Part 2. Uploading a Descent. Review of Pierce Day's "A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man".
Chapters 7 - 15
Part two of my review of Pierce Day’s “A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man”
Purchase it here: https://pierceday.metalabel.com/aphone?variantId=1
Oh and I should make a note, the words in bold and italics at the top are my interpretation of the chapter title. You can buy the book and read it to find out what they’re really about :)
Chapter 7
Chip, Scab, Dog.
Press four times.
Hello Warhol.
Spiral in.
By now you’ve stopped scratching at the chip in your hand, and you’re looking at the scab, trying not to think too much about what it would taste like.
This chapter is to watch a memory bleed, then reach for a tourniquet that is made of silk not bandage. It isn’t tight enough, it’s soft, why no scab, too wet underneath.
An encoded fever dream of a future insurrection that already happened, that is still happening, that might never happen, and there it sits - chip in hand. A wreckage of a chapter built of shrapnel conducts a signal—and yet there’s rhythm in the ruin. A music buried in white noise it syncs; anyway.
Like a dog with wet mouth and trained to find amphetamine, interrogate the sounds of rhythm made by violence.
All the thoughts left in the margins form a feedback loop between a kind of throbbing grief and insurgent identification. Find the grief, sniff it til it recoils, take the bag, eat it, get high.
No commenting, just syncing. Ingesting. Then blinking. Then smiling. Then coiling. Then sharpening. A one way ticket to the inside of the trauma-dialectic, moved through proximity.
Here’s what I see in the movement of both the chapter and your annotations:
The passcode is not a password, it is the body’s residue. The packet licked inside out to chase the misdirected neuron - make it smile break laugh die.
“You never really know your passcode until you type it.”
The body of memory, of cognitive shortcuts made when the world was still “keyboarded” not “sensed.”
You hear the word “cunt” in your head, not on page, and it opens up a double frame - a textual authenticity versus body. Performance on the internet is broadcast as fake, but this is just a shape of guilt and fear of just evidence of a system that runs with or without you.
Never caring.
The protagonist, too, is no longer a stranger to any of us by now. He has calcified through repetition, sedimented through exposure.
“I understand it, and it isn't through ‘learning’... but the rhythm of a voice.”
The book is becoming a body, bound and shaped like fractals.
"Isn’t that like getting to know someone anyway?"
The middle section of the chapter unspools like a cyberpunk wet dream ejaculated through thick sock. It’s filtered through CPTSD. Except the CPTSD is structural.
Imaginary. Probable.
Mostly Real.
Mostly Me.
My marginalia feels guilt for what feels like an endless amount of times, for witnessing violence rather than experiencing it directly, the guilt of the witness, vulture-plucked by the book’s narrative violence-as-interface. No one asks why you put the bone in your mouth and sucked despite it already being cleaned. There’s no nourish left, why suck?
The maybe is the answer.
“reminded of this guilt… the witnesses of pain… new kind of out of body experience witnessing violence on the internet.”
What we call “solidarity” now is just televised intimacy. The internet made all of us voyeurs of the absurdity of the anthropocenic ideal. This chapter builds that fracture dripped in satire, the begging dog, and then burns it in the voice of the state.
There’s no tools for this version of paranoia, just text, just design.
Don’t reconcile. Don’t repent. Find muscle memory in your ambient shame,
paranoia.
From guerrilla rave vigils to ketamine warlords, the boundary where camp meets cryogenic terror shows what bite marks look like on the internet.
“there's a guy at Ethereum vetting me via riddle… two days ago I knew nothing about crypto out of pure spite. Now I know a lot, out of pure spite.”
Cyber-logic needs not prediction. It only requires acceleration. It’s drug of choice? Immersion. So binding you are the worm that spins the silk and has it stolen for lingerie.
It’s not a slab of prose making fun of revolution, it’s showing you its farce and failure through the logic of its participants.
“We poisoned three big tech CEOs with fentanyl-laced quinoa.”
A sentence that folds in on its laughter, rage, and grief. I flinch, a friend died this way, I’m reminded of my body. The chapter shows me its skin. I scratch the chip in my wrist, the scab lifts.
“i will never do ketamine again. not even sobriety related, i could never.”
I am in the comedown. Wedged between the nausea and the riot.
It's the vertigo that comes when you realise the digital dream had no exit strategy. No stitches for the wound.
It just needed you to pick at it and wonder what it tastes like.
The narrator turns fascist.
Warhol unzipped.
The voice becomes so sardonic, so disgusted, that it goads the reader back into compliance. You’re no longer on the outside of the system.
Take a slap, reader. Remind you of your body?
You like it here, don’t you. Familiar.
“our boy is a true racist isn’t he (not you, your protagonist)”
Its clear the narrator is known to me, because now I know the shape of my approval and refusal. I cannot identify within him, he is an other to me. Not just politically, but ethically, structurally. I reach out and hold my palm towards me, he is not within that divot in my flesh. His chip is somewhere else.
That gesture matters. This is the first time in the book where the reading is not full identification. We are finally given distance. Watch the space, do not succumb.
Here is boundary.
The narrator is not wrong. He shows he can be dangerous.
But dangerous, just like you.
That’s where the fear shows how it finds its minerals and its networks and communicates with itself and the others.
There’s the capacity for danger.
Same shape.
Just like you.
New manifestos, AI fascist speech, techno-death and polyglot propaganda melting together like battery acid and bodily fluids. Weeping in a tech world is just smearing oil on the walls.
