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-
When I first backpacked through Europe, in 2004, I had a big bulky guidebook with me. It was only useful for planning my arrival in new cities, but otherwise too bulky to carry around on daily walks.
That was perfect. All the times I got lost where when I found all the things that I actually remember still 17 years on.
I think about this often with the phone map applications. You will never get "lost," meaning you will never find anything.
The first time my husband (then boyfriend) drove from North Carolina to Chicago to visit me, he had a road atlas and planned the route that way. That was in 2004.
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. 😂
And yeah, I noticed that angry comments happen more frequently when they are easily made. The essays that are paywalled at Another World never have assholes commenting on them because they would have to pay to do so. Here even though most of the essays are free, it's still not "easy" to be an asshole because they'd have to enter in their email address and that's really too much effort for them. :)
Okay: You asked. First, I'm glad to hear that things are less chaotic in your region. I also found out that some relatives of mine who live south of Stuttgart haven't been directly affected by the flooding. That's reassuring.
When you posted your photo earlier in the day, I thought, hmmm. A couple of things came to mind that relate to your current thinking about masculinity (let's call it becoming a man) and portrayal of men. There's the old saying, One grows into one's face. (And you aren't doing so badly.) There's the other old saying, Handsome is as handsome does. Both of these were often applied to men. They are good ways of judging a man. It doesn't mean that a handsome man is good. It means that handsome actions make a man alluring. Heck, it used to be that everyone knew this.
Among the Italians and the French, saying that a man isn't serious is an almost fatal assessment. In the Anglo world, the comment "he's not a serious man" isn't even understood.
As to social media. I avoid Twitter, which is the Freudian id of U.S. discourse. Twitter and Facebook are designed to aggravate the deep shallowness of English-language discourse.
The problem is that, in U.S. culture, one has only to scratch an American to find a Baptist testifying to her personal salvation by the Baby Jesus and to "telling her truth" about revealed religion--or one gets the endless Methodist sermonizing from the guy who wants to tell you How to Serve Both God and Mammon. Facebook is the perfect platform for the verbally religious. And for the "spiritual but not religious," who tend to fall into the same Swampy Crisis of Monotheism.
On Facebook, I have kept my friendses to people who I have met in the flesh or who I can figure out exactly (a friend of a friend, someone recommended). Many of my friendses are writers or other kinds of artists. So I have only about 200 friendses. How people manage five thousand "friends" is beyond me.
Also, many of my friends are Italian--their discourse is much less assertively puritan.
And (I do go on...) what I did a few years back to tone down the Facebook feed was to get rid of a number of yammering lecturing types--oddly, or not so oddly, given that I am a thorough leftist--many of the people I had to get rid of were Hillary Clinton Diehards. The kind who (tee hee hee) thought it was funny that Trump and Putin are "gay lovers."
I won't even go into the sexual puritanism in Facebooklandia.
Back to the top: Glad to hear that things are going well in your part of the Grand Duchy.
Oh, that block button on FB was super useful during the 2016 election!
One of the things I have been thinking about with social media from Americans in particular is that not only does a kind of religiousity reign, but also everyone feels empowered as an expert without actually having even had an opinion on a topic before it came up. That is definitely the algorithm: it is designed to make you react, and reaction is currency in the social capital world.
The only social media I use is FB. I post photos of my garden, of the sky, occasionally of the moon. I sometimes post family photos. I am active in a group of translation professionals, most of them in Italy, many of whom I know personally. That friendly, helpful, non-political, non-religious group is actually one of the main reasons I use FB. That said, I regularly prune my FB contacts and delete irritating people and mansplainers.
I do find that the FB experience tends to exacerbate my tendency toward introversion and avoidance of face-to-face interactions. And the political discussions on FB have definitely alienated me from some people who were once my real life friends. I have been unfriended by people on both the left and the right - because when the wackadoodle right goes far enough around the bend, it runs smack into the wackadoodle left coming from the other direction. And generally speaking, I think I use FB less than I used to.
The internet experience itself is bad for my concentration and focus, though. I hate reading articles online, they seem more ephemeral and less meaningful than a physical thing I can hold and read. I skim more, I pay less attention to what I'm reading. I fantasize about throwing the computer away altogether and forcing people to communicate with me via snail mail, in which my responses will be decorated with pencil and ink drawings on old-fashioned scented stationery. But as the computer offers the only avenue for doing the work I do, I know that is nothing but a fantasy. I use the damn GPS sometimes in the car, but never ever when walking. I am old enough to remember traveling when cell phones and computers didn't exist and you could disappear for months and no one could track you down, and you communicated with your travel buddies through notes left in poste restante. Yes, it's nice to be able to have a video chat with my daughter and grandkids or my friends and family in Italy, but the technology itself exacts a heavy price.
