Can a piece of art be dated before it has even been released?
The internet is nebulous and wide and unbelievably segmented and small. I tried to write about a small part of it in 2022 and INTERNET BRAIN ROT emerged. Not fully formed, of course. In a lot of ways, I am releasing an unfinished work. It has made me anxious to think I could not make something timeless. However, it's two years later. My life and mental state have changed dramatically. I've gone through intense periods of grief, change and depression since then.
Not releasing this chapbook sooner is a regret I will have to live with. There was no time to put it out. I couldn't physically work on it most days and it just sat in my Google Drive, haunting me with its deficiencies, the way that the future kept coming and my work stopped feeling relevant. Poetry itself is a dated art form so writing a poem called 'simp' for example and then putting it out in the world in 2024 felt...cringe. There isn't any other word for it unfortunately.
I kept reading over the poems and wondering if I even agree with what I'm saying, if it reflects anything prescient. I have come to accept that each piece of work should be a reflection of the time it was written and INTERNET BRAIN ROT was conceived and written during lockdown when I was on Twitter and Tumblr half the day, and watching movies the other half.
Since I wrote it, compiled it and edited it, AI, Twitter (sorry, X) and misinformation have degraded the quality of the internet, making it feel more like a wasteland as opposed to a floating blue screen like I imagined in my work. There is a significant amount of guilt I feel for using generated text, even though during the editing process, it belonged less to the computer and more to me, being sliced and rearranged with every edit.
I was intentionally trying to sound like the computer. Every day, the computer is trying to sound more like me.
I release this collection, in earnest, to get these words off my back. What feels like a time capsule rather than a savage takedown is weighing down my brain more and more each day. I give it to you now. I hope you don't feed it to the machine.