I'd like to point out that one facet missing in this conversation is the distinction between "most people" and "most people on Twitter." I agree most people *on Twitter* area hungry for good-to-bad narratives. I think that's because most people *on Twitter* are more inclined to be cynical already, and more bad-to-good stories justify their cynicism. They/we laugh or cringe at good-to-bad, saccharine stories. That's what Facebook is for, isn't it.
Oh yeah and im gonna help you if you dont wanna see these trash-ass articles go to about:preferences#home on firefox and scroll down until you see "reccomended by pocket" disable that and "sponsored stories" underneath i only undid it so i could get you out of this probably phising website that is stealing my ip right now
Stuff like this is why I'm happy to be off Twitter. Largest collection of people who need therapy and counseling, because there's no way this is how healthy people should be functioning.
It is a strange situation to be someone like me, who is extremely online, and who has very serious things that I'm actually trying to atone for, and yet to only get bad faith and uninformed invocations of those things, or just usual trolling internet garbage. I've written about it at length because it seems like the only thing I can do. But people frequently bring that stuff up - which is cool, I did it - but never with the kind of minimal commitment to understanding, or even getting the basic facts straight, that could engender something meaningful. Including meaningfully condemning/rejecting/denouncing me! Because when people ostensibly want to invoke what I did to attack me, but can't get even basic details about it right, they can't possibly hurt me. How can you be moved by criticism if it has so little to do with the situation they're talking about? So it's no good for everybody.
I've been saying "the internet is no good for anything and it sucks and we should all get off of it" for at least a decade, but even in that context, the last couple years seem to have made anything even resembling meaningful engagement (including angry engagement) impossible. It's just people relentlessly attacking caricatures and strawmen that they see as their enemies in some battle between social cultures, almost purely to signal allegiance to a certain group of people rather than to say or do anything. It's just all so pointless.
I really think that over-simplifies the issue to say "the internet is no good for anything and it sucks and we should all get off of it". The internet's limitations reflect our own. The internet's flatness reflects our own inability to be authentic and multifaceted in social situations. We hide away parts of ourselves and present a fraction, and expect other to, then contradiction - we see the parts hidden in archives of past presentations (a blog, a photo, a post, whatever) and lack the awareness we were interacting with a *human being* the whole time, not just a the face they presented at that particular time.
Humans remain the problem. Our lack of adaptations and consideration of others remains the problem. Our lack of ability to consider the interior lives of human beings we don't interact with physically often, or never have is the problem. The inflexibility in our time perception, leading to harsh judgements without consideration of context or time since - is the problem. This behavior on the internet is a symptom of something fundamentally dysfunctional in our interactions in larger social groups. Ignoring depth because it's easier. Forming caricatures of others because it's easier. Ignoring people change because it's easier. Removing the internet won't "fix" us. *We* are the problem. Not the tool.
I would agree with you if the internet was presented to us honestly. But when a website says 'we give you a platform to post pictures for grandma' but then does psychological experiments on you, tracks you everywhere, sells you out to Law Enforcement, influences elections, spreads lies for the sole purpose of enriching large commercial entities or pandering to politicians, and SILENCES YOU FOR HAVING UNAPPROVED IDEAS, they THEY are absolutely, positively, 100% the problem. Come at it from a reverse perspective. I don't give AF about being some prominent public influencer. About steering discussions or teaching people my virtuous ways. I literally just want a place where I can post pictures of my kids for grandma to see. And I can't have that without surrendering the entirety of my existence for scrutiny, surveillance, judgement and ridicule. Look at apps. They only exist for the singular reason of capturing data on you. Every nonsense business has an app and tries to get you to use it. SOLELY for the purpose of collecting saleable marketing data on you. Headlines lie, content views are manipulated to favor opinions that aren't even popular and stifle those that are, solely for the purpose or fooling you, manipulating you and steering you towards something you don't want. If there was a shred of integrity behind any of it, I would agree with you. Humans, especially in groups, are prone to acting against their best interests. But when everything is a lie and a scam as soon as you walk in the door, you don't own that. We don't own that. The one thing we own is being too stupid or addicted to just turn the whole thing off. One month with no users to advertise to would make honest men out of Goole, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I'm over a decade in to not letting these companies hold any dominion over me. I can guess their web addresses, but I've never been there. And apparently I'm contagious because this article is saying what I have for all that time. The time is coming where the truth will be more valuable than gold. And that gold rush will be the end of all these companies who brought it about in the first place with their structural dishonesty. Pendulums always swing back. R always trends towards k. k always trends towards R. Some day we'll all look back at this era and laugh about the fact that they thought they could pull it off.
