Nice to see you over here. Wherever here is. Getting actually read makes me go read the articles myself. I read this one through triple trip eyes. Found a typo, and I restore the sentence thus: You’re a citizen of the galaxy, so you can’t be lost.
As for the ensnaring effects of the devices, I'm now playing both sides. I've never had a phone, not in this century, but until this year I had also had no social mediation. Then three months ago I jumped in feet first to Twitter, Substack, and Linked In. Head rush.
My new game, played with varying rates of success, is to notice the horror in passing but pay much less attention to it than I would have before. I was a muckraking journalist and I've seen how well people can not care no matter what kinds of dirt a writer might rake up. Nowadays, once I've seen a few examples of an algorithm suppressing my work, of a world in which people believe in tiny little things inside their bodies that are the boss of them, and of endless radiation and poisons cast my way, I don't need a lot more examples. I don't need to be shown the dangers of the next G after 4, for example, to know that 5 and 6 will be terrible, and to guess that 7 or 10 might be world ending. I don't know what fun stuff I'll find when I explore the meaning of water, but I'm not going to be astounded if I discover widespread institutional misunderstanding about it. In the face of some new horror, I won't take as my mandate at that time the need to educate people. People already know enough about most alarming things to shove the information into the subconscious.
In the new game I'm playing, by contrast, I'm asking myself: what if I made all this? What if the lies of the machine, even the dissimulation of the simulation, is something I'm in control of? At what level, and with what actions, might that be possible? For example, I might not believe in viruses, but what might I get out of creating a world in which the vast majority of people do?
Most readers will think it simply crazy to think that we make the world with our focus, so I will be easing into this way of thinking about things very slowly.
Somehow we didn't sign up for the Peterworld today. Hopefully tomorrow. My IT person, aka wife, was away most of the day. I remain intrigued by the possibilities.
hey triple trip,
Nice to see you over here. Wherever here is. Getting actually read makes me go read the articles myself. I read this one through triple trip eyes. Found a typo, and I restore the sentence thus: You’re a citizen of the galaxy, so you can’t be lost.
As for the ensnaring effects of the devices, I'm now playing both sides. I've never had a phone, not in this century, but until this year I had also had no social mediation. Then three months ago I jumped in feet first to Twitter, Substack, and Linked In. Head rush.
My new game, played with varying rates of success, is to notice the horror in passing but pay much less attention to it than I would have before. I was a muckraking journalist and I've seen how well people can not care no matter what kinds of dirt a writer might rake up. Nowadays, once I've seen a few examples of an algorithm suppressing my work, of a world in which people believe in tiny little things inside their bodies that are the boss of them, and of endless radiation and poisons cast my way, I don't need a lot more examples. I don't need to be shown the dangers of the next G after 4, for example, to know that 5 and 6 will be terrible, and to guess that 7 or 10 might be world ending. I don't know what fun stuff I'll find when I explore the meaning of water, but I'm not going to be astounded if I discover widespread institutional misunderstanding about it. In the face of some new horror, I won't take as my mandate at that time the need to educate people. People already know enough about most alarming things to shove the information into the subconscious.
In the new game I'm playing, by contrast, I'm asking myself: what if I made all this? What if the lies of the machine, even the dissimulation of the simulation, is something I'm in control of? At what level, and with what actions, might that be possible? For example, I might not believe in viruses, but what might I get out of creating a world in which the vast majority of people do?
Most readers will think it simply crazy to think that we make the world with our focus, so I will be easing into this way of thinking about things very slowly.
Somehow we didn't sign up for the Peterworld today. Hopefully tomorrow. My IT person, aka wife, was away most of the day. I remain intrigued by the possibilities.