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 do indeed try to be charitable about all this, especially since I've known quite a few friends who've initially adopted identities and then had a very difficult time when they pulled back from them.
And absolutely, our desires are rarely our own any longer, but rather shaped by machines trying to sell us things.
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.
Mass hysteria of this sort have a very ancient history. The "jumping" or "dancing" plagues in Europe are particularly fascinating incidents of this. Not far from where I live is one of the oldest towns in Luxembourg where just such a plague occurred. People couldn't stop jumping, and it was believed they'd been cursed by a witch they had executed.
There is often an attempt to find a "scientific" root to these moments, and I think this misses the point. It was once seen as a spiritual manifestation (or literally as manifestation of spirits), and as a religious "technology" this still persists (as any charismatic Christian church or African traditional ceremony shows).
Ha! If I recounted the all the various spiritual encounters/experiences I have had over the years to certain people they would see me as someone with a form of benign schizophrenia!
Lest we imply or assume that such social plagues are more likely among young women, there is a largely Asian phenomenon of men becoming obsessed by the idea that their penises are shrinking or withdrawing into their bodies (koro). A European version was the idea that witches could steal penises, or cause impotence in other ways. One must, of course, note that just because a particular social plague or obsession existed before contemporary social media does not mean that social media are not exacerbating the problems.
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?!?!
Funnily enough I've been reflecting on this a lot recently. Growing up, we were never in one place for very long, and I absorbed the assumption that a housewife would be the death of all ambition, the dullest thing I could possibly be. I never imagined I would end up with my own home and garden and loving marriage and a stable community I care about. These days, it is literally my ambition to find a way to reduce my paid hours so I can spend more time contributing my time and energy towards the flourishing of all these things.
Yeah, a healthy community needs people available to do the various unpaid activities that are an essential intercellular matrix connecting everything, a stream of giving and love and neighborliness independent of the flow of money.
ROGD for girls is not so much a running towards maleness for its perks. It's more a headlong running away from entering adulthood in a burdensome and self consciousness inducing female body.
Yes, that changed body instead of being a wonderful sign they are getting ready to be a fertile bearer of life in partnership in their youth with someone ( generally a young man) embedded in supportive family/community, is now a burden and a handicap, with life bearing being postponed for years and years or as a potential hardship not happening at all. So sad we have a society that has does not have a positive sacred sense of this.
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 remember an editorial in one of the role-playing game magazines that did a little calculating and concluded that gamers actually had a suicide rate lower than the national average for teens. This was in response to a story about a gamer who did commit suicide after his long-running character was killed in a campaign, leading to media concerns that RPG were driving vulnerable kids to the brink.
Not surprising to me. I was never a gamer but as I get older I’m developing an appreciation. The ability to entertain ourselves without recourse to TV, video games, and social media is an important piece of divesting from industrial civilization. Groups getting together and making up stories seems like a great way to build healthy communities for kids and adults.
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?
All episodes of The Re/al/ign are made available to the public after a week or two. The episode with Dougald will be public this weekend. Paid subscribers get to listen and watch each episode first.
I'm relieved. I really wanted to listen to you and Dougald speaking with one another, since that's what brought me to your blog / space to begin with. I'm a full time volunteer in my work, and so have little money!
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.
In short, I've learned that a great many people in the 'developed world' actually don't have much direct understanding about what it is to be a learner. 'Education' in the dominant culture is mainly oriented toward various kinds of hierarchical arrangements, of which most people don't have much reflective awareness of or about. Teachers are regarded not as teachers, but as authorities, meant to provide a scaffolding for people who do not yet know how to stand on their own two feet and orient to the world using their own innate wisdom and intelligence. It's THAT bad. Our 'educational' systems are mainly geared towards inculcating folks into systems of hierarchical authoritarian systems in which the authorities in the system pretend *not* to be authorities -- even as they embody authoritarianism to the hilt -- since being clear and direct about it is now considered old fashioned. The task of an 'educator' in authoritarian-structured systems within pseudo-democratic modern cultures is to pretend to be an egalitarian while exercising total control over everything and everyone. Collaborative learning, thus, is impossible in the current cultural context of the USA, where I dwell, except in the rarest of local conditions.
The upshot, in context here? Those who are *not* allowed to experience collaborative learning environments not based on -- and rooted in -- perverse forms of masked and disguised authoritarian hierarchies will tend not to have a felt sense of self, or personal presence and integrity. They will thus be vulnerable to to a thousand offerings of pseudo-identities to act as surrogates for being a person and a self. But 'self' isn't an object, but a process ... learned in community, emerging in community -- and the modern world is offering very little experience of community, indeed.
In short, my point is that the dominant mode of 'education' in the 'developed world' obviates the natural and innate sense of personal identity which is truly sincere and authentic. So it is no wonder, to me, that countless millions of people are desperately clinging to senses of identity which do not emerge naturally and organically from within their own lived experiences. It's no wonder that so many, upon 'achieving' any kind of 'success' are experiencing imposter syndrome.
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 do indeed try to be charitable about all this, especially since I've known quite a few friends who've initially adopted identities and then had a very difficult time when they pulled back from them.
