An excellent overview IMO of a long trend I've called Desire to be Virtual. I'm sure it's been with us always but the uptick in furry subcultures etc in the 90s as well as the ubiquitous branded animated cartoon t shirts had me ranting about our culture's desire to transferred into virtually, to become the cartoons, in other words too become the map and abandon the territory of the real in a secular fashion. Particularly enjoyed your parallels between advertising and advantage. Being less charitable I've described this phenomenon as the capitalist dumbing down of the population, not that we are any less 'intelligent' but the actual platform of how we think and socialize is geared to create this virtualizing desire in order to sell goods and to inoculate us with specific wants and needs. The social contagion spreads through a system primed by Capitalist code replacing the desire for real interaction, food, sex, shelter, ecstasy with an irreal desire, a virtual desire
Jan 12, 2023·edited Jan 12, 2023Liked by Rhyd Wildermuth
I am reminded of the behavior of a group of teenage girls during the Salem ‘witch craft’ event, going into hysterics and weird ‘tics” on cue as evidence someone was a witch. There are also accounts of whole convents, centuries ago, mewing like cats “uncontrollably”. In high school decades ago I witnessed girls going into restrooms during lunch with the lights turned off and staring into a mirrors until Mary Worth, an old lady would manifest to them and they would come out in excitement. Somehow the boys chose not to participate in it. The school administration ended up putting a stop to it. Yep, girls and guys are in general different, each with their own set of positive and negative tendencies. For instance I don’t visualize and imagine being mugged by a gang of women in a bad neighborhood.
I wonder if the phenomena of there being way more girls wanting to change genders than boys can be seen as the triumph of toxic patriarchy - it’s better to be a guy than a gal - more power and freedom! After all the role most woman played through history - a variety of wife, mother, homemaker is now seen at best as something tacked on as a sideline to the real business of vocation/career, action in world outside the home. Really! being a wage slave serving non-family instead of being a mother and homemaker is liberation?!?!
Lots of interesting threads to pull on here - emerging from a tangle of different causes, effects, concerns and experiences.
I got caught in the ADHD algorithm on Instagram Reels (arms’ length TikTok for millennials!) back in 2021 and, honestly, the cognitive effect of spending time watching Reels felt like the described symptoms of ADHD anyway. But something that kept bothering me, the more I watched, is the way these videos shifted the focus away from our fucked-up systems and on to the individual. The implication is that things simply are the way they are; if you struggle with them, your struggle is explained by your condition; and through your condition, you can feel like part of a community, which staves off that sense of alienation.
One thing that came to mind when I was reading was - of all things - an observation in an old martial arts book that I read over a decade ago: eating pictures of food doesn’t nourish you. At the time I was living alone in a new city, a few hours’ journey away from anyone I knew well, and I began to realise that the time I spent on social media left me feeling lonelier. It was the social equivalent of eating pictures of food and expecting to be nourished. Since then, I have seen social media effectively decimate our ability to organise socially, even at a local level, because the infrastructure - and the interactions - is/are all effectively controlled by an algorithmic platform which profits from our physical alienation.
Back in the 1990s, I worked in a design department for a manufacturer. One of the designers I much respected had a small sign over his desk that said IF YOU THINK VIRTUAL REALITY IS INTERESTING, YOU SHOULD TRY ACTUAL REALITY. This was very helpful to me at the time, as 'VRML' was all the rage and now I see where the powers were and are trying to push us. Actual reality is just so much more interesting, and much less deadly, than anything virtual. Plus it's free, you dont have to buy anything, to engage in actual reality.
My husband and I have been snickering remembering parental fears of the 80s and 90s. We play tabletop RPGs (descendants of Dungeons and Dragons) and listen to heavy metal. According to the common wisdom of the 1990s, we must be suicidal and potentially have Lucifer as a houseguest.
Meanwhile, my parental fears are that my kids won’t have any flesh-and-blood friends to summon demons with. If only I was concerned about my kids being excessively nerdy with their friends or playing drums loudly and poorly in a garage band dedicated to cliche songs worshipping Satan. That would be so much better than desperately trying to track down friends for my kids while other parents seem to disappear into social media only to message out “we should hang out soon” a couple of times a year. Can we please, please, have Satanic cults summoning Lucifer with games and music attempt to recruit my children like was advertised in my childhood?
I was sorely disappointed that I would have to have a paid subscription to listen to you speak with Dougald Hine, which is what brought me here. Hey, but at least I can complain about that here without paying an entry fee.
How could I know if I want to subscribe if I can't even listen?
I began my very brief (but still, years long) career as a teacher of movement-inclusive embodied mindfulness (somatic education) practices because I finally realized that we're so highly conditioned into hierarchical forms of 'education' that my role as a group facilitator for collaborative learning in this realm was simply not going to work out very well. Most people around me so unconsciously and automatically tend to orient toward authority for 'guidance' in life that they tend not to trust anyone not standing (or sitting) in the position of an authority to consider collaborative learning as a thing. They also, I sadly found, will tend to value an educational offering more highly if it has a definitive price / fee. So my sliding scale gift economy orientation in my offerings was widely regarded as a signal that I was no authority in my field. So I and my educational collaborators could barely make the rent on the dance / movement spaces we rented in order to set out a basket for anonymous donations to cover rent.