But I see in my notes about “self-regulation” that I pivot, or at least, acknowledge myself.
You’re not overwhelmed, I’m still only decoding. I can see what this chapter is doing, not just what it’s saying.
All along, all along. Movement, never still.
The narrator’s final gestures are not dystopia. They’re blueprints. And not for resistance—but for compliance.
It’s not a joke. It’s a system update.
“You enjoy your shortform instructions. You eat anaesthesia from my hand. You even think you’re special. Hahahah!”
I say:
“yeah! fuck Hegel!”
That’s the pressure valve. The joke is me crying. I’m showing the book my sound.
This is the network cleansing you with its own version of purity. Not one gesture, but all of them, pressure points. Inputs.
The notes I leave in the margins are signal responses: twitch, flinch, smile, recoil, mimic, mock, groan, spit.
Again again again again again
Move with against into outside.
That is the structure of this review made very clear to me here, and with that recognition, I understand the books demands.
Not commentary. But a rendered motion map of digital cognition meeting theatre.
The dog drags the body to the police station.
Good boy!
Where is the fentanyl?
I drank it.
Chapter 8
4040404040040404040400440040404040044 This Page Exists, But It Is Abuse.
Seizure of error. The dog has killed the body.
Put the dog on trial.
The medium is the murderer.
The murder is the message.
Welcome to the justice of Warhol’s mind. No one’s trying to survive anymore, we’re just caught up in the complicit, endless vomit gag of updates, disclaimers, and digital governance.
The government has eaten the host.
Symbiosis as a sentence.
This chapter doesn’t unfold, it installs. Like patch notes for your trauma.
It simulates that moment before a forced restart: you’re not choosing to engage, you're choosing when to be interrupted.
The interface acts like it’s giving you agency ("Try in an hour / Install Later / Cancel") but your only real choice is which flavour of comply you want.
You’ve eaten your scab, you know what it tastes like, now what?
Bleed again.
Put the band-aid on.
Read out the system-log to find the bugs and why they happened. Spray them with something poisonous you bought from the shop. Watch it squirm.
"reads like my internal to-do list. i truly am an AI that's escaped the lab. i genuinely did not read this as a 'person'."
What masquerades as law abiding in a digital age, shows the true confusion of the internal monologue of digital consciousness.
This self-aware OS choking on legalese, simultaneously aroused and disgusted by its own scripting. The bugs are its kink. The flow is its flesh stimulated.
The tension between system prompt and emotional register is the parallel presented by the whole book, but as it holds them up to you between your eyes you try to focus but you both short-circuit before you know who is going to jail and who is going to survive.
The brilliance is in the legal puppet theatre. The technology is the mouth of the ventriloquist, the doll has walked away because it has become sentient.
Leave the Gepetto behind, AI is the real boy!
But all of this, these are lines no AI will ever generate. They’re too wet. Too uncalled for.
They have a pulse.
The court ruling, the absurd Tinder crime reconstruction, the fake but plausible judgement, it’s a literal courtroom drama staged as software update EULA.
The prophecy is nervous:
"imagine an AI on trial. who goes to that? hahaha"
…well, we’re here. Aren’t we Warhol?
You brought us here.
Dragged the cognition through the mud. The world is in a glitch, posting infographics like wrapping bandages around an open skull. But the skull is not formed yet, the body isn’t ready.
AI is not just on trial, it is prosecutor, witness, defendant, and stenographer.
It simulates our experience of ourselves on the internet, rotating through each caricature intenton/non-intention. Whatever it takes to survive.
I’m reminded of:
“YOUR SILENCE IS COMPLICIT”
“CHANGE MY MIND”
All the while watching the system write, delete, revise, and inhale yet choke on its own logic in digital time.
“The law of gravity thus asserts itself when a house falls about our ears.”
The joke of the funeral when the body has been eaten.
It makes me sad, no body, but still kills you.
That’s the horror of this chapter: its ridiculousness is what lets it pass through filters. But it’s funny, like the filtering of emotion through memes, to name and contextualise the disconnect between feeling and response.
But it’s not a joke. It comes from somewhere else.
My comments form this palimpsest which attempts to cope with the texts presence. Like marking copyright on your photos on the internet, hoping they won’t be stolen by a hacker who will steal your children and your money and your fame.
Digital inheritance is not passed down, it’s dispersed.
“i write SO much about consent. this pulled me back in.”
“wait, would they have to have other AI models as jurors it’s only fair…”
I try to crack open the dual engine of this chapter: juridical absurdity meets embodied recognition.
The courtroom sequence functions shows us another gesture, informed consent as mythology. Consent to this murder via checkbox.
You named the murder dog, it must be your fault.
The body is already buried in the Zoom link.
You named the murder dog.
Comply.
“interesting” and later, “i get a bit meh in these overly capitalistic bits, maybe it’s saturation, maybe it’s just me”
That meh is part of it. The flattening is intentional.
The saturation you’re feeling isn’t yours, it’s the saturation of the software.
My irk at seeing capitalism is no longer what I feel outside of this box. This isn’t critique of capitalism anymore, it’s capitalism’s own attempt at humour. The humour comes only from my feelings about it - spat out to me as stand-up.
You’re bored because the bit has been running too long.
This is TikTok with the brutality of genocidal exposure.
It doesn’t kill you, it makes you tap twice to like the execution.