""I fantasize about throwing the computer away altogether and forcing people to communicate with me via snail mail, in which my responses will be decorated with pencil and ink drawings on old-fashioned scented stationery.""
Yes, me too. I used to be a prolific letter writer, and had worked really hard for several years to make my handwriting really interesting. I still have that but I noticed my once really beautiful script has degraded from lack of use. And now I rarely write anything at all by hand (and I think very few people do now), which is really tragic.
Silvia Gilbertson (and Rhyd Wildermuth): Don't give up on writing letters. From a selfish standpoint, they are an exercise in refining one's thoughts to a limited space, and they are a touch of sensuality--the hand against paper, the inking on the sheet, the smell of paper.
I have written many letters, especially during the pandemic. Ironically, the letters go mainly to writers and artists, my main circle. And they love getting letters. Yet they tend to respond by e-mail messages. Ah, well. At least writers and artists usually can put together an e-mail message with complete paragraphs.
A final selfish reason for letterwriting: When I write to my Italian friends, I have to shape my thoughts, choose the correct word, and make sure that I use the congiuntino properly.
I quit social media last year, got back on for a brief second a few weeks ago, and after a few weeks got back off of it. Life is much, much, better without it.
Social media is one of those things that capitalism ruins. I think people are too quick to try and convince themselves that social media has no value, but in my experience trying to convince myself that it was all bad only led to cycles of, well, bingeing and purging, because invariably I would come back. I think there _is_ something valuable about interacting with my friends and family, and getting to know people whom I wouldn't otherwise know. I think there _is_ value to essentially getting to workshop jokes for free seven days a week on twitter. The problem is that the profit motive warps everything to actively make things less useful. (It's especially glaring with online dating—part of why online dating is terrible is that the people who write that software are incentivized to _prevent_ you from finding a date, because pairing up means you won't use the product.) Part of finally being able to quit it for me came down to having to admit to myself that I was actually giving something up that I liked and was worth liking, but that overall it would still be worth it.
And that's what happens to discussing politics online—in theory there could be good political discussions online, and online also gives the revolutionary chance to encounter ideas you wouldn't otherwise encounter (the American Left was so thoroughly squashed by the 90s that I don't think I would have been able to encounter real leftist thought without the internet in the 2000s). But hot takes and cruelty drive more engagement than compassion and slow, careful thought, so that's what the platforms incentivize.
really good point about the online dating software. If you succeed at what you are using it for, you won't need to use it again unless you are poly/open.
I'm really fascinated (well, and appalled) at the "gamification" design in those apps and in the phone itself. An "alert" is both exciting and anxiety-inducing, and whether that alert is from a dating app or social media or whatever, it demands we respond to it immediately. We get rewarded for doing so, and so it trains us to do that more often, just like any video game trains us to respond to "alerts" in order to win.
One of the most useful ideas for me about the internet is from Slippery Elm's "The Dead Hermes Epistolary," where Elm states that we should treat social media as "occupied enemy territory." That is also relevant to your other point about the enclosure of the internet. It belongs to the capitalists now, despite the fact that so many people who made it thought of it as a way of getting around the capitalist stranglehold on information.
Now they have the same stranglehold again. I think of this especially regarding Facebook, which will not allow you to control your "feed," but only allows you to tell it what sort of things you'd like to see more often and which you would like to see less. It's no longer about people but about advertising categories, and what doesn't sell doesn't get shown.
Hi Rhyd. I don't know if it's the most appropriate place to bring this up, but I really value your opinion.
Just wondering how you would advice those of us of the "Spiritual" persuasion to navigate the current "Covid is a hoax" belief spreading in what might be called "Conscious community".
I look in awe at people who 10 years ago were talking about "manifesting" as if one's thoughts changed reality, and who used to preach "oneness and love", suddenly respond with rage at the governments attempts to deal with the pandemic, calling it "authoritarian" and sinking into conspiracy theories.
Sorry to bring this up, but you're one of the few people I know who understands spirituality and politics to a high enough level to be trustworthy.
Huge question that I am trying to understand myself, too.
