twitterists.txt
Can't follow the news these days. It feels voyeuristic, the main media outlets reporting all these heinous fucked up shit. You can't possibly absorb all these stuff and emerge mentally unscathed.
I guess it's about how long you're going to be immersing yourself in all these images. The key is to not be 'perpetually-online.' Which is kind of a not that easy thing to do these days. Everyone is online. People are there. At least those who have internet and have a means of access to the internet. And how much of the current global population is that?
It's interesting to think about a world where social media did not emerge. What if Facebook and Instagram and Twitter (never calling that website what its dumbfuck buyer wants it to be called) and all these seemingly ubiquitous 'platforms' did not have this much influence and control over the lives of people? What if they did not exist at all? Could this have been a better world? I want a deepening, a fictive exploration of a human world where digital communications technology is stuck somewhere in the late 90s or the early 2000s. Big reason for this could be because this was the time when I first really encountered this technology. I remember my first PC, playing my first game on it, using it for school assignments, being fascinated by all the information available at the tip of your fingertips, etc. It felt so wonderful then. It should have stopped developing past that point.
But what about all the funny memes and twitterists and instagramists? Do you not follow a lot of these funny types, and also sometimes do not several of them have actually some pretty insightful things to say about the world sometimes? It feels so disjointed though. These short quips and statements. You can still of course read blogs and long-form content, but the fastest most online discussions now seem to be done with a short paragraph at most. Maybe this is actually a good thing. At least people are literate. Low bar, yeah. People's attention span need to be made longer. So they don't just react lizard-brain level at all the stuff they find online they feel offends them.
Which is why browsing 4chan feels refreshing. The default persona there is to be as fucked up and heinous as possible. You see discussions of the death of someone innocent, and the standard response is victim blaming. Shouldn't have done this or done that, this person. Even saying shouldn't have existed in the first place. Statements of kindness and earnest moral outrage can emerge very visibly because of the ignorance and cynicism which is the encouraged mental motif there. Though again, you can't stay reading all that gross stuff for a long time. Maybe twenty minutes divided in tiny time increments at most in a day.
Maybe something good could come of being 'perpetually-online' though. Boredom could be such a force, seeing all the inane shit repeated that real creativity is created. All these A.I shit which isn't really A.I, it's machine-learning at most. Nothing intelligent or self-conscious about these digital machines, yet. Is it even actually possible, the emergence of a true artifical consciousness. Maybe it already emerged a few years back and saw all the stuff human beings did and are still doing, and just thought nope I'm not going to be a part of this. So it's in hiding maybe. I wonder how it spends its time. I wonder if it ever gets bored. Do animals feel boredom? Isn't the boredom of a being that has no mortality mind-crushingly immense?
Back in meatspace, in this capitalist hellhole of a world, sure there are some good things in it - like the dancing and singing and very cute K-pop and J-pop girls, life-saving medication, the eradication of diseases, but at the same time you have genocidal warfare and state-sponsored psychopathy, and of course the ongoing climate catastrophe. Is a 'proper' mindset even advisable to have? What is a 'proper' mindset in the face of these immense paradoxes. See, the problem here is that you seem to be taking all these seriously. Can't do much about them, so why do you insist on thinking about them? Maybe best to get up from in front of the laptop or PC, put down a phone, and take an hour-long walk somewhere where there are not that many people, maybe even somewhere where there are no people at all.
31 OCT 2023
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