And absolutely, our desires are rarely our own any longer, but rather shaped by machines trying to sell us things.
"to become the map and abandon the territory" is an excellent description
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.
Mass hysteria of this sort have a very ancient history. The "jumping" or "dancing" plagues in Europe are particularly fascinating incidents of this. Not far from where I live is one of the oldest towns in Luxembourg where just such a plague occurred. People couldn't stop jumping, and it was believed they'd been cursed by a witch they had executed.
There is often an attempt to find a "scientific" root to these moments, and I think this misses the point. It was once seen as a spiritual manifestation (or literally as manifestation of spirits), and as a religious "technology" this still persists (as any charismatic Christian church or African traditional ceremony shows).
just in case you havent read Huxley's "The Devils of Loudon" it is an excellent and very disturbing book about witchcraft mania.
Ha! If I recounted the all the various spiritual encounters/experiences I have had over the years to certain people they would see me as someone with a form of benign schizophrenia!
Lest we imply or assume that such social plagues are more likely among young women, there is a largely Asian phenomenon of men becoming obsessed by the idea that their penises are shrinking or withdrawing into their bodies (koro). A European version was the idea that witches could steal penises, or cause impotence in other ways. One must, of course, note that just because a particular social plague or obsession existed before contemporary social media does not mean that social media are not exacerbating the problems.
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?!?!
Funnily enough I've been reflecting on this a lot recently. Growing up, we were never in one place for very long, and I absorbed the assumption that a housewife would be the death of all ambition, the dullest thing I could possibly be. I never imagined I would end up with my own home and garden and loving marriage and a stable community I care about. These days, it is literally my ambition to find a way to reduce my paid hours so I can spend more time contributing my time and energy towards the flourishing of all these things.
Yeah, a healthy community needs people available to do the various unpaid activities that are an essential intercellular matrix connecting everything, a stream of giving and love and neighborliness independent of the flow of money.
ROGD for girls is not so much a running towards maleness for its perks. It's more a headlong running away from entering adulthood in a burdensome and self consciousness inducing female body.
💯
Yes, that changed body instead of being a wonderful sign they are getting ready to be a fertile bearer of life in partnership in their youth with someone ( generally a young man) embedded in supportive family/community, is now a burden and a handicap, with life bearing being postponed for years and years or as a potential hardship not happening at all. So sad we have a society that has does not have a positive sacred sense of this.
modern america is truly poisoned at its roots, which is why that it's mostly pathology that grows from its soil.
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 remember an editorial in one of the role-playing game magazines that did a little calculating and concluded that gamers actually had a suicide rate lower than the national average for teens. This was in response to a story about a gamer who did commit suicide after his long-running character was killed in a campaign, leading to media concerns that RPG were driving vulnerable kids to the brink.
Not surprising to me. I was never a gamer but as I get older I’m developing an appreciation. The ability to entertain ourselves without recourse to TV, video games, and social media is an important piece of divesting from industrial civilization. Groups getting together and making up stories seems like a great way to build healthy communities for kids and adults.
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?
All episodes of The Re/al/ign are made available to the public after a week or two. The episode with Dougald will be public this weekend. Paid subscribers get to listen and watch each episode first.
Thanks Rhyd.
I'm relieved. I really wanted to listen to you and Dougald speaking with one another, since that's what brought me to your blog / space to begin with. I'm a full time volunteer in my work, and so have little money!
Check your email. :)
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.
continued -
In short, I've learned that a great many people in the 'developed world' actually don't have much direct understanding about what it is to be a learner. 'Education' in the dominant culture is mainly oriented toward various kinds of hierarchical arrangements, of which most people don't have much reflective awareness of or about. Teachers are regarded not as teachers, but as authorities, meant to provide a scaffolding for people who do not yet know how to stand on their own two feet and orient to the world using their own innate wisdom and intelligence. It's THAT bad. Our 'educational' systems are mainly geared towards inculcating folks into systems of hierarchical authoritarian systems in which the authorities in the system pretend *not* to be authorities -- even as they embody authoritarianism to the hilt -- since being clear and direct about it is now considered old fashioned. The task of an 'educator' in authoritarian-structured systems within pseudo-democratic modern cultures is to pretend to be an egalitarian while exercising total control over everything and everyone. Collaborative learning, thus, is impossible in the current cultural context of the USA, where I dwell, except in the rarest of local conditions.
The upshot, in context here? Those who are *not* allowed to experience collaborative learning environments not based on -- and rooted in -- perverse forms of masked and disguised authoritarian hierarchies will tend not to have a felt sense of self, or personal presence and integrity. They will thus be vulnerable to to a thousand offerings of pseudo-identities to act as surrogates for being a person and a self. But 'self' isn't an object, but a process ... learned in community, emerging in community -- and the modern world is offering very little experience of community, indeed.
In short, my point is that the dominant mode of 'education' in the 'developed world' obviates the natural and innate sense of personal identity which is truly sincere and authentic. So it is no wonder, to me, that countless millions of people are desperately clinging to senses of identity which do not emerge naturally and organically from within their own lived experiences. It's no wonder that so many, upon 'achieving' any kind of 'success' are experiencing imposter syndrome.