I have been trying to look at it as multiple interests and realms of principles, rather than a "true or false" dichotomy.
For instance, Covid kills people, and governments have an interest in reducing those deaths if they want to stay in power.
Also, governments have an interest in accumulating more power over their citizens.
So, on the one hand, it is right for the government to take actions to reduce deaths. On the other hand, it is terrifying how much more control it gives them over the lives of the people they rule.
Here in Europe, Covid has pretty much brought back all the authoritarian internal border controls that were eliminated through the EU/Schengen agreement. If you don't have proof of vaccination or a government-approved and recorded document showing you are negative, you cannot travel to another country in many places. This allows the government to trap undocumented immigrants in a way they could not legally do before.
For the spiritual element, there is a good point to be made that there is something really strange happening with Covid. But the conspiracy is much more mundane, and the authoritarianism of the governments already existed in multiple ways many people previously ignored.
I don't know if this answers your question, but I am not sure we know answers to any of this yet, nor what our world will look like in the next ten years because of all this.
FWIW, I see it a little differently. To me, the whole "covid is a hoax" thing exemplifies the failure of common sense we see in so many different contexts in today's information society. We have all this information blasting at us all the time, and apparently we have lost the ability to interpret it, sift it, and make any sense of it. I mean, it is pretty obvious that covid is not a hoax, and if we didn't have the hoax conspiracy we wouldn't have the vaccine dilemma in the first place, with all the attendant travel restrictions. People would be interested in protecting themselves and would take sensible steps to do that. Instead, a significant chunk of the population has fallen under the malevolent spell of a dying power structure that will literally kill in order to hang on. Spiritually, I think new agers and lots of so-called "alternative lifestyle" folks gravitate to authoritarians who will tell them what to do in every situation, so it becomes a bit laughable when they get all bent out of shape at a government's relatively benign efforts to protect them from a pandemic. Meanwhile, the real surveillance society proceeds apace...
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-
When I first backpacked through Europe, in 2004, I had a big bulky guidebook with me. It was only useful for planning my arrival in new cities, but otherwise too bulky to carry around on daily walks.
That was perfect. All the times I got lost where when I found all the things that I actually remember still 17 years on.
I think about this often with the phone map applications. You will never get "lost," meaning you will never find anything.
The first time my husband (then boyfriend) drove from North Carolina to Chicago to visit me, he had a road atlas and planned the route that way. That was in 2004.
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. 😂
aww thanks!
And yeah, I noticed that angry comments happen more frequently when they are easily made. The essays that are paywalled at Another World never have assholes commenting on them because they would have to pay to do so. Here even though most of the essays are free, it's still not "easy" to be an asshole because they'd have to enter in their email address and that's really too much effort for them. :)
Okay: You asked. First, I'm glad to hear that things are less chaotic in your region. I also found out that some relatives of mine who live south of Stuttgart haven't been directly affected by the flooding. That's reassuring.
When you posted your photo earlier in the day, I thought, hmmm. A couple of things came to mind that relate to your current thinking about masculinity (let's call it becoming a man) and portrayal of men. There's the old saying, One grows into one's face. (And you aren't doing so badly.) There's the other old saying, Handsome is as handsome does. Both of these were often applied to men. They are good ways of judging a man. It doesn't mean that a handsome man is good. It means that handsome actions make a man alluring. Heck, it used to be that everyone knew this.
Among the Italians and the French, saying that a man isn't serious is an almost fatal assessment. In the Anglo world, the comment "he's not a serious man" isn't even understood.
As to social media. I avoid Twitter, which is the Freudian id of U.S. discourse. Twitter and Facebook are designed to aggravate the deep shallowness of English-language discourse.
The problem is that, in U.S. culture, one has only to scratch an American to find a Baptist testifying to her personal salvation by the Baby Jesus and to "telling her truth" about revealed religion--or one gets the endless Methodist sermonizing from the guy who wants to tell you How to Serve Both God and Mammon. Facebook is the perfect platform for the verbally religious. And for the "spiritual but not religious," who tend to fall into the same Swampy Crisis of Monotheism.
On Facebook, I have kept my friendses to people who I have met in the flesh or who I can figure out exactly (a friend of a friend, someone recommended). Many of my friendses are writers or other kinds of artists. So I have only about 200 friendses. How people manage five thousand "friends" is beyond me.
Also, many of my friends are Italian--their discourse is much less assertively puritan.
