Over the course of history scent has been imbued with medical properties it doesn’t possess, but it can also have very real physical and psychological effects, including unanticipated ones; and it can at least suggest the fulfillment of our needs and desires. Once it was said to ward off miasma; now it gives texture to otherwise formless days during lockdown and makes otherwise uninhabitable spaces feel like home.

Quarantine sparked the idea that “nature is healing” in the outside world, but said less of domesticated nature, which thrives on human attention. The science of how plants interpret their surroundings through sonic vibration is uneven and somewhat haphazard, but the role of houseplants and music in the home take equal precedence: Music for plants is ambient sound for your living home, not just for you, but ultimately it’s all for you.

A haunted object relies on a singularity of experience, an event or series of events, each with a fixed time and place. Yet here in "The Hands Resist Him," up for bid on eBay, was a painting so haunted that any representation of it, whether png or a paper copy, had somatic effects in home viewers and home printers alike. Rather than diminishing it, each copy only seemed to amplify its power.

Viral videos of animals capture the impossible and the impossibly rare. But the new techniques also encourage a kind of emotional projection. Infinite looping gifs, Instagram stories, and features like Boomerang work as a kind of synecdochal butchery, reducing an animal to an isolated constituent part or motion: That sudden wobbliness and narcoleptic bellyflop that reminds you you’re so very tired too.

AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky described the feeling of intuition as the way our “cognitive algorithms happen to look from the inside.” An intangibly human gut response is just as socialized (programmed) as anything an algorithm might “feel” on the inside, clinging to its intuitions as well. It should be enough to take the algorithms’ output at face value, the preferences they ascribe to me, or to trust that it is the best entity to relay its own experience. But I’m greedy; I want to know more. What does it see when it looks at me?

There is no small irony in assigning a name to a form predicated upon resisting meaning, like penning a press release for a protest without demands. Yet it feels very right that asemic writing should emerge from that particular Y2K moment of hurtling globalization, techno-pessimistic paranoia and neon-lit fishtanks; a time of semiotic overstimulation where signs swarmed like white blood cells and where, in the immortal words of Horse_ebooks, everything happens so much.