Or you know, you could just avoid the parts of the internet you don't like because of the nefarious intentions of those who operate them. In other words, get off social media. The internet and social media are not synonymous.
You don't need to have a visceral reaction to it though. I understand the distrust of social media companies, which is why I don't have any accounts (I want to buy an Oculus, but don't want to sign up for Facebook, so no Oculus for me), but you control how you react to it. Twitter isn't my news source, and a one-time comment by somebody on Twitter won't make them my enemy for life. Do social media companies encourage division? Yes. Do I need to participate in that division? No.
America did a terrible thing with its history of slavery and apartheid that lasted for centuries. All Americans are damaged by such ill deeds. Even those who witness a horrible crime are damaged by it. A black man was fired from his job for using the "n" word colloquially. He did not invent this word, nor did he make it into a slur, yet he suffers today from the ill deeds of some white people from the past. Everybody suffers from it. These people that you speak of are not exempt. We all suffer. One will fail at attempting to just rationalize the consequences away.
To sum up this piece: Social media is evil because it sometimes goes after leftist heroes. Firing Wilder for her pro-palestinian tweets was evil. Judgement must be suspended on Kemper because, you know, she might be a good leftist now. Peter Theil, however. What happened to him was just because he practiced 'wrong-think.' Ditto Trump. And Ben Shapiro is just dehumanizing these noble victims (except Theil and Trump, who fully deserve what happened to them) by pointing out that this is the American version of Mao's Cultural Revolutionaries.
So, keep tearing down those statues. Eliminate all thought except leftist thought to protect freedom for our posterity.
This article is public discourse. The entire internet is public discourse. Just because lots of people are drawn to (fake) outrage on one or two parts of it doesn't damn the whole internet.
This parasocial relationship was one that I examined in pretty great depth after some truly disturbing accusations were levied against a once-favorite musical artist of mine (if you take into account that I am a white guy in his mid-30s who loves sad bastard y'allternative music, you can probably guess who in fewer than 3 attempts).
Ultimately, I landed in a place where I realized that any single action I took (sticking around or Brexiting a fandom) was unlikely to have any impact because the power that person held came from a passionate collective of fans and one apostate was unlikely to affect that body of mass. However, my conscience dictates that I no longer engage in the person's art, as that would still be participating in the collective power structure that allowed the man to predate on others.
Not sure where this leads to in the Ellie Kemper case, but I'm sure we'll get a number of think-pieces in 2-3 days about "what it all means."
It sounds as if the author is making excuses for the 'flattening' or more simply the purposeful; ignorance of context so as to justify Woke religious behaviors such as cancelling. e.g. "Many of the current conversations about power and accountability are conversations we desperately need to have."
Mostly we don't. The 'conversations' don't exist to do anything but shift power. It's a form of stealing that no sane human should condone. If it's Woke it's not based on reason, justice or any level of understanding. It's all about power and self-righteousness.
Pfui! The article is all about "influencers" and "celebrities" and other essentially meaningless people about whom no one actually cares. Me? I have meaningful conversations with my FB friends, many of whom are talented artists (some even famous) and many others are just regular people who don't give a flying expletive who I was forty years ago.
Characters are often called one dimensional when they lack depth also interpreted as a "flat" personality. They are just one thing and that's it, nothing more. Perhaps the author is using the phrase in that way instead of actually talking about a 1 dimensional point, vs a 2 dimensional plane.
The internet is what you make of it. There is virtually infinite learning at your fingertips. There are also flame wars on Twitter. Choose which you like and ignore which you don't.
One of the behaviors I’ve noticed is the transfer of moral authority away from traditional institutions (churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc…). Moral authority is now vested in corporations via their CSR initiatives and/or social media influencers.
I'd like to point out that one facet missing in this conversation is the distinction between "most people" and "most people on Twitter." I agree most people *on Twitter* area hungry for good-to-bad narratives. I think that's because most people *on Twitter* are more inclined to be cynical already, and more bad-to-good stories justify their cynicism. They/we laugh or cringe at good-to-bad, saccharine stories. That's what Facebook is for, isn't it.
Why the fuck was this on my firefox homepage this is all a simulation stop with your fake intellectual garbage
Relax Jeb. No one forced you to click on it.
I wish you too would stop with your fake intellectual garbage.