And (I do go on...) what I did a few years back to tone down the Facebook feed was to get rid of a number of yammering lecturing types--oddly, or not so oddly, given that I am a thorough leftist--many of the people I had to get rid of were Hillary Clinton Diehards. The kind who (tee hee hee) thought it was funny that Trump and Putin are "gay lovers."
I won't even go into the sexual puritanism in Facebooklandia.
Back to the top: Glad to hear that things are going well in your part of the Grand Duchy.
Oh, that block button on FB was super useful during the 2016 election!
One of the things I have been thinking about with social media from Americans in particular is that not only does a kind of religiousity reign, but also everyone feels empowered as an expert without actually having even had an opinion on a topic before it came up. That is definitely the algorithm: it is designed to make you react, and reaction is currency in the social capital world.
Well I'm 65 and I don't now and never have used social media. It has just never struck me as something I would want to do.
On phone maps: when walking, I usually find them more distracting than helpful. I do like them for driving. More than once they've led me astray.
Those old large guidebooks could be torn into small pieces. That's what I used to do with them (at the suggestion of one of them!).
ha! That is exactly what I did too! Much easier to carry that way!
The only social media I use is FB. I post photos of my garden, of the sky, occasionally of the moon. I sometimes post family photos. I am active in a group of translation professionals, most of them in Italy, many of whom I know personally. That friendly, helpful, non-political, non-religious group is actually one of the main reasons I use FB. That said, I regularly prune my FB contacts and delete irritating people and mansplainers.
I do find that the FB experience tends to exacerbate my tendency toward introversion and avoidance of face-to-face interactions. And the political discussions on FB have definitely alienated me from some people who were once my real life friends. I have been unfriended by people on both the left and the right - because when the wackadoodle right goes far enough around the bend, it runs smack into the wackadoodle left coming from the other direction. And generally speaking, I think I use FB less than I used to.
The internet experience itself is bad for my concentration and focus, though. I hate reading articles online, they seem more ephemeral and less meaningful than a physical thing I can hold and read. I skim more, I pay less attention to what I'm reading. I fantasize about throwing the computer away altogether and forcing people to communicate with me via snail mail, in which my responses will be decorated with pencil and ink drawings on old-fashioned scented stationery. But as the computer offers the only avenue for doing the work I do, I know that is nothing but a fantasy. I use the damn GPS sometimes in the car, but never ever when walking. I am old enough to remember traveling when cell phones and computers didn't exist and you could disappear for months and no one could track you down, and you communicated with your travel buddies through notes left in poste restante. Yes, it's nice to be able to have a video chat with my daughter and grandkids or my friends and family in Italy, but the technology itself exacts a heavy price.
""I fantasize about throwing the computer away altogether and forcing people to communicate with me via snail mail, in which my responses will be decorated with pencil and ink drawings on old-fashioned scented stationery.""
Yes, me too. I used to be a prolific letter writer, and had worked really hard for several years to make my handwriting really interesting. I still have that but I noticed my once really beautiful script has degraded from lack of use. And now I rarely write anything at all by hand (and I think very few people do now), which is really tragic.
Silvia Gilbertson (and Rhyd Wildermuth): Don't give up on writing letters. From a selfish standpoint, they are an exercise in refining one's thoughts to a limited space, and they are a touch of sensuality--the hand against paper, the inking on the sheet, the smell of paper.
I have written many letters, especially during the pandemic. Ironically, the letters go mainly to writers and artists, my main circle. And they love getting letters. Yet they tend to respond by e-mail messages. Ah, well. At least writers and artists usually can put together an e-mail message with complete paragraphs.
A final selfish reason for letterwriting: When I write to my Italian friends, I have to shape my thoughts, choose the correct word, and make sure that I use the congiuntino properly.
I quit social media last year, got back on for a brief second a few weeks ago, and after a few weeks got back off of it. Life is much, much, better without it.
Social media is one of those things that capitalism ruins. I think people are too quick to try and convince themselves that social media has no value, but in my experience trying to convince myself that it was all bad only led to cycles of, well, bingeing and purging, because invariably I would come back. I think there _is_ something valuable about interacting with my friends and family, and getting to know people whom I wouldn't otherwise know. I think there _is_ value to essentially getting to workshop jokes for free seven days a week on twitter. The problem is that the profit motive warps everything to actively make things less useful. (It's especially glaring with online dating—part of why online dating is terrible is that the people who write that software are incentivized to _prevent_ you from finding a date, because pairing up means you won't use the product.) Part of finally being able to quit it for me came down to having to admit to myself that I was actually giving something up that I liked and was worth liking, but that overall it would still be worth it.
