There is a smell of desperation in the air for something as simple as feedback.
I saw a young adult sending tweets into the aether. Of course, I am one of these. Look here, where I write in a place with no mechanism for response... I wish to participate in the same activity but at least knowingly.
When I see someone posting obvious attempts to connect receiving no response, no response, nothing... I watch from behind the glass at a raving lunatic. At someone's thought process laid bare and bloody and craving an insufficient touch.
They ran an experiment where mothers would play with their babies, then stop paying attention and maintain a perfectly neutral facial expression for a period of one minute. The babies cried.
I'm walking past a cube truck, thinking, this is a non interactive object, this thing is not alive. When I walk through dirt I leave footprints. When I walk through city streets they accept as little of my existence as possible.
A video does not acknowledge my presence; it is the world without me in it. Were I to go back in time and experience it again, even in a deterministic universe I would be different, slightly different — and the replayed universe would not be, could not be, exactly the same ever again.
video removes the viewer, only the viewer, from the universe. a video replayed is the same every time.
Like the fool who stomps his roof, our fix for this is to create artificial feedback to replace that which has been lost. Interactive art, video games, control schemes, input and output, generative AI, and the illusion of being connected with others across time and space.
Nothing living can deny your existence.
Whatever transformation removes the living acknowledgment any system pays to you is a killing curse.
To ignore is not to kill; to ignore is to become dead; to ignore is to die.