Speaking as a young person (TM), I've been interested in de-technologifying or de-digitifying (or however you say it) my life.
Millennials and Zoomers have been raised on the Internet, entirely online for all of their lives. So hopefully this would also serve as a kind of inspiration too for anyone else in my situation to join the movement and maybe even for future generations if they stumble on this post.
I am a bit of an outlier, in terms of my habits and because my parents pushed me to spend time away from devices, which gives me more of a mature person's outlook, but even then I still spend way too much time on the Internet by normal standards.
This has led to the kind of existence I talked about in my post called 'simulation country', where most people and especially young people are hooked up to some kind of virtual / digital / technological opium 24/7. For girls, social media platforms, and for guys, video-games (Instagram is really the female version of an MMO game).
It leads to a situation where you fast-forward through your life-- and then you wake up, you're in your 30s, and you've never done anything other than walk on some digital treadmill. Then you talk to your parents and they did all kinds of things by the time they were 19, and if you're not totally zapped out, you feel like you have nothing. Very sad, and disturbing.
It's not just the lack of relationships or the lack of sex (those are the external aspects, which show up in the statistics) but really the lack of complexity and depth in people's emotional lives, including my own-- we are living very empty, robotic, hollow, existences. Like I said, it's as if someone pressed the fast-forward button and were trying to skip over life without any of the interesting bits, just one mindless distraction after another.
I've also noticed quite a few Millennials seem to have this kind of
jaded know-it-allness and cynicism, despite literally knowing nothing
about most subjects and having no social experiences. This is especially
common on Twitter, where you can read some of the most empty retarded
ignorant hopelessly wrong opinions delivered as if they were verified by
God Himself, with a tone of snarky superiority etc although it's also common on YT (video essays being
the biggest offenders). Hopefully this doesn't infect as many Zoomers, but who knows.
Being online 24/7 also feeds into the mental illness epidemic, too. However for this series I'll try to stick to the smaller aspects or secondary effects, since most people are aware of the big problems like suicide, bullying, widespread access to porn and gore / violent videos, etc.
In this series I would also not just be thundering down as a superior or like some latter-day prophet castigating sinners (which I do have quite the tendency to do, if you haven't noticed). By looking at something which I'm guilty of, it forces the tone to be more humble.
I'll also add that when I look at my experiences, it's really the moments when I was least
online that have been the most memorable, productive, satisfying,
interesting, and so on.
In the same way that monopolies and cartels in the economy should be broken down into smaller pieces, Internet usage also needs to be dialed down, and re-focused into developing various skills, instead of passively relying on one mega-device to do all the work, while suffering from all kinds of downsides and secondary effects.
(To make matters worse the mega-device has been designed by some of the most evil and lazy people in society, the tech oligarchs. All the more reason to DISCONNECT.)
RETVRNING to the real world means going back to various different devices and tools, instead of solely relying on one, developing your own skills and hobbies, rather than becoming another account, and living a more fulfilling interesting life, with both ups and downs, rather than a bland monotonous existence of treadmills and sanitized corporate slop.
You can call it an old-fashioned view, but I also believe that young people who preach socialism or anti-capitalism need to practice it in their own lives first, in order to show that their beliefs aren't just cheap talk.
ReplyDeleteOne of the problems holding back most pro-worker / populist movements is that their leaders call themselves anti-materialistic and anti-consumption, and make a big show of being humble and pro-labor and environmentalism, but in reality it turns it's all a show and that they're just bitter that they'll never be able to afford expensive luxury items or land a super high income job, since the Boomers beat them to it. When you look at their actual behavior, they are just as materialistic and consumptive and selfish, sometimes worse, but it just takes place online.
So if you condemn big corporations, monopolies, etc-- but then you spend all your time consuming corporate slop on a super-centralized censored platform Reddit or Twitter, then your beliefs are just fake posturing.
Or you look down on your Boomer relatives for buying their 7th home or going endless luxury cruises, but your entire real-world personality and behavior revolves on doing what would get the most likes on Instagram or views on Youtube.
Dunking on easy targets allows people to inflate their self-esteem, which in turn makes them blind to their own bad behavior.
It's the same in my case, which is why this series is more interesting / a breath of fresh air.
ReplyDeleteThe US government, economy, culture, etc-- it's all being led right off the cliff by suicidal addicted morons.
This was true for Biden, and it's true for Trump too. Biden and Trump are just different flavors of the same type of senile bitter rage, the left-wing / ANTIFA version and the right-wing / ICE version. Since neither of these leaders, or their parties, is capable of more maturity than the average 7 yr old, it's very easy to criticize them-- you just need to have a functioning brain, and emotional / financial distance from the whole spectacle.
However this just inflates my self-esteem and leads to excessive self-righteousness and thundering down, which I'm tired of (and I imagine most readers too).
By talking about something else that isn't just the same old same old, and which is closer to heart, hopefully the tone will be less angry, more humble, and more interesting.
Also, happy Thanksgiving!
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of being anti-technology, I am still wondering if I shouldn't branch off and start making some other form of content.