Oh yeah and im gonna help you if you dont wanna see these trash-ass articles go to about:preferences#home on firefox and scroll down until you see "reccomended by pocket" disable that and "sponsored stories" underneath i only undid it so i could get you out of this probably phising website that is stealing my ip right now
BIG DUDE TECH TIPS
Stuff like this is why I'm happy to be off Twitter. Largest collection of people who need therapy and counseling, because there's no way this is how healthy people should be functioning.
Great write-up.
It is a strange situation to be someone like me, who is extremely online, and who has very serious things that I'm actually trying to atone for, and yet to only get bad faith and uninformed invocations of those things, or just usual trolling internet garbage. I've written about it at length because it seems like the only thing I can do. But people frequently bring that stuff up - which is cool, I did it - but never with the kind of minimal commitment to understanding, or even getting the basic facts straight, that could engender something meaningful. Including meaningfully condemning/rejecting/denouncing me! Because when people ostensibly want to invoke what I did to attack me, but can't get even basic details about it right, they can't possibly hurt me. How can you be moved by criticism if it has so little to do with the situation they're talking about? So it's no good for everybody.
I've been saying "the internet is no good for anything and it sucks and we should all get off of it" for at least a decade, but even in that context, the last couple years seem to have made anything even resembling meaningful engagement (including angry engagement) impossible. It's just people relentlessly attacking caricatures and strawmen that they see as their enemies in some battle between social cultures, almost purely to signal allegiance to a certain group of people rather than to say or do anything. It's just all so pointless.
I really think that over-simplifies the issue to say "the internet is no good for anything and it sucks and we should all get off of it". The internet's limitations reflect our own. The internet's flatness reflects our own inability to be authentic and multifaceted in social situations. We hide away parts of ourselves and present a fraction, and expect other to, then contradiction - we see the parts hidden in archives of past presentations (a blog, a photo, a post, whatever) and lack the awareness we were interacting with a *human being* the whole time, not just a the face they presented at that particular time.
Humans remain the problem. Our lack of adaptations and consideration of others remains the problem. Our lack of ability to consider the interior lives of human beings we don't interact with physically often, or never have is the problem. The inflexibility in our time perception, leading to harsh judgements without consideration of context or time since - is the problem. This behavior on the internet is a symptom of something fundamentally dysfunctional in our interactions in larger social groups. Ignoring depth because it's easier. Forming caricatures of others because it's easier. Ignoring people change because it's easier. Removing the internet won't "fix" us. *We* are the problem. Not the tool.
I would agree with you if the internet was presented to us honestly. But when a website says 'we give you a platform to post pictures for grandma' but then does psychological experiments on you, tracks you everywhere, sells you out to Law Enforcement, influences elections, spreads lies for the sole purpose of enriching large commercial entities or pandering to politicians, and SILENCES YOU FOR HAVING UNAPPROVED IDEAS, they THEY are absolutely, positively, 100% the problem. Come at it from a reverse perspective. I don't give AF about being some prominent public influencer. About steering discussions or teaching people my virtuous ways. I literally just want a place where I can post pictures of my kids for grandma to see. And I can't have that without surrendering the entirety of my existence for scrutiny, surveillance, judgement and ridicule. Look at apps. They only exist for the singular reason of capturing data on you. Every nonsense business has an app and tries to get you to use it. SOLELY for the purpose of collecting saleable marketing data on you. Headlines lie, content views are manipulated to favor opinions that aren't even popular and stifle those that are, solely for the purpose or fooling you, manipulating you and steering you towards something you don't want. If there was a shred of integrity behind any of it, I would agree with you. Humans, especially in groups, are prone to acting against their best interests. But when everything is a lie and a scam as soon as you walk in the door, you don't own that. We don't own that. The one thing we own is being too stupid or addicted to just turn the whole thing off. One month with no users to advertise to would make honest men out of Goole, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I'm over a decade in to not letting these companies hold any dominion over me. I can guess their web addresses, but I've never been there. And apparently I'm contagious because this article is saying what I have for all that time. The time is coming where the truth will be more valuable than gold. And that gold rush will be the end of all these companies who brought it about in the first place with their structural dishonesty. Pendulums always swing back. R always trends towards k. k always trends towards R. Some day we'll all look back at this era and laugh about the fact that they thought they could pull it off.
Or you know, you could just avoid the parts of the internet you don't like because of the nefarious intentions of those who operate them. In other words, get off social media. The internet and social media are not synonymous.
Almost impossible to avoid social media, when much of the news is sourced from it, and the news appears everywhere on the internet.
