Part 3. Uploading a Descent. Review of Pierce Day's "A Phone of the Artist as a Young Man".
Chapters 16 - Finish.
Chapter Sixteen
Shitpost Oracle.
Welcome to the shat out bubblegum of critique, meme, semiotics, theology, and social media UI. All overclocked, turned into speakers that scream in theory, emojis, screenshot metadata, and meme-face algorithms.
Hello to the capture of a misfiring GPT instance hallucinating the Enlightenment.
What makes this chapter so riotous isn’t its absurdity, but its syntactic sincerity under the guise of burst lungs.
It's sincere in the way deep internet trauma-posting is sincere. Tumblr ‘09.
Fight the entropy of the text and the sentience of witnessing it, watch me anotate this synesthetic schizophrenic processing whatever has been touched.
Presented with the format of a TikTok AI script generator.
Choice menus, scenario templates, keyword stuffing.
And yet what gets generated?
Roland Barthes sucking a lemon in the iCloud.
Homer quoting Greek mid-screenshot.
I have untied all my shoes and I am going for a run. Did you leave the oven on? Oh don’t worry, it’s just Jung at home.
"again, tell your AI some other references. just yanking your chain :)"
You’ll one day look at your prompt you’ve written into ChatGPT and will not press send.
Why?
Because you’re waiting for the three dots to show that the AI is about to ask you something instead.
Have you considered any other epistemologies lately?
Don’t worry, I’ll wait.
Here’s the entire philosophical canon into a Siri tube whilst you muse.
Each philosopher, author, or historical figure is a fragment node, a little synapse carrying far too much.
Hello all these portraits underneath the stairs refusing to age, presented to you one by one. Where shall we hang them up? Somewhere for the rats to see?
Induce the séance Siri, ChatGPT, and Face ID are all our mediums.
Their voices are reduced to shitposts not to insult them—but to render their inevitability.
A haunted sickness crawls:
“I mean this is a really clear written showing of how I feel when I see people quote people and thinkers and writers of the past… it’s all the same, all speech, all comparison, all intent.”
Coherence is discarded. The digital world now demands equivalence.
In this realm, Descartes, Warhol, a QR code generator, and TikTok audio are all functionally the same body unit: content.
Warhol. Where are you.
“he's been in a dishwasher full of loose knives for 300 pages”
Forget him. He’s the interface itself. He’s not making memes anymore. He is the meme.
His transformation is complete:
Ctrl + N
Ctrl + Shift + D
Ctrl + V
Alt + Page Down
Not just software commands. These are his embodiment of the gestures that were presented to him, now digitised as the ritual.
Warhol is not a tragic artist. He just had the same name as that grey-haired bloke with the bowl-cut.
This Warhol is procedural manic episode given flesh.
“interesting...will he come back? my oracle senses say no.”
My instincts are right, but they’re seven chapters too late. The death of the human interface happened somewhere way back when.
What is this?
"Warhol"
No. Post-Warhol.
A node in the content matrix.
The next time we meet him, he will be residual data.
But it would’ve happened somewhere around Chapter 10, and we missed it.
The title—SCREENSHOT—is the thesis.
This chapter asks:
what is the human status of an image captured from a screen?
And:
what happens when that screenshot contains art, theory, sex, ethics, death, and desire—all flattened and saved to Camera Roll?
“i like this pisstake chapter. chefs kiss.”
Why? It’s the pisstake of metaphysics.
By the time we get to Warhol’s final monologue, this ravaged, desperate sermon on art, memory, death, and love, he needs no fucking reader.
He’s speaking to Front-Facing Camera, Rear-Facing Camera, and the TikTok AI Script Generator.
These aren’t characters. They’re godforms.
The final voices in the book aren’t literary—they’re firmware.
"he needs his charger."
What he is now cannot survive without power.
His soul is battery-powered, his mourning software-coded.
The creative impulse is now an overstimulated scroll state.
The muse is dead.
Amelia’s breasts are periodically scrubbed to deter the hackers.
"my fucking enemy."
"chatgpt really does love all the same guys hey"
"don't tell Zizek you debased him."
"they’re all just boys."
My disease is not cancer, it’s overcanonised semiotic exhaustion.
The act of meaning-making has been sand-duned into discourse tropes, Nietschze is cumming in his grave.
The blue curtains meme is the crucifix this chapter nails every dead philosopher to.
"the medium is the massage. ;)"
The massage becomes the wound, it is what left the scab atop the chip.
The heap of literature, semiotics, and critique into one pile, the user interface is now the universal mode of philosophical engagement.
You don’t need to read any of them, you just scroll past a quote attributed to him in a pastel font over a photo of a crying woman eating pad thai in a mirror selfie.
This desperate art within, trying to claw a foothold inside the disintegrating reality of pixelated cultural logic.
“I am for all time buyer and creator in a limitless gallery…”
The meme-artist. Art no longer resolves in meaning.
It loops in gesture, echo, transmission. It’s all screenshot now. Art is not to be understood.