ReplyDeleteMaybe a recorded lecture? Or a YT video / stream?
I'm a much better speaker and talker than I am a writer, so that's a possibility and it would be more accessible.
Plus since I do have these scholarly and academic inclinations, I could get them out of my system and feel like I'm speaking to a real audience of sorts.
Some long-term themes that have been on my mind lately, which I wouldn't be against making a video out of:
1) Millennials were shafted by the system, but they weren't hit hard enough, and so they overwhelmingly chose to sell out to it and be a part of it in order to just barely make it. That's why the majority of BLM revolutionaries, Green-types in Europe, woke people in general, and other counter-productive "radicals" (servants of the establishment) are Millennials.
This is why so many commercials these days all have this tone of creepy weirdness, almost like you're being groped (it certainly feels like that to watch them), with nobody doing or saying anything about it and just along with it. That's their whole life experience, getting felt up and molested by sleazy oligarchs, global corporations, cartels, etc and just going along with the whole thing like a bunch of passive cucks.
Zoomers all grew up without any prospects of success, meaning the door had slammed shut (and it will be the same for any future generations). Since the basic structure of society stopped working when they turned 20 (ideas like 'work hard and you'll make it' and 'study in school and you'll get a good job' are so openly fake people aren't even cynical about them), they're more in the Mangione / fighting direction, on the left, and in the anti-woke direction, on the right (the backlash against that garbage among young people is only taking place now that Zoomers have replaced Millennials, whereas it was at its absolute worst and peak of insanity before).
2) The world we live in is boring, sterile, and technologically retarded. Progress is fake if we can't clean streets, build new things, or even maintain existing ones. It's just there for the retards to say 'Now with 20% more AI!!!' even if the actual device or machine or system is a scam and doesn't work, or generates garbage.
3) Twitter is the NY (or the Paris, London, SF, etc) of social media platforms. They sell it to you as the place to be but it's really a post-apocalyptic wasteland of junkies and vagrants, with a handful of super-rich elites who do nothing for a living.
The endless commercials, video games, and movies that all have this bizarre theme of creepiness, unease, and weirdness are everywhere these days-- they are the mainstream today, rather than being just characteristic of some niche group of weirdos, like they would have been in some other decade.
ReplyDeleteAnother point I should have made when talking about movies-- it's not that today's movies are "bad", in the sense that they try to emulate previous movies but fall short, it's that in many cases their goal is to make something repulsive, alienating, and hostile to the audience.
So "fixing them" is not a question of providing them with the right techniques, since that naively assumes it's a technical problem, but rather wiping out or neutering the forces that are pushing them in that direction.
A central theme of wokeness is debasing and degrading the dignity of the audience, the public, Americans etc, by pushing more and more awful garbage into the societal ecosystem under the guise of improving it or lIBeRaTiOn or whatever ("sex work", normalizing hard drug use, filling the streets with mentally-ill psychos, etc). It's just they do it through the left-wing / government / public sectors, rather than the corporations, so according to the retards on social media IT'S AKCSHUALLY GOOD to get abused, as long as the Democrats are the ones doing it of course, and not the evil Republicans.
However in this case I think it's also a reflection of Millennials' experience, how they see themselves and the role they took in the society. Namely, that instead of fighting the system and going out with dignity, the route they took was to completely sell out to it (while not even getting that much from it as a reward), out of passivity and cowardice and spinelessness.
That's why there's this constant theme of something wrong or weird or creepy going, but none of the characters does anything, they just quietly go along with it and accept it, effectively normalizing the inversion of reality. That's who they are, and that's what they're doing, as a group.
In exchange for enslaving themselves to the system, their new overlords did allow them to act out some of their online revenge fantasies IRL. They have many of those, due to a whole life-time of repeatedly getting cucked by colleges, by Boomers, by the job market, and in general, while never doing a single thing about it.
ReplyDeleteThe only stipulation was that as long as those revenge fantasies went after the approved enemies of the system, and not any of the big oligarchs or corporations or honchos.
And, like the biggest bunch of seething hall monitor faggots in all of human history, that's exactly what they did-- as in Gaza (right-wing version) or the BLM riots (left-wing).
And those are just the most salient examples.
The common theme is lashing out against innocent people, out of impotent fury, appointing yourself as some kind of grandiose superior and enforcers of the rules, while in reality blatantly committing crimes right in-front of the public. It's a total inversion of how authority and leadership in a real society would function.
And that's also where the extensive re-branding comes in, on both sides, in order to make it easier to go along with the total surrender, to mask the absolute capitulation to the neolib / neocon Establishment and its interests.
ReplyDeleteNamely, all this talk of possibilities Radical Action and Change and The Youth and whatever on the left-- accompanied by some of the most destructive witch-hunting you've ever seen, not to mention all kinds of retarded and decadent beliefs.
The easier it is for children to find pornography on the Internet, and the more difficult it is to find literally anything else, the more progressive the society. The more mentally-ill schizos go around stabbing people, the more open-minded and tolerant and wonderful we are.
