"the grass is quicksand" & other existential crises
Hey it’s Brandon. This email is late – I meant to send it yesterday, but I had some personal stuff going on Friday and therefore got behind on everything else.
Two days ago, there was another Bandcamp Friday, and I released my second single from INFINITE NORMAL – "the grass is quicksand." You can now listen to it on Bandcamp, alongside a few bonus tracks. It'll also be on streaming next week.
The fun thing about "quicksand" is that it's a rare example of me having written most of a song on an acoustic guitar – I often write first either on a piano, or in the DAW (ie. my laptop). So it makes for a good "acoustic version" as well. I posted a video of me doing just this to YouTube in case you missed it.
Over the past week I've found myself in a somewhat continuous jaded haze given the news. I'd also just finished the Three-Body Problem book series, I haven’t been able to get them out of my head. So much of the ideas and stories in these books are incredibly relevant right now. (Spoiler alert.)
In the books, there’s a concept called a sophon – a subatomic particle (like a proton) which is manufactured by an alien species specifically to disrupt the ability of a species to advance scientifically. It’s programmed by the species to create random irregularities in scientific experiments, causing the scientist to be unable to definitively prove any new scientific theories – and therefore advance the scientific knowledge of humans. Because it’s subatomic, it can travel at near-light speed, meaning it can go anywhere almost instantaneously and disrupt dozens of bleeding-edge physics experimentation happening anywhere in the world.
If we never can prove new scientific theories, if we can’t explain the unexplainable, we stop developing. We regress.
There is another concept (in the 2nd book The Dark Forest) called the Wallfacer: a carefully-chosen individual who is tasked with devising an entire strategy for human species survival inside their own mind, such that it cannot be detected by the sophons. The Wallfacer has unlimited funds and access and can rationalize anything they do or ask for because it is inherently in the best interest of the human race and they cannot explain themselves, as doing so would risk exposure to the sophons. In the story, several Wallfacers are named, but most of them pursue ridiculous, catastrophically unethical solutions that arguably cross lines that humans shouldn’t cross. The one who doesn’t is basically perceived as a kook for large swaths of the story.
I sometimes feel like the anti-intellectualism that has taken over American culture (and now our government) is the sophons at work. It also feels like there is in fact some Wallfacer-like individual high up in the chain, perhaps even entirely out of the public eye, doing completely incomprehensible things that we may find out are catastrophic to the human race, even if well-intentioned.
I write this all after a weekend when the head of my country’s health & human services department blamed neurodivergence on vaccines and widely-accessible & almost-risk-free medication, and the majority of liberals on the internet seemed to rally around a theory that the current US president was dead or dying because he uncharacteristically fell out of the public eye for a few days. It feels like we’re all grasping to conspiracy theories these days, and I get why. Because in a chaotic world where you can now see almost all the chaos, it’s impossible to process & explain all of it in a way that we can feasible comprehend.
At least our chaos is mostly self inflicted, which means we can control it – it’s not like we have suns unpredictably burning and freezing the entire planet.
Hope you found this enjoyable and/or informative. Drop me a message on Bluesky or Threads.
Talk soon ✌️Brandon