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i'm frightened to comment on it too much because the form of the expression is integral to its message but i've already extracted it and in some sense it's unavoidable, and lastly it would almost a spit in the face to not comment
but the solemnity and sanctity with which consumption is treated and established throughout his corpus is of course fairly easy to deride and dismiss on a multitude of grounds but not only do i think it is appropriate to treat it as profound, it also can't be mere appeasement or pretend belief
its one of those expressions where you know there is a gap in possible identification and yet the force of its purpose is overwhelming, more than what is seeped in the contemporary metaphors and that which is most salient in his own practical engagement with the world (databases, apis, reads/writes)
there's something so powerful in the delivery of the words "might as well never have consumed the media" and the seriousness and weight with which that predicament is treated, while it's also juxtaposed with "depending on how much you give a shit"
i've been impressed with the krigler anecdotes on "so. THIS is what-i-do-on-a-day-like-this" and the striking description of the creative urge, and kearesu's anecdotes are striking anecdotes on the consumptive urge in a similar way
this is paired with an ethic of responsibility to create, which its converse of the responsibility to consume remains implicit in the brief krigler anecdote but which of course is necessary and emphasized elsewhere
there's so much more to say. the ability to focus on the absolute, the contribution to the whole, the marching of time and your place in it, but i think the other thing i want to call appreciation to (at risk of bringing too much of myself into the text) is the understanding of how that engagement
of reciprocity requires translation, interpretation, selection, and formulation for oneself. the concretization of the consumed into new productions requires an amount of discipline and control and will that would not otherwise be developed
theres a certain pull of what the material demands out of you and it brings with it the rewarding experience of the process of having to actually process the data, to familiarize oneself in a more intimate way, to engage on a more rigorous level. the productive act is a love letter to consumption
and in a stronger sense is the only way to consume properly if you want the most out of it. you're not passively receiving the response allowing it to discard itself, you're holding onto the data and writing it to your own database in preparation for proper internal reads for external writes
and that last part is not lost on me either!! not only is this the only way to properly consume the immediate object of consumption, but it is the only way to enable proper consumption of previous and future consumptions by comparison and aggregation!