And all this based racism, endless edgy memes, and racial triumphalism and bragging on the right.
Somehow they all either skirt around, or actively support, every single one of the policies that put global corporations run by HR ghouls and globalist zombies first, while leaving Americans with nothing. But there is 20% more racism tacked on to that slop, which allows them to ignore the awful outcome.
That's why when you browse these incestuous slop-infested echo-chambers, which are totally closed off from normal people (and even hostile to them), you don't read anything normal or even normal-adjacent. It's instead more like,
"Here's the based eco-fascist edgy right-wing socially Darwinist transhumanist-but-anti-AI racist-but-loves-Jews case in support of... the war in Ukraine".
You have to spend a year decoding their memes, lurk Twitter in order to understand all the jokes, and browse 4chan full-time in order to know what ideologies they're even talking about, and all of these niche and bizarre and unheard-of positions all combine and mix together in order to produce the most pro-Establishment, boring, old and conformist stance.
Wow, amazing! Incredible!
They're assuming that by waging iNfORMaTioNal wArFArE, people in the audience are going,
ReplyDelete'You know, I used to be against wasting trillions of dollars and lives on all these foreign wars, but now after consuming all these based memes, I've realized that the most Indo-European Aryan R1B dominant alpha male behavior is... to destroy my own society through hyper-inflation, so that we or our proxies can lose some doomed war even harder.'
or
'I've always been against off-shoring, but now that I realize that I can make fun of Chinese people, or Indians, or whoever, I whole-heartedly support the destruction of American communities, and the gutting of the American economy. It doesn't matter how much your own life sucks, or how bad you're being raped by your leaders, as long as you can find someone else that's worse off, to make fun of and feel superior to.'
Massive amounts of non-retards are already defecting from the sinking ship of fake news and pretend-radicalism, which is just a totally sealed off hermetic echo-chamber of pure garbage, and even greater amounts will simply ignore and dismiss it in the future.
As this process accelerates and gains more and more momentum, all they're left with are the most enthusiastic cock-suckers and the most fervent slop-consumers, in order to form the perfect suicide-cult, swallow the kool-aid, and go down together.
Not only am I not going to miss any of them, I hope that I get to enjoy watching them get killed by their own disgruntled supporters domestically or blown up by whatever bogeyman of the week they're losing to abroad.
To put it another way, are you really surprised that the creators and makers and rationalizers of this dysfunctional mess of a society spend their time making retarded fake coins and sterile memes, taking drugs that induce bizarre hallucinations, and worshiping and conducting conversations with schizophrenic barely-functional computer programs?
ReplyDeleteIf someone told you that he was trying to sell some painting he made of a picture of his dog's ass for a billion dollars, and then he told you that he spent the morning talking with his toaster, would you trust him with repairing or improving your house? Or baby-sitting your children?
Are these people really the best we have, the concentration of real-world expertise, intellectual ability, knowledge, etc?
Or are they more like total and absolute non-functional retards who've only made it to the top thanks to some of the most generous economic conditions for the top .1% in human history, a giant mega-bubble of fake scams, the dismantling of the real economy, and a wasted decade of rewarding Ponzi schemes over anything requiring actual talent, competence, know-how, etc?
These are all questions I ponder.
Then when you notice these things, and observe just how fucked up society is becoming, it sets off some of the craziest amounts of coping.
ReplyDelete'N-n-n-n-noooo broooo, y-y-y-y--youu neeeeed to l-l-l-look at it in c-c-c-context...'
According to these people, what you have to do is:
Spend 8-hours a day listening to podcasts made by vacuous pseudo-expert morons who've never had a job
Carefully analyze 4,000 different scientific studies, which may or may not be fraudulent (just a 50% chance, y'know nothing major)
Read pages and pages of obscure Internet forums, and become an expert in Libertarian ideology
Regularly take an insane combination of mind-destroying substances, some of which are literally illegally, plus pharma-pills
And then, and only then, will you be able to understand why things are they way they are and make peace with that, and maybe even fully trust the benevolent omniscient leaders and go along with their wise plans, instead of being ANGRY and MISINFORMED.
When just adjusting to the society requires a Herculean effort, you know it's fucking over. And of course none of this is really an intellectual exercise, although it is branded that way.
Rather it's simply a question of what the right methods are to rationalize things that are simply unacceptable and even absurd, inversions of a healthy society, so your mind can cope with the open and flagrant breakdown of institutions, systems, codes and society as a whole, as well as the consequent normalization of betrayal, fraud, failure, abuse, abandonment, by the leaders.
My frank advice-- stop lying to yourselves, stop the coping, stop wasting all your time trying to defend a dead lie, and just admit the truth and start from there. Maybe then you'll hit on something new and original, rather than being stuck on the same tedious endless treadmills.
ReplyDeleteAnd also to say that as powerless as I may be to halt or reverse the ongoing decline and breakdown, I'm not going to stoop to being a defender of abuse or the shredding of the social contract. You can't let them take your dignity.
ReplyDelete