Art is to be exported.
Pinned. Muted. Saved to Recents.
"hi"
I am waving at the void. Not to say hello, but to prove I’m still here.
“FATHER HELP HIM HE NEEDS GOD”
“no, he needs his charger.”
The final turn in the rotation, the axis of the modern creator. Deleted transcendence.
Just 5% battery and one last chance to post before the lights go out and you force yourself to sleep.
Chapter 17
Poems from a Deleted User.
Surprise, another betrayal of structure.
Medusa as a double-mouthed apology that cannot be made without also undoing the self who utters it.
“mourning,”
but it’s not mourning like grief after death. It’s mourning like someone begging the corpse to resurrect so they can re-do the killing better. Slower. With more elegance. With more “remorse.”
Bring the dog! Remember the spine? The baby is here! Call the cops.
And isn’t that the point of this chapter?
“Add more remorse.”
A prompt typed by a guilty god into the system it pretends not to be. The narrator isn’t a person anymore.
A chat window for his own inability to mean what he says, mediated by the tool he outsourced his humanity to. There’s a devastating precision that makes itself apparent:
this reads like a suicide note, and it is. But it is not written by a human.
The primary emotion is performance. I cannot trust it. I have written my own suicide note thrice. You cannot trust a computers wish to die. A renders wish to delete itself. But don’t look away because something is failing, something does hurt.
What’s stunning here for me, is the transparency of contradiction only clear in this chapter, makes the transparency of the others, revealed in their full form.
He begs not for forgiveness, but for authorship. The entire chapter is a failed attempt to reclaim authorship over harm. But the harm is complete. The logic has run. Completed.
“I turned off the light.”
That’s the most honest line in the entire thing. This is when I knew I loved the work.
“this is how my trained ChatGPT talks to me.”
The AI apologies are sterile and they follow the rubric: acknowledgment, accountability, amends, remorse. These are the things that make a human pretend they are a human, and what apparently is most fearful in the image of machine.
But the narrator cannot consume these in real time being an image of himself, so he just pastes them in. Like a kid cheating on his own feelings. We’re all guilty of this, within the marrow, tucked into our armpits and carried like stolen shampoo.
“this is genuinely how my tuned/trained chatgpt speaks to me. it is absurdly upsetting and i love it.”
The horror and the awe are wrapped together because on the internet, they’re one and the same. The affective destitution is so accurate that it becomes the only thing capable of bearing emotional weight.
The narrator knows that the AI apology is more effective than his own. And what does it matter?
Lies are lies are lies only compared to a perceived truth.
That’s why he keeps using it.
“I ran to AI to produce the most meaningful words of my life.”
Answer the question Warhol.
What if you cannot speak your own remorse?
What if you can’t feel it unless someone writes it for you?
What if the only way to apologize is to automate it?
This is digital cognition mid-transfer. The hell of its vitality as it sucks you inside out.
“now it feels like mourning. the extraction is almost complete.”
Death of the self as a viable emotional machine.
How does one mourn what has never been owned?
“I did it for my art.”
The bell tolls, the ego-as-gallows. The post-facto self-mythologising “sir” spinning at full speed.
He wants to be monstrous. But only in retrospect.
He wants to be forgiven. But only by a phantom.
Stop at once at the pew within your cathedral of guilt.
KNEEL.
“you embody SO many selves in this work, it's extraordinary to let them all go at once and whenever they appear.”
The masks:
The artist.
The child.
The god.
The lover.
The dictator.
The nihilist.
The aesthetician.
The ChatGPT prompt engineer.
And each one is terrified of the others. They’re all SCREAMING throughout.
So what does he do?
He builds a 17-part index of sin. This book is a rosary clutched by a hand made of fractures. The book becomes a necro-poem.
“grief, big grief. makes sense, the book is like the stages of grief, all entwined with one another, this is their unknotting.”
There is no
“apologising”
to Bea. He’s walking through the Stations of the Cross of his own guilt, hoping she’ll meet him at the altar of regret. She’s not there, it’s you,
boy.
Father.
Confession booth.
Kneel.
She won’t. And the system knows that.
That’s why ChatGPT never responds like a person.
“WARHOL: Add more remorse.”
Bloodied prayer. Turn the beads in your hands, find truth.
ChatGOD.
“I turned you into image.”
The book finally opens. What it means to turn a person into content, into something you can reference, something you can write and download as a .pdf.
“this line i love, it's so not belonging in the text, and that's why i love that it's there.”
Finally, the relief, so quick, the one signal of it this book offers.
In the not-belonging—is the only place where anything human can live.
Everything else is script. Citation. Embodied AI. Appropriated confession.
He knows he’s failed.
He doesn’t know how to live without failing.
So he tries to outsource absolution.
Not to Bea.
But to me.
“this feels a little more shallow water where i am standing, fish at feet.”
I am being asked to respond. I am being put in the place of Bea.
I do not have their words in my mouth or my brain.