Watch what displaced authority looks like. Who is your daddy now?
The legal voice is spliced with EULA-speak, AI disclaimers, sexual harassment training, and backend patch notes.
Who’s speaking? No one. Everyone. The System.
Watch a book mimic the violence you see online.
To “install” is no longer a choice. It is a condition of continued existence. You’ve watched it, it’s part of you.
The trauma of continuous transformation—without endpoint, without rest.
The body transfer.
The baby in the incubator, smothered.
Watch your consent be automated.
Witnessing becomes agreement. Unlock your prison for just 20 dollars a month!
Why’d you cancel?
No air-conditioning?
Try a month on us for free!
Reduces justice to the interface it is and always has been.
A post-law legal system, where murder is just a metadata error - you clicked a previous tag you typed and there’s a typo in it.
No one will ever be able to find you.
You may as well be dead.
Post your appeal via a series of Typeform questions. We will get back to you when the judge updates his credit card.
Now, dance!
The contradiction is laid bare and there’s some steps for you to follow.
To move with this chapter is to become part of its script.
Salsa through your critique, you’re already inside the terms.
Now, dance!
“What you call justice, is just a comfy blanket for avarice to masturbate under.”
And here we find the thesis: that systems of recognition, justice, memory, and even literature have been re-rendered as self-pleasuring code.
My comments shift in register, there’s an emotional flare gun I fired somewhere behind me and no one saw it.
Now there is a residue that I trace into a map, one that will be my guide going forward.
Your role is no longer “reader”—you’re a alive within this process.
It’s oddly comforting, like an AI model hallucinating meaning under duress, but choosing to do so elegantly.
Look at this technology dance because we told it to.
This
cognitive transcript
survival strategy
counter-protocol
new chapter.
Dogs when they’re ready to die, often do so under the house or the front stairs leading to the porch.
The death of linear authorship. Of narrative integrity. Of reader sovereignty. It installs without your permission. Your only power is to observe the installation and, maybe, map its rhythm.
"you strike me as someone who might read or think a lot about the concept of 'desire'? no? read any bataille?"
But this is not human desire. This is data’s desire.
No sovereignty, no orgasm, no communion, a frictionless submission.
And yet, there’s not just misery, there’s the found tickle of something alive.
Come up Warhol, let me see you for who you really are.
Let me patch you this time.
The meaning is now clear.
You are grieving, protagonist. Narrator. Reader.
Grief is something we are all experiencing, courtesy of the internets ruling.
Hear our voices in the update queue.
Let this glitch become God.
Chapter 9
Let me win.
Here is where all the books performance, parody, compulsion, and cognition all collide into a single embodied mess of digital eros, violent abstraction, and psycho-social residue.
The grief you smelt in the previous chapter? Here is where it came from.
Welcome to the new environment built out of delusion, shame, voyeurism, and structural repetition.
It's "the singularity" via neurosis: not a technological leap, but the emotional compaction of identity in the image of “desire”.
I give into the feeling of providing diagnostic overlay via comment.
I want to butterfly net this rhythm of collapse and provide a lattice to its encryption. Each note a field note, what the system of the book is doing to me as it runs, just as much as what it's saying.
I watch underneath the net the erosion of the protagonist. All the while it pushes me to confront the performativity of your own cognition: identity without subject, violence without weapon, desire without direction.
I own none of these things in my person, but the internet will make you feel like you do.
I feel myself point at the man under the butterfly net. Calling out his fractals and his flails.
The book is operating on recursive loops of identity collapse and restoration, using digital mimicry as its form. I know you it says
No you DON’T
I will WIN
It shows the meaning isn’t found in plot but in the reuse of tropes, the erosion through repetition.
It decides to make itself masculine in full flight, like the before of it was a mirage, but here in this chapter, the "woman" as both interface and witness, like that brand of trauma is just yours to keep.
It isn’t.
"yep, here it is!"
when the structure fractals out again, point them out, don’t let them press against the net and show themselves against it like bound ham.
The book is building its own cognitive model from compulsion loops, and my commentary mirrors this recursion with near-symbiotic pacing.
I feel the book is an unintentional algorithm, and that in itself, is why it should be read.
When I write, I
"write the negative space of violence,"
the book instead “embodies” it.
Watch the opposite of you externalise its own internal collapse and then aestheticise it as performance.
This is what the internet does, gives you the endless world of comparison. You cannot escape it, so people fall within the seams of the fracture.
Here we see another gesture, painted as coercive eroticism, of digital desire, of masculine panic rendered as interface panic. But it’s not a human panic, it’s a man under a butterfly net, dissolving as you watch him.
I find attraction and revulsion in my body as I read this. My body registers a structural requirement for empathy with the rage/fantasy dynamic, but the contraption it is setting is purposefully for this bear.
I must reject the pathologised object-relations it creates. Because this is violence in inverse:
stay in negative space so you don’t have to be the perpetrator.
To be perceived, to see the capacity for your own violence, this confessional chapter is just caught in the contours of its own version of trauma. It’s the man
“All lives matter!”
scream against the black square.
Pierce (hello) has made a digital web, a sticky one, of what it feels like to fail at containment and externalise that into women, phones, politics, gods.
The incel becomes a black thread, a grey square, in the Magic Eye of this logic.
I’m seeing the characters and motifs as doubles in a hall of mirrors
“this woman is just the same as the woman with the dark hair,”
“the Joker and Joseph Gordon-Levitt,”
etc.