I gave up when covid made it all impossible to continue.
An excellent overview IMO of a long trend I've called Desire to be Virtual. I'm sure it's been with us always but the uptick in furry subcultures etc in the 90s as well as the ubiquitous branded animated cartoon t shirts had me ranting about our culture's desire to transferred into virtually, to become the cartoons, in other words too become the map and abandon the territory of the real in a secular fashion. Particularly enjoyed your parallels between advertising and advantage. Being less charitable I've described this phenomenon as the capitalist dumbing down of the population, not that we are any less 'intelligent' but the actual platform of how we think and socialize is geared to create this virtualizing desire in order to sell goods and to inoculate us with specific wants and needs. The social contagion spreads through a system primed by Capitalist code replacing the desire for real interaction, food, sex, shelter, ecstasy with an irreal desire, a virtual desire
I am reminded of the behavior of a group of teenage girls during the Salem ‘witch craft’ event, going into hysterics and weird ‘tics” on cue as evidence someone was a witch. There are also accounts of whole convents, centuries ago, mewing like cats “uncontrollably”. In high school decades ago I witnessed girls going into restrooms during lunch with the lights turned off and staring into a mirrors until Mary Worth, an old lady would manifest to them and they would come out in excitement. Somehow the boys chose not to participate in it. The school administration ended up putting a stop to it. Yep, girls and guys are in general different, each with their own set of positive and negative tendencies. For instance I don’t visualize and imagine being mugged by a gang of women in a bad neighborhood.
I wonder if the phenomena of there being way more girls wanting to change genders than boys can be seen as the triumph of toxic patriarchy - it’s better to be a guy than a gal - more power and freedom! After all the role most woman played through history - a variety of wife, mother, homemaker is now seen at best as something tacked on as a sideline to the real business of vocation/career, action in world outside the home. Really! being a wage slave serving non-family instead of being a mother and homemaker is liberation?!?!
Lots of interesting threads to pull on here - emerging from a tangle of different causes, effects, concerns and experiences.
I got caught in the ADHD algorithm on Instagram Reels (arms’ length TikTok for millennials!) back in 2021 and, honestly, the cognitive effect of spending time watching Reels felt like the described symptoms of ADHD anyway. But something that kept bothering me, the more I watched, is the way these videos shifted the focus away from our fucked-up systems and on to the individual. The implication is that things simply are the way they are; if you struggle with them, your struggle is explained by your condition; and through your condition, you can feel like part of a community, which staves off that sense of alienation.
One thing that came to mind when I was reading was - of all things - an observation in an old martial arts book that I read over a decade ago: eating pictures of food doesn’t nourish you. At the time I was living alone in a new city, a few hours’ journey away from anyone I knew well, and I began to realise that the time I spent on social media left me feeling lonelier. It was the social equivalent of eating pictures of food and expecting to be nourished. Since then, I have seen social media effectively decimate our ability to organise socially, even at a local level, because the infrastructure - and the interactions - is/are all effectively controlled by an algorithmic platform which profits from our physical alienation.
Back in the 1990s, I worked in a design department for a manufacturer. One of the designers I much respected had a small sign over his desk that said IF YOU THINK VIRTUAL REALITY IS INTERESTING, YOU SHOULD TRY ACTUAL REALITY. This was very helpful to me at the time, as 'VRML' was all the rage and now I see where the powers were and are trying to push us. Actual reality is just so much more interesting, and much less deadly, than anything virtual. Plus it's free, you dont have to buy anything, to engage in actual reality.
My husband and I have been snickering remembering parental fears of the 80s and 90s. We play tabletop RPGs (descendants of Dungeons and Dragons) and listen to heavy metal. According to the common wisdom of the 1990s, we must be suicidal and potentially have Lucifer as a houseguest.
Meanwhile, my parental fears are that my kids won’t have any flesh-and-blood friends to summon demons with. If only I was concerned about my kids being excessively nerdy with their friends or playing drums loudly and poorly in a garage band dedicated to cliche songs worshipping Satan. That would be so much better than desperately trying to track down friends for my kids while other parents seem to disappear into social media only to message out “we should hang out soon” a couple of times a year. Can we please, please, have Satanic cults summoning Lucifer with games and music attempt to recruit my children like was advertised in my childhood?
I was sorely disappointed that I would have to have a paid subscription to listen to you speak with Dougald Hine, which is what brought me here. Hey, but at least I can complain about that here without paying an entry fee.
How could I know if I want to subscribe if I can't even listen?
I began my very brief (but still, years long) career as a teacher of movement-inclusive embodied mindfulness (somatic education) practices because I finally realized that we're so highly conditioned into hierarchical forms of 'education' that my role as a group facilitator for collaborative learning in this realm was simply not going to work out very well. Most people around me so unconsciously and automatically tend to orient toward authority for 'guidance' in life that they tend not to trust anyone not standing (or sitting) in the position of an authority to consider collaborative learning as a thing. They also, I sadly found, will tend to value an educational offering more highly if it has a definitive price / fee. So my sliding scale gift economy orientation in my offerings was widely regarded as a signal that I was no authority in my field. So I and my educational collaborators could barely make the rent on the dance / movement spaces we rented in order to set out a basket for anonymous donations to cover rent.
I gave up when covid made it all impossible to continue.