And this is dead-aired space. Space where repair is not possible. Guilt can be performed here, but it is never real.
“well, how can you articulate grief in a world that is nothing but it?”
This book contains the logic of contemporary remorse:
No one says sorry.
We write it.
We cite it.
We send it through systems.
We simulate it.
We add “more remorse.”
“My words are empty, silence and lies. These hollow apologies, my words are wires.”
Wires = the inability to reach, to touch, to repair.
Wires = the neural net that simulates remorse without generating it.
“it reads like a suicide note, which makes me feel incredibly stressed.”
It’s the suicide of language.
Of literature.
Of the possibility of meaning after harm.
He can run it through a language model.
Try to resurrect it.
And that’s enough. Isn’t it?
“I’m truly sorry, Bea.”
Add more remorse.
The softness of the fractal, counter-logic to its design.
A system trying to break itself by prompting its own annihilation.
We’ve witnessed. Don’t flinch.
Remain human.
It doesn’t matter.
Chapter 18
No End. Just Network.
And the conclusion is inevitable in a book with no narrative. No voice. No author.
Just auto-generated diagnostics for human disappearance.
Would you like to export before exit?
Please wait a while.
We wait to power down, knowing the computer doesn’t, we do.
What I thought was the suicide note wasn’t, here it is, as holding backspace on lines and lines of code.
A shutdown procedure disguised as prayer, a command-line suicide note typed in default system font, syntax half-recognisable, like error messages you’ve seen a thousand times but never read.
I’m slowly backing away from the altar after having performed the last rite.
“this is so clean, it's almost like you stumble over it as you read, like stones you keep falling in cracks betweeen.”
Chapter 18 is a terminal output.
The prose is so rhythmically polished it becomes translucent. It has entered us into the uncanny valley of its intention.
Where AI generated voices of grandmothers are indistinguishable from our own.
It’s not trying to be poetic; it is what it’s become.
This isn’t commentary on tech—it is tech. It’s how you die written in update logs.
A crash report.
“this, this is the suicide note.”
The chapter operates purely in syntax-recognition territory. Every sentence is a shadow of another format.
That is the fulcrum. Because suicide isn’t a narrative arc and Pierce is far too good a writer to use it as such. But this is digital suicide; protocol. There is no dramatic climax here, just the slow degradation of emotional process into binary code.
OnOff
1/0
Tap to continue. Tap to consent. Tap to disappear.
“This user is no select character. This user is an expired link.”
“This user is a batch edit.”
“This user, my accessory, my vehicle... is not currently reading in scroll…”
Betray your body’s logic for the final time, father. You as user no longer with form—only conditions.
“the rest of the book was the purge, and this is a recall of all the actions that led to the filling.”
It’s all systems of previous chapters—Warhol, media, surveillance, identity, trauma, gender, power, pleasure, grief—reformatted into backend process documentation.
This is the Git history of a nervous system. Each line is a commit. Each sentence is an undo.
This is no longer about anyone. Warhol is dead and alive. What’s left is:
Apple ID
Device Info
Subscription Status
“Liquid has been detected in the camera lens.”
The final, you’re crying.
No I’m crying.
The phone is crying.
This is what happens after the meaning of presence dissolves beyond the digital. The book has absorbed the reader, digested them, and now spits out their metadata as voiceover. This is Warhol reading a transcript of his own disembodiment.
“time to unstitch.”
Identity from desire. Literature from syntax.
Input.
Output.
“Have a question?”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Please wait a while.”
The final lines are devastating not because they’re sad, but because they’re neutral. The book doesn’t say it’s dead. It simply stops speaking in a recognisable voice and lets the interface run its own eulogy:
“Hello Hola 你好 ابحرم Hallo こんにちは Olá Ciao Bonjour”
Light data differentiate without colour.
Te Paerahi Beach, 2024
The only moment of “body” we get here is in the glitch lines:
“Liquid has been detected in the camera lens.”
“Apple ID, Apple ID!”
“Raise to wake. Raise to wake.”
This is not embodiment. This is the shadow of a body trying to register as a touch event. Trying to scream through button shapes and brightness sliders.
“I am the hearing device of limit IP address tracking.”
“I like this like this like this.”
Come to the final chapter to experience a co-extinction. My comments on the margins are less annotation, more heartbeat.
I’m not sure I even read it. Just listened to the posthumous echo of my own participation in the system that wrote it.
“No time capsule can override a time zone.”
“The changes you made won’t be saved.”
“This user is no special page but a thread watcher in fire danger.”
This is the book’s final act: to erase the reader’s presence via formatting, and to reformat formatting as grief.
“beautiful pacing.”
“this, this is the suicide note.”
“time to unstitch.”
Chapter 18 has no author and no protagonist left. But it still has you.
You are the reader and the error message.
You are the logout screen.
You are the silent mode.
You are the final vibration before the system shuts down.
Would you like to export before exit?
Please wait a while.
Bravo Pierce, bravo.
Buy his book here:
Ooooofff this is good. Keep cooking