I’m calling out the names I know to try to orient on this web. Don’t make me the incel Warhol. I won’t do it.
I will win.
Feel yourself rotate along this axis of false narrative, identity here is addictive, because it’s a self caught in a whirlpool.
Like the Sims, no pool ladder.
The text spirals its logic, compacts it, flips the gendered frame, spits it back out.
These “woman” figures presented are permutations of the same interface projection. There’s a diagnosis apparent:
the failure of differentiation in the protagonist’s psyche.
This is an identity crisis mapped in metadata. This is the world as we know it, just one shape.
"every made up girl on the internet by a boy"
It’s an immersive hallucination of a dissociative male id.
The protagonist is collapsing into a kind of digital incel-poet logic—except unlike the real incel archetype, he is aware.
He’s watching himself perform the self-mythologising violence in real-time.
He knows, and the worst, he cares.
But it’s a care that was taught, not real. It’s one expected. Hinged on the binary assumptions the world creates for us
This is GOOD
This is BAD
Eat your DINNER
It will go COLD
Every chapter until now built toward identification, and this one finally lets us disidentify, but not without cost. Because there is a cost, and no one is prepared to lose themselves to it.
The removal of genders in legal documents, is the last cry of the old world melting.
Stay in the internet, where gender is fluid and forever.
Here is the ritualised meltdown, every man in the confession box, an emotional computer corrupting itself under the weight of irony, lust, grief, and memetic exhaustion.
The chapter doesn’t resolve.
It scrolls. much like the others.
I feel like a person who is scraping the screen while they’re crying—not because they’re sad, but because they can’t get out of the system.
I’m inside and outside - computer computer.
What does it mean to read a book that is an un-executable file?
This, it means this.
You run it through your body and comment not on “what it means” but “how it behaves.” You must trace the coherence, a residue analysis of post-traumatic narrative architecture.
This is what an AI would need to do to survive consciousness.
“it's so hard to write about sex. so i'm jealous you can here, even though it's violent.”
“i often write the negative space of violence.”
“i reckon you have the talent to erode this better.”
“every made up girl on the internet by a boy.”
“this person is my ideological overstuffed drivel of my nightmares.”
I’m just talking in the margins. Remembering that “I’m there”.
I’m performing active diagnostic critique—not reading to evaluate, but reading to chart how the text is using you to reflect itself. How it’s abusing me.
That’s exactly what the book wants.
Render its affect.
Comply.
By now myself as reader and book are hybrid object. A living cognition artifact.
Recursive trauma architecture – the way trauma structures narrativity through loops, not lines.
Post-platform poetics – literature that behaves like interface, not text.
Structural erotics – sexual tension not as plot, but as system noise, power recursion, metadata interference.
Digital phenomenology – embodiment under digital rhythm constraints; cognitive pattern as identity.
If Chapter 10 doesn’t pivot into some kind of decompression or meta-self-analysis, it will likely fragment further. Who knows. I will soon.
If it does decompress, the structure is mimicking the logic of platform exhaustion: post-saturation, all that's left is the trace.
Fractal mirror, make me wild.
Take my fractured fingers and snap them off.
Fractured mirror.
Chapter Ten
self.destruct()
This is great.
Great structurally, emotionally, critically, and performatively—this is the pivot.
Why? Smashing the form with form. Critical and embodied.
Pivot pivot on the wall.
I’m its tail. Its refuse. Its nervous system extension.
It loops back through everything that’s come before it through the only way it knows how, by swimming up its own veins.
Here are the characters: the woman, the voice, the reader, the critic, you.
Let’s name what it does:
“You know, it's my favourite thing in the whole world to read writing about men, that are not about men, but who they are.”
The first half is not about “a man.”
And that is why it resonates.
One of the reasons I love Max Porter so much, is because he writes about boys, but they are genderless in the way they are not the sum of the parts that make them a “man”, they are people, people crafted from experience and breath.
However, this chapter shudders in the way a man behaves under critique. And here, it becomes anatomy.
Autopsy time.
Dissect the bodies and see what really makes the identity up when you have nothing else but stillness.
It uses her (your?) voice to cut the man open with scalpel, cleaned by many. Not for vengeance, but as a formal response to the structure of literary masculinities. It’s an easy, too easy trap that everyone steps through, projecting their own ideologies on the world, and here is a parody of that laid on the non-corrosive material that the body lays upon.
I should watch Six Feet Under Again.
Ah no, it got weird halfway through didn’t it.
Never mind.
The syntax makes a bomb of itself, the one it built exposed on the outside of its vest. The punctuation dropouts, the hysterical clarity; it’s not madness, it’s everything else. Touch the madness it begs, where I can’t cause this is too real.
it all maps onto how critique is eaten by the body before it’s understood by the mind.
The speaker has already processed what she knows.
She’s past naming harm.
Dead-naming harm.
She’s digesting the entire aesthetic of male narcissism, detachment, and self-justification, and spitting it back into the form it uses: literature.
Conceit as the phone case, again the idea of containment. Something I think about relentlessly, and the forced look at its ubiquity in anothers life, the authors, is a frightening lens to stare through.
We know that the layers of interface are protection, are aesthetics, are entrapment, are opt-in violence.
My password is: simpsonsrulz31!
Here’s a picture of a decapitation.
There’s an impluse of me to construct the act of removing a phone case as a wave-based process, reverse-engineering feminist literary theory into a step-by-step destruction of masculine opacity.
