So, too, in this digital agora—this virtualized agora ficta—does the modern writer find himself suspended between recognition and irrelevance, aspiration and alienation. My Substack, Karlstack, has garnered a modest retinue of paid subscribers, an assembly of loyal readers who sustain the fragile edifice of my public identity. It grows incrementally, and yet with each new reader, there remains a gnawing sense of inadequacy, an ineluctable awareness that I, like Tantalus, am consigned to a form of striving that admits no final consummation. A hundred subscribers beget the hunger for two hundred; three hundred spawn the void where a thousand should reside. Growth itself is experienced not as gratification but as a slow deepening of desire’s abyss.

I am, by objective metrics, not unsuccessful—tethered to some fragment of recognition, like a mariner clutching at the driftwood of online notoriety in a sea of obscurity. Yet even so, I remain marooned, adrift between two irreconcilable conditions: that of being somebody, and that of being nobody. It is this ambivalence, this impossible straddling of contradictory states, that transforms the mere act of writing into a Sisyphean exercise in self-reproach. With each post, I aim to hoist the weight of my ideas up the steep incline of cultural discourse, only to watch them tumble back into the vacuity of yet another week’s ephemeral controversies.

There is, in this sense, an ignoble futility to the entire enterprise, not unlike Sega’s ill-fated attempts to disrupt the gaming hegemony of the 1990s. The Sega Saturn, a machine possessed of prodigious potential, was rendered stillborn by poor marketing, mismanagement, and a technological structure so labyrinthine that even its creators seemed unable to harness its full capacities. A console perpetually deferred, never attaining the critical mass to cement its legacy, it exists now as a specter—a monument to unfulfilled promise. Is this not the perfect analogue to the trajectory of so many of our digital creations? We toil in obscurity, laboring over intricately structured texts that possess within them the latency of something grand, only to find ourselves stranded in a cul-de-sac of unacknowledged potential.

To inhabit the position of a Sega Saturn in a world that exalts the streamlined efficiencies of a PlayStation is to be perpetually on the cusp of irrelevance. And yet, there is something perversely liberating in embracing the Saturn’s plight. If I am to be washed up—if this endeavor is to be my own Saturnine failure—then I must at least revel in its esotericism, its abstruse architecture, its appeal to the few, the obscure, the marginal. Better to be the cult classic than the forgettable success, the Sega CD rather than the Xbox 360. For in the annals of mediocrity, it is the curious, the errant, the doomed-to-fail that attain a peculiar kind of immortality.

But even these rationalizations are hollow. For the heart of the matter is not metrics or legacy, but desire—desire unbound and unfulfilled, the desire that gnaws at the psyche of the writer, the so-called intellectual, who craves not just subscribers but validation, not merely attention but transcendence. And there, in the most unguarded recesses of thought, lies the true torment. It is not that I cannot achieve; it is that whatever I achieve will always, inevitably, fall short of that impossible horizon of self-worth that remains ever beyond reach.

It is a particularly modern form of impotence, this strange admixture of visibility and invisibility, which the ancients could scarcely have fathomed. The ancients spoke of the fates weaving the threads of human destiny, of being subject to divine caprice, but they never conceived of an existence dominated by algorithmic whims, by metrics, by the ruthless calculus of engagement rates and click-throughs. Where Tantalus was tortured by the direct hand of the gods, the modern Tantalus is tormented by abstractions, by percentages and dashboards, by the cold, indifferent apparatuses of the digital age that dangle before us the simulacrum of success while withholding its substance.

And so, like a Saturn collector painstakingly curating a library of obscure, untranslated JRPGs, I persist in my futile endeavor. Perhaps I will never be anything more than a novelty, a peculiar node in the vast network of thinkpieces and diatribes, a minor footnote in the history of Substack—a shadow of what might have been. Perhaps I will always be this particular kind of loser: Tall, Canadian, the son of a sperm donor, inexplicably compelled to churn out provocations about academia scandals in a country where such controversies are regarded with the same indifference that the Greeks bestowed upon the toils of mortals. And perhaps, worst of all, I will remain unloved—not for want of readers, but because of the inner void that no accolade, no subscriber count, no validation can ever fill.

But perhaps that is the fate of all of us who, like Tantalus, toil within sight of our desires: to be condemned to our own peculiar telos atelestos—an unending pursuit of that which forever recedes.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5603480&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310486",#48144360)