You don't need to have a visceral reaction to it though. I understand the distrust of social media companies, which is why I don't have any accounts (I want to buy an Oculus, but don't want to sign up for Facebook, so no Oculus for me), but you control how you react to it. Twitter isn't my news source, and a one-time comment by somebody on Twitter won't make them my enemy for life. Do social media companies encourage division? Yes. Do I need to participate in that division? No.
This is really good piece with some excellent, colorful language that I look forward to quoting. Thank you for tackling this complicated problem.
America did a terrible thing with its history of slavery and apartheid that lasted for centuries. All Americans are damaged by such ill deeds. Even those who witness a horrible crime are damaged by it. A black man was fired from his job for using the "n" word colloquially. He did not invent this word, nor did he make it into a slur, yet he suffers today from the ill deeds of some white people from the past. Everybody suffers from it. These people that you speak of are not exempt. We all suffer. One will fail at attempting to just rationalize the consequences away.
To sum up this piece: Social media is evil because it sometimes goes after leftist heroes. Firing Wilder for her pro-palestinian tweets was evil. Judgement must be suspended on Kemper because, you know, she might be a good leftist now. Peter Theil, however. What happened to him was just because he practiced 'wrong-think.' Ditto Trump. And Ben Shapiro is just dehumanizing these noble victims (except Theil and Trump, who fully deserve what happened to them) by pointing out that this is the American version of Mao's Cultural Revolutionaries.
So, keep tearing down those statues. Eliminate all thought except leftist thought to protect freedom for our posterity.
the article is being about how internet make any public discourse dumb.
You know, like your comment here.
This article is public discourse. The entire internet is public discourse. Just because lots of people are drawn to (fake) outrage on one or two parts of it doesn't damn the whole internet.
Can you guys shut the fuck up about the internet ON THE INTERNET? Stop invading our home. Assholes.
I couldn't agree more this. It's why I view the internet as more of a tool then anything else now.
This parasocial relationship was one that I examined in pretty great depth after some truly disturbing accusations were levied against a once-favorite musical artist of mine (if you take into account that I am a white guy in his mid-30s who loves sad bastard y'allternative music, you can probably guess who in fewer than 3 attempts).
Ultimately, I landed in a place where I realized that any single action I took (sticking around or Brexiting a fandom) was unlikely to have any impact because the power that person held came from a passionate collective of fans and one apostate was unlikely to affect that body of mass. However, my conscience dictates that I no longer engage in the person's art, as that would still be participating in the collective power structure that allowed the man to predate on others.
Not sure where this leads to in the Ellie Kemper case, but I'm sure we'll get a number of think-pieces in 2-3 days about "what it all means."
My guess is Conor Oberst or Jesse Lacey.
It was actually Ryan Adams. Could never get into Brand New, tbh.
D'oh. Forgot about Ryan Adams. That one was horrible.
Mark Kozelek?
No but it could have been so partial points are awarded. RIP to Lost Verses, btw.
Is it Lostprophets? It's Lostprophets isn't it?
Guess again and yikes to that guy.
Hi! I sent you a question/message on discord re: this. I love this piece. Thanks :)
It sounds as if the author is making excuses for the 'flattening' or more simply the purposeful; ignorance of context so as to justify Woke religious behaviors such as cancelling. e.g. "Many of the current conversations about power and accountability are conversations we desperately need to have."
Mostly we don't. The 'conversations' don't exist to do anything but shift power. It's a form of stealing that no sane human should condone. If it's Woke it's not based on reason, justice or any level of understanding. It's all about power and self-righteousness.
Pfui! The article is all about "influencers" and "celebrities" and other essentially meaningless people about whom no one actually cares. Me? I have meaningful conversations with my FB friends, many of whom are talented artists (some even famous) and many others are just regular people who don't give a flying expletive who I was forty years ago.
It's truly a galaxy brained thing to call a flat something one dimensional. Kindly explain what that even looks like.
Characters are often called one dimensional when they lack depth also interpreted as a "flat" personality. They are just one thing and that's it, nothing more. Perhaps the author is using the phrase in that way instead of actually talking about a 1 dimensional point, vs a 2 dimensional plane.
I always thought of the internet as a giant cesspool.
The internet is what you make of it. There is virtually infinite learning at your fingertips. There are also flame wars on Twitter. Choose which you like and ignore which you don't.
Then get off it.
One of the behaviors I’ve noticed is the transfer of moral authority away from traditional institutions (churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, etc…). Moral authority is now vested in corporations via their CSR initiatives and/or social media influencers.