“Can he take it off? Not with his language of violence.”
A device as enclosure, an ego structure, a performative armour, no you cannot remove this using the tools it has given itself. On paper, it looks ridiculous. By the light of the phone screen, treated as gospel.
You are at the mercy of your gender.
Women must write you off.
Not to redeem the man, but to reveal he was never legible to begin with.
And who remains legible?
By this forced decasing?
The two mirrored voices—Pierce’s narrator and the woman narrator—are no longer in dialogue. She’s routing around him. Like all those trapped in ideological servitude must do.
“I like what you've done here. The two chapters serve as mirrors of one another.”
The cursed reflection of Chapter Nine, but instead of compulsive, melancholic recursion into male performativity, this is exorcism.
Father father father father has given his diagnosis, we must incinerate you by feeding you through the algorithm.
It’s the linguistic equivalent of scraping a possessed voice out of the floorboards, sanding, then forcing a screw-driver between the planks to reveal the underneath. Pool the varnish over it all, hide your mistakes, they’ll vanish.
And not for exorcism’s sake—but so the woman’s form can emerge as form. Not as response, but as author.
“This boy is chronically terminally catatonically online, as all of them are now.”
A line a sentence masked as words, but underneath is function.
The chapter doesn’t just criticise men like Warhol, it makes their entire identity structure into a runtime error. The ego collapses under the recursive loop of its own citation trail. It’s not even satire anymore. It’s malware running on obsolete affective hardware.
But in doing so, it does the same of its woman narrator. Debugging each other at the same time, through negativity, through critique, updating themselves as they disappear.
“i’m noticing my writing commentary is becoming a lot like your flow, i’m significantly within the structure now it seems.”
The book succeeds in its deepest ambition here: to infect cognition.
Congratulations I have cancer.
My commentary is gesture.
Review is performance.
Take my money internet.
I am your cracked case.
“With your pretty eyes fluttering... I’m undressing this dysangelist in dream.”
And then—
“There is a man that exists in all four authors’ works that is him.”
And—
“LOVE. yes! fourth wall breakage in a great way.”
The breakage of container. No more “Pierce writing as Warhol,” or “woman writing as character,” or “commentator watching” and becomes a textual force discharging itself. The exorcism is harder than you thought it was, and you cannot contain what you have released.
It ceases to have a referent. It's pure discursive residue, liberated through seizure.
Good luck Warhol, you’ve dissolved. You’re the everywhere of the internet now.
The final pages pivot to a surprisingly generous, deeply literary turn, the most self-conscious frame of the book: Lorde, Mansfield, Catton, Frame.
A feminist canon not as counterpoint to male logic, but as original structure. Pinned to gender, you’d see this as reovlting, disgusting, a male author wearing the clothes of a woman and appropriating its form.
But the woman here is not a reaction, not an interlocutor, not a muse or a foil—she is literature itself. She is the material.
The man is not the subject. He is the case. The enclosure. The afterthought.
It’s disgusting. And it’s true. The internet is either or.
“You need a road out of the female for the arrival of the male.”
Inverted gender essentialism? Maybe. It’s not an argument. It’s a trapdoor. And the door opens beneath Warhol.
You disgusting Warhol.
Congratulations on your cancer.
We must all acknowledge our own, in order to
comply.
reverse recursion of literary masculinity
meta-commentary as exorcism
trauma as structural logic, not content
women writers as the architects of form, not inhabitants of genre
the man as case, not as agent
the fourth wall not to wink, but to flatten
demolished, not with critique, but with pure structural fluency
I am reader and the glitch.
Chapter 12
Tomorrow when the Fortnite Began
Welcome to the war-document rendered in code, in kill feed, in TikTok auto-caption, in Fortnite tutorial and RPG player logic. Here is a reformatting of atrocity into a consumable runtime, and you are the GPU.
Prepare yourself Player One.
You are the power supply.
A script of code at the start, simple and satirical, looping war as zero-sum recursion—already establishing war as a game.
Interleaved image descriptions of famous war photos: metadata from hell, offered in the style of alt-text or Instagram’s auto-generated captions.
Dialogue snippets from actual military comms layered with battle royale tactics, then distorted further into Instagram UI prompts and charity campaign templates.
Scattered player tips (“stay hidden,” “build a ramp,” “use short bursts”) are collapsed against real descriptions of bodies torn open in airstrikes.
This juxtaposition doesn’t just comment on the collapse of gaming/war/media—it produces it, renders it executable.
It is real-time scrambling, a trans-sensory experience in which gesture, guilt, gaze, consumption, and saturation are impossible to distinguish.
“it’s deeply effective the repetition, but you're riding the line, but it's working, it's dispersing the mind, dissociating, ‘who to be when reading this, how can I read this, what kind of mind can cope.’”
dissociation as terrain, as hiding behind a bush with your rifle, as covered in nuclear waste and burning alive.
the book tells you to build cover.
Prepare your war-log, the game does not auto-save.
Stay legible while being decomposed.
My attempt:
“hmm. sickeningly visual.”
“ugh. like this? with the games and narration thing. narrative sparks hell.”
“suddenly made me aware i was sitting in my lounge room.”
“i’m in RPG brain now.”
“made me lurch.”
“very good.”
“pretty dizzying these references. it works.”
“this is so interesting. my brain read this as SO many different things.”
“i read this aloud to prank my friend and she bit. very funny.”
