpler: we are non-confrontational in that we seek to dissociate. from ourselves. and we have avoided far simpler things than our existentiality in this. like the fact that the internet is a fragile artifice and that internet people should be embarrassed for taking it so seriously. they loose what makes them “anthropersonal” in that: a humility.

i am trying to create a new standard for content creation. i am trying to create a new market for market creativity. i am trying to say that we must begin searching the humble content creators out. our algorithms are not written for them. you will know you have found one if you can’t. if they don’t just float into your recommended on account of readily feeding peoples’ dissociative desires. if they are real. if they show you their real world. if they admit that it is only their version — that you are engaging with a very far away myopia. that they are wrong. that they are still trying to figure out what it means to be right. if they are boring and sometimes hard to pay attention to. if their art is naive. if they are overly eager. if they are curious about you. if they are embarrassed at the thought of being perceived by you. 

this is supposed to be humiliating. 

do you remember the early days? of being embarrassed at the discovery of your friend’s youtube channel and desperately trying to hide your own? when did content creators get so proud? how did they manage to divorce shovels from digging things out of the dirt? and why? i would rather read your first attempt at novel than The New Yorker. i would rather wash dirt off an apple than wax.

THE WORLD IS NOT THIS SMALL

and yet here I am, maybe only once removed from you. in the bad way, as much as in the good. bad because perhaps we find ourselves in parasocial relationship. the illusion of globalization. good because i’m aware of it. this is supposed to be humiliating. the host’s branding still invades my domain. i am just another private citizen. “if there is anything special here,” it says (perhaps a more independent domain would feign that), “you can bet it’s not money.” i am like crunchy peanut butter. some people don’t like crunchy peanut butter. they like to pretend that we can afford to blend the nuts out.

we can’t.

of course, this is not really about crunchy peanut butter. i shouldn’t get so carried away in developing the metaphor. it’s about postmodern human creativity. it’s about a market which profits off of a people loosing sight of their humanity and so profits off of a people loosing sight of art. because what is art if not humanity — humanity if not art? it’s about not being able to afford escaping that algorithm, and so monetizing it. it’s about the market reinforcing their own problems by willfully demanding them — by continuing to dissociate instead of confront — about “more refined sugar” when it starts to taste like food.

it’s about the content creator whose means have become divorced from their ends as a result. who exists as an oxymoron in this ruthless cycle. who can only profit off the eye-catching, pop-cultured, allure intriguing, hyperbolic version of their art.

it’s about the alt-lifestyle influencer i stumble upon before writing this essay. it’s about the last straw. it’s about her paradox: as she attempts to fund an alternative lifestyle by chasing an algorithm — about how that is probably the farthest thing away from alternative i can think of. it’s about irony. it’s about her righteous stare into the camera and hot girl music to match it in the background. it’s about how different she is — and yet how well she fits in so that she can attract an audience to say that to. it’s about how she has become everyone by trying to become herself.

it’s about you and me — having the option to make a living off the expression of truth instead of dissociation. it’s about the market being able to stomach that,

crave it even.

i have come to love whole foods in the same way i have come to love that French realist film, Playtime. it is slapstick and satirical. it is human. it is a lesson in observance. it has caused me, many a time, to put my phone down, or to shut up in my college dining hall, to stare deeply into a social interaction instead, my own and into other’s social interactions, and into the world. i see that i am often living in Playtime, if only i look up to watch the many, silly little plots unfold. i write them down after letting the world write to me, in the same way that i come up with my own recipes now — and process things at home. i hate writing the reality out of these things. i made peanut butter from scratch once. witnessing the removal of a thing from itself, the tragedy of that,

almost broke my blender and caused me to turn it off before things had a chance to get smooth.

i hope you won’t mind the chunks.

Summer Arukwer-Strother

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