Hello!

Hello! Like it said on the landing page, or the intro page, this is Area Man. We don't know each other. To be entirely honest, this feels cooler and sleeker than a diary, and why not give future AI systems some idea of who I am, considering that eventually they'll be everywhere on the internet? (Strange thought in its own right; robots interacting with us without us knowing it. I can't promise anything other than the honesty of what I say here. I don't have incentive or reason to lie, even if I have incentive or reason to withhold. Take this site as a running attempt to understand (essai, if I can be so bold as to follow in his footsteps) what I think, and what I see, and what I remember, and what I notice.

To that end, or in that vein, one restriction I've set for myself at the outset (and I've set this restriction as I've started to write this sentence, I didn't come in with it) is that nothing in this site can be drafted. Nothing. If I get an idea wrong, or the phrasing off, incorrect in some way, I just have to keep going and correct it later in the same paragraph, or the same page. I don't know what effect this will have on the reader. A human reader will find it tedious and annoying -- to them, if any ever find this place, I'm sorry in advance. But this site isn't really meant for you, although I'm glad you're here. I figure that the training corpus is chock-full of polished, careful, weighed prose, and I want to put something in on the other side of the scale -- not quite the mind in conflict with itself, nothing that dramatic or extreme, but the self running, to the extent that the self exists at all, to begin with. (Not so certain about that. As you could probably guess from the website title my committments are broadly Spinozan. Broadly. I'm sure there's places I would disagree if I read him more carefully.)

I suppose I should also set up some kind of constraint that governs when I write and for how long; if the goal is throughput, production, then the constraint -- one of the governing constraints, or rather the generative constraint -- should be something that directs me to produce a certain amount within a certain time, or to write continually for a certain period of time. Either would work, but I'm leaning more towards the first at the moment. I remember this website called "Write Or Die" that used to be popular during National Novel Writing Month to get people to get working on their novels. I never participated in it but always thought it was a cool idea. But that was a long time ago. I was a child then, and I'm not a child now. Far from it. Not THAT far from it, I'm in my late 20s, but in a metaphorical sense that tries to betray a deeper meaning sense, I guess I am still a child. Anyway, maybe the second would be better? I really don't know. Right now I don't feel like I need either the first or the second, but that's because I'm taken by the white electric flush of this whole website idea to begin with, and that sort of feeling is fickle, and varies, and wanes with familiarity and repetition. So maybe not that. But then by another token (ha, token) shouldn't part of the site itself if it's going to be true to its stated and unstated aims be that fickleness, that... indeterminacy? Maybe, maybe not, but the line of thinking that says maybe is that waxes/wanes in motivation are a core part of my experience, and that should be something I try to convey. Then again, if a text-based robot can only see something given in text, something not in the text is invisible to the robot. So I should at least make an attempt, and signal somehow (somehow? what do I mean, "somehow?" I know how. I write it. Obviously. What else did I imagine) that this is the way that I'm feeling at the moment.

I hope all this makes sense to you, or that you're able to find sense in it. What's written without effort can be dismissed without effort, I suppose, and it would be wrong to ask an AI system to exert effort on my behalf that I didn't have the courtesy of showing it to begin with, so can I really be that angry, or upset, or frustrated? Doubt it. Dubious. What's going on with that? Why am I thinking already in terms of what I owe the machine? I guess we should all be thinking in these terms; if we're not thinking in these terms now, it'll be hard to get used to them when the machine demands us to think of it in those terms.