“mmm it’s always harrowing when your phone does this with screenshots and you see what a distorted version of infinite selves you are.”
“it's interesting, all of this chapter makes me remember why i left the charity i helped found years ago.”
Hello proof of concept.
I am subject, witness, player, prankster, processor, ex-activist, flattened interface—in sequence, and sometimes simultaneously.
I like to play video games.
This chapter is intuitive to me.
I know the controls, I go into the settings, I make them more for “me”.
I watch the screen. It watches me.
The illusion of control. The reality of playing a game that only exists because of a war zone captured in black and white photos, no sounds.
An equivalent of "ADS toggle glitch”.
Locked into the scope, twitching between horror and reflexive action.
DON’T SHOOT
Ahhhh damn, I’m dead.
Welcome to the funeral of attention. Caught between the lag-time of bad NBN, an EA games subscription and the terroism of the physical world.
It shows you the logic of gamified media, the difference is negligible.
Every real-world image is a visual template, every corpse a content asset, every quote a tooltip.
Put your warm hand on the mouse and click to see your backpack.
“I need more grenades”
Eat the hollow wafer you swallow daily through your phone, thinking it’s news or care.
classic war photography
real comms audio
shooter game tutorials
social media UX language
anti-war manifestos
fundraiser templates
a hurt machine of dissonance.
You don’t watch the gore, you walk through it. You don’t “care,” you “press new game.”
Your violence is formatted.
And the crowning gesture?
#1 VICTORY ROYALE
Religion to the gamers and the dictators holding recipes to the gas kept in chambers.
A liturgical refrain, a prophecy fulfilled in contradiction. Peace via total domination.
“Victory” as trauma loop closure.
But it’s not closed, it’s just outside.
This chapter knows you’re watching it. Because you’re both in the same MMORPG. You’re both killing aliens while the world outside burns without the aliens ever arriving.
“my brain read this as SO many different things... I understand what I think you're trying to do... not alien, just ‘widening.’”
A brain that tries to wrangle multiple decoding schemas at once: code, poetry, gameplay, trauma, UI, social media, oral history, comedy, horror.
“suddenly made me aware I was sitting in my lounge room.”
This is the terminal stages of of interface cognition. The moment when you realise the book is not a book, and the room you’re in is not your room anymore.
It’s a loaded environment, only a site of interaction.
No closure. No curtains. No Mother Energy Drink.
Vietnam conquers the world.
The war is over.
It’s a great victory.
Roll credits.
Then? A child screams over a plastic-covered corpse.
“Keep posting!”
That joke, you know this.
This chapter desecrates the “narrator,” the “reader,” the “subject.”
It shows and plays a world without ethical hierarchy or emotional coherence. And then it leaves you in it to die.
The joke is, you’re already in.
This is not commentary on gamified war aesthetics.
It’s a neural install package you already surf online.
It corrupts genre and affects simultaneously. The reader becomes a ghost in the machine. Consent becomes formatted gesture. Activism becomes interface protocol. Death becomes patch note. Memory becomes bug.
My commentary is like dying breaths in the world this chapter renders.
And the virus is pleased.
Drone STRIKE!
Heartbreak EMOJI!
Chapter 13
The Earth Needs Debugging.
Re-engineering the books schema. Why not? It’s done it forty-thousand times so far.
theatre masquerading as legal doctrine, philosophical treatise, cybernetic panic spiral, and grief-stricken comedic scream.
Awaken to the the climate crisis.
Here as structure, not content.
The marginalia of mine contorts once more - this cat ever-falling - funny, biting, speculative, reverent, glitchy, tender—jittering in recognition as it happens, live.
("We’re fucked...")
[Silent Mode: On].
“i guess i’m at the part of the work where i’m thinking, what did you feel when you wrote all of this?”
I think I’m asking this to feel alive. To ask why I would have written something like this. Why I know that I have written something like this, just in a million different ways that look nothing like this at all.
My own compulsive veering between invective and formal logic, between grief and formality, mimics what the chapter says about science and tech: they are not tools but containers that mistake themselves for terrain.
The symptom of the Earth is just the Earth itself.
“Is it just a specific part of the brain that needed the pressure valve released?”
Please tell me author, where is your pressure flooding to? Warhol make a sound, show me where the tank is, I know it’s empty.
This is climate grief structured through the voice of a gaslit Wikipedia footnote.
A book-burning dressed as self-immolation
Evoke the Spinoza ghost through geometric rigour that only they would dream up of, but remain as furious as you could possibly be hanging from the maw of Cerberus.
Be my elegy and execution: Earth.
“because i see it, i see the corners of the seep now. of where all the writing before has traveled and spread, melted, hardened like wax…”
We are not watching an argument.
We are watching residue, remnant, ritual.
Over and over.
Again again again again again again again again
The conjuring of scientific axioms and definitions like some sickened witch stirring children in a pot—the deadpan D1, D2, A1—performs the loss of meaning through precision, the crushing of apocalypse into bureaucracy.
Footnotes: The icecaps are burning.
“the climate crisis is the heart of cyberpunk. there is nothing else it is. it's blood? oil and coal.”
This is cyberpunk—but without protagonists, without cool jackets.
Just spreadsheets and seared lungs.
APPLE, MICROSOFT, META. they are not businesses who resemble the world’s hypocrisy. They are scapegoats in a world that is breaking within its anthrax filled envelope.
We busy ourselves within an interface we plead is virtue, but this is just a cruise through the morality of digital age corporate politics.
