Monthly open thread: July
As I mentioned last month, I’ll be doing a monthly discussion post here on From The Forests of Arduinna. Here is July’s.
First as an update, as many of you know there has been really intense flooding in the Ardennes and also along the Rhine. We escaped this ourselves—we live in a high valley where a watershed starts, so there isn’t as much of a chance for intense rain to flood us (though last year this did happen). The friend I mentioned in The Secret of Crossings did get flooded signficantly; however, she was able to clean up the damage really quickly because we had gotten so much up to higher ground before hand.
It’s finally sunny here. In fact, we’ve had very little of a “summer” to speak of. While some of my plants have enjoyed the intense rain, others in my garden have given up (for instance, tomatoes). But today I went to a social event that required me to dress up, and I took this photo in the sun this morning before putting the tie on:
The event was a rather high class (in the European sense of the word) event. I won’t say much more except that it took place somewhere the Rothschilds are known to frequent, and royalty, and other people of wealth I don’t normally meet very often. And at some point I was in a conversation about Marx that was maybe one of the most pleasant and intelligent conversations I’ve ever had on the subject, much more so than any American “social justice” internet interaction.
And speaking of the internet, I’ll be officially no longer using Facebook or Twitter starting on Lughnasadh. There will be some automated postings from here and other places I write onto those platforms, but I will no longer have any direct interaction with social media.
The reason I’m leaving is because I’ve realised it deeply alters the way you think about the world. At some point I’ll write more on this, once I’ve had enough distance, but I’ll add another interesting point here: those people I mentioned above? They don’t use it either.
Anyway, for this month, I’d love to discuss social media. What have you noticed about the way the interactions there are different from your real-life interactions? Have you noticed a shift in the way you think after using it?
Also, I’ve noticed a lot of the “woke” extremism stuff tends to be more severe online than it ever is in in-person interactions. For instance, some woke person just called me a “fascist” on social media because of that photo above, because I quoted Nietzsche under it (“Become who you are”). I can think of no in-person interaction where anyone would ever think to say such a thing.
It’s easier to speak without consequence from behind a screen.
That sort of distancing seems to only increase the extremism of this stuff. What kinds of things have you noticed? Feel free to vent if you need.
Much love, and thanks for all the support!
—Rhyd
I like the idea of a monthly open thread so much that I might steal it ;-)
In seriousness: social media has ruined society in deep and extreme ways, from eating disorders and suicide in the young to the general coarsening of discourse and the normalising of abuse and extreme behaviour. As you say, nobody would dream of behaving in this way if they had to do it to your face.
More broadly, actually, I think that the internet is an utter disaster. It ruins everything from travel (everything is mapped, nothing is surprising, everywhere is the same as everywhere else) to realtionships (the horrors of porn) to the way our brains are wired. If it were possible to turn it all off I would flick the switch right n-
I have decided sort of by accident that I only use social media as essentially a photo service for remembering my kids and what’s happening in my garden at different points in time. Anything beyond that and I feel depleted and irritable. For precisely the reasons you and Paul have outlined. It’s a great big smokescreen from behind which people can yell awful things at each other and “listen” in bath faith.
I blogged for a long time, but the monetization wave ruined it for me. I’m appreciating the balance substack seems to be striking: the idea that you might have to pay for at least some of what you want to read makes you feel invested, that you’re part of a group of people who have come together to talk and share ideas on purpose, as opposed to people flitting through a frat party and stirring the shit for funsies.
And for what it’s worth, you are a very handsome fascist. 😂