Egg Tooth

Let's talk about the trap that encompasses even the attempt to escape it. Plus, a new take on an age-old escape tactic.

Dec 04, 2023

The traps

Some days. Some days, I wake up, put on my clothes, have a coffee, start to feel like I’m about something. I take a step. And no sooner than I do, I’ve stepped into a trap. Not every day. But often enough that I don’t feel all that smart.

To listen to a song, to talk to a friend (AT&T sends a note that they’re adding a $10 service I don’t want unless I log in with a long-forgotten password and click through a half dozen screens to say no thanks, guys), make a coffee (the light on the machine is blinking yellow now, which means you have to buy the cleaning pods) - everywhere there’s these parasitic conveniences.

Every step seems to be in service to an adversary, and I ask: How did my hurry become their force multiplier, as probably every middle-aged man has asked before.

This sense of being inside a series of traps only gets bigger. I want to see what’s going on in the world, and I run into a rage trap - the news wants me angry. I go to work and run into a wage trap - enough to live, but not enough to quit, barely enough to pick up my gaze and look around. The economy is stuck in a growth trap - it has to grow or terrible things begin to happen (See “Because There Is No Growth,” September).

The whole thing starts to look like a desert kite - these huge arrangements of low stone walls built in the days before farms and fixed settlements. Their purpose was to gently guide the mass-migrating herds of wild antelope, bison and so forth into a single area where they could be slaughtered in relative leisure.

Even during the times when I feel free, when I’m writing a book and running at full stride alongside the characters, situations and concepts, the sense of a trap persists. After it all, I still wind up with a book. It gets reviews and maybe a few sales on the killing floor of the market.

And as you may be starting to sense that whole spiel, the worst trap of all may well be my own mind. You could go deeper and say that I am enmeshed in desire, and, as a result, lost in an illusory nightmare of my own making. Fine. But this isn’t that kind of essay. Also, I’ve seen desire dry up in people - and it doesn’t always leave enlightenment in its place.

On my way to the store…

Maybe the fulfillment of every desire - to know, to have, to survive, to speak, to be seen or loved - is a step into a trap.

But there is something else at work.

When you go to meet a friend, or buy something you need, or to work, something else happens. You see something - a beggar singing, a building draped in mist, a young person who reminds you of something awkward you did, and makes you envy the mistakes you once believed you could make.

But you need to focus. So you do. You squint. As you get things done, something nags at you. Something seems missing. And why are you in such a bad mood all of a sudden?

It could be that every single one of us will die without a complete picture of what we’re involved in by being alive. The reasons why have been up for discussion since the tree of knowledge.

Getting in our own way

Regardless, there are glimpses, when we least expect them. The rest of the time, something holds us back. And the more I’ve tried to have those glimpses, the more it seemed that what holds me back is built directly into my best efforts.

So how can we begin see what we’re missing? Not through data as it's currently championed, which feeds mostly back to us what we've known or liked or said. This is kind of by design, as Timothy Leary (by way of Douglas Rushkoff) complained early on.

“(Leary) went on to explain his core problem with the Media Lab and the digital universe these technology pioneers were envisioning: ‘They want to recreate the womb.’ As Leary the psychologist saw it, the boys building our digital future were developing technology to simulate the ideal woman… a predictive algorithm could anticipate their every need in advance and deliver it directly….”
-Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest

Just to be clear, this is the digital future in which I speak to you today. This is no patient accretion of knowledge. It wasn’t even really designed in good faith. It was designed to be as a replacement womb – whatever you want, immediately - a thought-destroying, for-profit womb. That suffocating and infantilizing quality of the internet seems to be overpowering these days. And the apologists of our digital present have to spend more money and energy ignoring the damage every day.

The womb and the trap

Another way of understanding the seemingly impassible dead end of a trap is, however, as a womb. A trap and a womb both share uneasy sense of being enclosed and being held in place, with some sensory awareness of motion around you.

As anyone who’s spent any time with the Tibetan Book of the Dead will tell you, the identification of the womb with a trap is nothing new. In the between-life phase, the whole point of that book is to help keep you from volunteering for a womb, or at least selecting a less horrible one.

As anyone who’s been directly involved or closely adjacent to the birth of a child knows, the womb is great, for a while. But if you don’t get out, everyone involved could die.

Coincidence

So if the digital shadow of reality - the internet - is simply the latest shell of a massive trap, what is the way out? And if you’re being suffocated by something that claims to be giving you what you want, what do you do? The first clue is that it can’t be what you already know how to do.

What’s left is the wholly unknown. But where do you start to look for that?

A time-tested way to touch the unknown is through the so-called random non-sequitur. People have developed different tricks. You can flip to an arbitrary page of a books. You can listen to the utterances of women wild-eyed who have inhaled volcanic fumes. You can systematically derange your senses with liquor, drugs, sleep deprivation. You can flip to ancient poems as assigned by the tossing of sticks or the flipping of coins.

The point is that the truly unknown is always right here. It’s the shout in the street, the unexpected resemblance of a stranger, the lighting of a bird on the roof of a passing bus, sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming in our faces.

But today those moments are easier to miss. The trappers are smart. We carry electronic devices - which may be a tool and may be a trap - everywhere we go. And as a result, the nets of personal preference, personal habit and personal opinion close over us more regularly and more tightly than before. The digital womb seems to constrict. And we all feel a little queasy - not because of the so-called blue light of the screens - but because we know that the point of a womb is to leave it.

Egg tooth

This sense of pervasive and uneasy enclosure is half of the story. The other half, for me, has always been the experience of how the world can be suddenly and irrevocably reinterpreted to something entirely different - perhaps a paradise - in an instant.

This sense of an enclosure, outside of which waited boundless possibilities as to what we might think and see is a big part of what inspired the multi-year development and refinement of Forget This Good Thing. Think of it as a pocket knife for relief and even possibly escape from this trap - an egg tooth for this womb.

Forget This Good Thing is an attempt - by turns playful and deadly serious - to use coincidence to turn your phone into a functioning oracle. It’s the nemesis of Google, because it can tell you not only what you don't know, but what you don't necessarily want to hear.

It’s the beggar on the way to the office, the mist-shrouded building on the way home. It interrupts. It interferes with the imprisoning tendencies of all minds global and personal. We know you need it because we need it too. That said, no promises. Stay awake.