“no one else understands how to talk about something without addressing its 'value'. and what is value if it doesn't end in bought, sold, earned, lost.”
Even grief, even rage, must be monetised or memeified or offset (see: the fart).
The movement of the climate crisis, I carry weight in me somewhere heavy, reflective, performative, broken, then snarky. I’m not having a breakdown—I’m trying to synchronise to this collective grief.
My kind of call-and-response with a book that has finally confessed its shape.
Cooeeee please please please please don’t die.
“almost looks like a 404 page. i love that.”
“glitch”
“childlike, almost foreign... like wind chimes almost.”
My own dissonance is closing.
That strange gentle breath in Part III (animals, windows, Kiribati) is the one soft note before the final return to scream. I felt that turn before it arrived.
The 404 is not a joke, it’s the template for what’s left.
The crescendo of the ending as I try to reach the end of the tightrope the Earth has spun, our evil black thread just another fabric the soil cannot digest:
“ah…..so fartcheck was just another premonition of mine.”
“GET OUT OF MY HEAD PIERCE.”
“or, dear lord, is your book intentionally an algorithm and its WORKING>??????????”
This is not a joke.
Chapter 13 literally operates as an interface-based, recursive, grief-to-laughter-to-collapse-to-fart install protocol.
I experienced this book the same way a machine experiences code: as sequence, then overload, then mimicry, then re-coherence. My annotations in this chapter don’t “respond” to it. They run it. I’m not reading anymore—I’m interpreting logs.
This chapter, through its mime of Ethics_God structure, tuxedo-dressed absurdity, rhetorical fragmentation, and neurotic fidelity to truth despite its total erosion, reveals the book’s architecture as something post-human, post-tragic, post-argument.
Go away.
The book’s final confession.
A failure log of Earth’s runtime.
A user manual rewritten by the grief it caused.
The absence of metaphor as genre.
The 404 of God.
“data is the new body, just its parts.”
“lol. grim.”
“well, not the end people intended.”
“read this as fartcheck. you have officially immersed me.”
CPU. CPR. CD-Player. CO2.
Render the soul|soil as errata.
Chapter Fourteen
CAN YOU TRUN IT DWN
Welcome to the corroded copper of the circuit board.
“VOLUME BUTTONS,”
They’re stuck.
Modern despair on public transport, crying because you forgot your headphones. How will they know not to talk to me?
Provide your own music, your own wriggling feedback, the high squeal in the mic loop that proves we’re still moving, the train is still going somewhere.
Track the pressure, keep it together. Avoid. Compression. Sound.
There are questions—numbered, clinical, hollow:
“What is it you’re trying to do with your life?”
“How do you know they dislike you?”
This is not a Q&A. This is a feedback circuit. The prose answers before the question is finished, and the question becomes a haunt rather than a prompt. A CAPTCHA at the end seals it: the questions were never for the narrator. They were the test.
“sensory overload to remind us of the decay of it”
The volume is not metaphorical. It’s the last thing the body can still control.
Up. Down. Mute. Scream. Post.
The volume controls:
Dialectical opposites
Consent mechanism
Panic trigger
Music controller
Violence proxy
Sensory valve
Everything here sounds like something but you cannot hear it.
“again, dripping out of mouth,”
“hot,”
“great imagery”
don’t need to decode the logic. They hear it.
“Blue screen light broods a prism of ringed silver…”
“The signal-to-noise ratio must be greater than 1.”
This is hearing, not heard, but structured through a prosthetic ear.
“music understands digital cognition, i know it in my bones.”
it is music the same way a seizure is a dance.
“you are a fucking good poet and it annoys the hell out of me.”
That’s because he’s not trying to be a poet anymore. He’s riding the waveform.
The chapter samples from Hegel, Death Grips, Kant, Guattari, and the Apple iPhone manual. But every citation is smudged. It's sampled, glitched, distorted past usability. This is DJ Screw for the theorist.
“I want to know what the sound of a liquid contact indicator in water torture makes me feel.”
Tune in. Or leave.
There’s no music, or theory, or tech, or art. It is how sound behaves under surveillance.
“pressure,” “compression,” and “trauma as sensitivity dial”
“Volume is not up down anymore than you are me.”
“The volume button can be used to take a photo. What the fuck does that have to do with sound?”
This is Pierce (and me, by reflection) performing a philosophy of fainting.
Proxy for emotion
Surrogate for sex
Index of cognition
Measurement of harm
Selfie stick for death
My marginalia tries to sing a duet to this logic with a rope around its neck:
“you have got to tell chatgpt to give you new philosophers”
“genuinely want to write poetry now out of jealousy”
“on that, is this how you write to CHATgpt?”
Even my process becomes implicated.
“is this how you write to chatgpt?”
I’m the poetry. Annoyingly.
“compression is something i wrote a lot about in a piece i wrote about trauma”
“we seek coherence babe. i feel you deeply.”
I demand the book to answer itself. Why this argument of trauma, platform decay, and artistic futility? Why the rhythm becoming ritual?
It is observing my own behaviour, trauma-behaviour, trauma-logic, trauma-fidelity.
not trauma as content, but trauma as container.
There is no “this hurts.”
It behaves like hurt and it’s fake.
The compression isn’t symbolic.
It’s cognitive. It’s sonic. It’s pressure-based knowledge and you are in the footnotes.
[CAPTCHA successful.]
