Excerpt from Next-Level Spleen by John Kelsey

The network-disgust that's experienced by even the most positive-minded artists today is captured in our continued abuse of the meme "LOL," which becomes ever more applicable in direct correlation to the degree that we overkill it and wear it out.  Not even a word, the term itself performs the loss of language and of laughter, even.  It's a disembodied and thus efficiently transmissible abbreviation of laughter that in its repetition seems to reveal both the ecstasy and the anxiety of our nonstop displacement within social media.  An overwritten, highbrow press release about networks may be LOL.  Or a JPEG of a knowingly failed painting.  But mostly LOL signals the amputation of laughter from the body and its recoding as the silent, poison-like dart flight of a postword within a network.  The more we abuse it, the more it functions as the postlaughter of wit minus bodies, always somehow aimed at the bad faith of postcommunal connectivity.