And that's what happens to discussing politics online—in theory there could be good political discussions online, and online also gives the revolutionary chance to encounter ideas you wouldn't otherwise encounter (the American Left was so thoroughly squashed by the 90s that I don't think I would have been able to encounter real leftist thought without the internet in the 2000s). But hot takes and cruelty drive more engagement than compassion and slow, careful thought, so that's what the platforms incentivize.
an essay:
something about the internet as a commons and social media companies as an enclosure
side note about how substack is essentially an enclosure of an older more decentralized internet consisting of blogs and RSS readers
...?
profit
really good point about the online dating software. If you succeed at what you are using it for, you won't need to use it again unless you are poly/open.
I'm really fascinated (well, and appalled) at the "gamification" design in those apps and in the phone itself. An "alert" is both exciting and anxiety-inducing, and whether that alert is from a dating app or social media or whatever, it demands we respond to it immediately. We get rewarded for doing so, and so it trains us to do that more often, just like any video game trains us to respond to "alerts" in order to win.
One of the most useful ideas for me about the internet is from Slippery Elm's "The Dead Hermes Epistolary," where Elm states that we should treat social media as "occupied enemy territory." That is also relevant to your other point about the enclosure of the internet. It belongs to the capitalists now, despite the fact that so many people who made it thought of it as a way of getting around the capitalist stranglehold on information.
Now they have the same stranglehold again. I think of this especially regarding Facebook, which will not allow you to control your "feed," but only allows you to tell it what sort of things you'd like to see more often and which you would like to see less. It's no longer about people but about advertising categories, and what doesn't sell doesn't get shown.
Hi Rhyd. I don't know if it's the most appropriate place to bring this up, but I really value your opinion.
Just wondering how you would advice those of us of the "Spiritual" persuasion to navigate the current "Covid is a hoax" belief spreading in what might be called "Conscious community".
I look in awe at people who 10 years ago were talking about "manifesting" as if one's thoughts changed reality, and who used to preach "oneness and love", suddenly respond with rage at the governments attempts to deal with the pandemic, calling it "authoritarian" and sinking into conspiracy theories.
Sorry to bring this up, but you're one of the few people I know who understands spirituality and politics to a high enough level to be trustworthy.
Thanks for all your work <3
Huge question that I am trying to understand myself, too.
I have been trying to look at it as multiple interests and realms of principles, rather than a "true or false" dichotomy.
For instance, Covid kills people, and governments have an interest in reducing those deaths if they want to stay in power.
Also, governments have an interest in accumulating more power over their citizens.
So, on the one hand, it is right for the government to take actions to reduce deaths. On the other hand, it is terrifying how much more control it gives them over the lives of the people they rule.
Here in Europe, Covid has pretty much brought back all the authoritarian internal border controls that were eliminated through the EU/Schengen agreement. If you don't have proof of vaccination or a government-approved and recorded document showing you are negative, you cannot travel to another country in many places. This allows the government to trap undocumented immigrants in a way they could not legally do before.
For the spiritual element, there is a good point to be made that there is something really strange happening with Covid. But the conspiracy is much more mundane, and the authoritarianism of the governments already existed in multiple ways many people previously ignored.
I don't know if this answers your question, but I am not sure we know answers to any of this yet, nor what our world will look like in the next ten years because of all this.
FWIW, I see it a little differently. To me, the whole "covid is a hoax" thing exemplifies the failure of common sense we see in so many different contexts in today's information society. We have all this information blasting at us all the time, and apparently we have lost the ability to interpret it, sift it, and make any sense of it. I mean, it is pretty obvious that covid is not a hoax, and if we didn't have the hoax conspiracy we wouldn't have the vaccine dilemma in the first place, with all the attendant travel restrictions. People would be interested in protecting themselves and would take sensible steps to do that. Instead, a significant chunk of the population has fallen under the malevolent spell of a dying power structure that will literally kill in order to hang on. Spiritually, I think new agers and lots of so-called "alternative lifestyle" folks gravitate to authoritarians who will tell them what to do in every situation, so it becomes a bit laughable when they get all bent out of shape at a government's relatively benign efforts to protect them from a pandemic. Meanwhile, the real surveillance society proceeds apace...