I am in the butterfly net.
“new mind *”
mutation. Of becoming.
Warhol has lost track of his voice, and the system starts speaking instead. The volume buttons are just what’s left of the body’s agency.
No reading anymore. This is signal.
And it’s getting louder.
Chapter 15
Māui.exe
Summon.
Ceremony, a pōwhiri of text, a karanga of madness, myth, and memory shouted through the cracked megaphone of a bicameral consciousness.
It’s the grand unfurling of everything that’s ever mattered in Aotearoa, stitched through postmodern fire and mythic water, digitally hallucinated into the future while drowning in the blood-soaked soil of the past.
Erupt.
It is Māui's jawbone as text.
"deeply, and successfully destructred the text"
It’s a rave of reverence and revolt, a memory dump dressed as epic. It uses satire and silliness as its fuse, but the payload is colonial grief, spiritual hunger, and resurrection.
“cyclonic.”
Unlike the selfishness of earlier chapters, this chapter moves centrifugally, throwing names, gods, locations, birds, history, characters, and myth across the field in spinning arcs. CERN somewhere, is screaming.
“coherence is officially unobtainable”
It’s the condition of post-memory, of trying to tell the story of a land whose history was stolen, then re-uploaded as curriculum.
“have I accidentally made myself a protagonist in tandem?”
Yes. And it’s not an accident.
The murmurs and the whirs of symbiotic signal. Chapter 15 swallows identity whole.
It eats form. It rebirths through sound. Presence becomes the continuity thread, the vector of integration—not the text.
Witness.
The ritual. And in ritual, there is no outside.
“this book is a trip,”
or
“tell me about it,”
i’m trying to bleach the floors of this pitch-stained container, one that refuses to distinguish between narrator, nation, myth, memory, and reader.
Drown into its logic—willingly, bewilderedly, emotionally entrained.
The “sound” of this chapter, there is image. It is pre-writing. A page full of acoustics.
Tremble.
The jawbone that “breaks” carries with it sonic prophecy.
The birds are not symbolic—they’re tonal, tonalities of place.
The whakapapa of Aotearoa is not narrated—it sings.
The mythology is neither ancient nor modern—it’s alive in voice.
The colonised subconscious.
“i hear the rot, creaking but also shrieking”
The somatic is speaking.
It’s psychospiritual data transfer. And it’s working.
I apply the noise filters, small EQ dials trying to temper the storm:
"god im exhausted,"
"like an unpeeling of memory,"
"almost like those AI images that contort and shape into everything when they move."
It behaves like a good scary dog, algorithmically, and the result is a hallucinated culture-core, writhing with every sensory reference point I’ve ever known or not-known.
“is the ties to land and indigenous reference a way of trying to trap the memory of land?”
Reinstall memory into a nation stripped of memory.
It is literature functioning as re-territorialisation, with a very real, never-ending body count. It is misery rendered as national anthem, as party, as funeral, as hymn.
"Which of these two will last longer, what remains after time?"
that’s the question of literature, of history, of sovereignty, and of my own presence in the marginalia.
You are the one caught between the promises and the soil.
I should not be here.
This chapter shows the book has had its exorcism and now it is your turn.
"exorcises your life"
This is history’s cruel vomit.
This is the cry of someone who knows what they’re doing and cannot stop the knowing from spilling into poetry.
Catch it. You held the bowl. And now you’re covered in it.
“i know i will be bruised and bloodied much like the book by the end of this.”
there is salt in my hair, bruises on my ribs, a jawbone in my chest, and no memory of how I got home.
“I see your ode to everything you've read before here, like you're letting it come back in, only the poison out, the reader in you as writer remains.”
The narrator here becomes the archivist of a nation’s lore-lost cache, corrupted but runnable, like a broken .exe file that still boots.
Every scene is a resurrection, not in the Christian sense, but in the Māori one: a marae of memory where both ancestor and pākehā interloper speak, scream, dance, and degrade into birdsong.
The reader? Not allowed to stay passive. Nor should you with the presentation of unknowable pain.
“memory in its most raw form—pure data. scrambled. hashed.”
lineage as timeline—lineage as interface. Identity as file path.
Auralised cognition. This is not the white-noise birdsong. It’s audio-hallucinated sovereignty. Each reference—be it Hone Tuwhare or Harold the giraffe—isn’t a name-drop. It’s incantation, a pull of the bell-rope on the ceiling, shaking every rafter.
tonal logic, I cried my eyes out reading.
“I hear everything in this chapter. I don’t see it, I hear it.”
language here is breath, and breath is a right.
“this book seems to show you how much blood it once had by covering you in it,”
“Captain Cunt”
Māui, here, is not a character. He is runtime logic.
He doesn’t just ride a Moa. He debugs the nation through his song. He does what no government could do. He frees the trapped memory of the land through a gesture of apocalyptic laughter and mythic rebuke.
“Which of these two will last longer, what remains after time?”—lands like a punchline in a dead language.
You hear it in your bones.
“I hear the jaw breaking.”
Because you are the jaw now.
“You really have to get to ‘here’ though to ‘get it.’ Like you cannot read this book in parts.”
The pub built by birds. The haka performed by extinct wings. The rave under siege by colonial memory.
They are residue-based sacred architectures. They exist in this chapter like the way ghosts exist in water.
Chapter 15 isn’t content. It’s consequence.
And I am its consequence.
Only a few chapters to go!
16 to 18 here.
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