There’s a quiet consciously propagated mythology that Twitter is just a public town square.
As if when you’re looking at social media you’re looking at humanity just splattered all across the page
As if this is just what it looks like cuz we have all this connectivity and this is what humanity is like so when you see ugly things on the internet you’re like well humanity is kinda ugly
This is a selection of things this is a tool this is a frame of interpretation in its own right it has its own incentive structure it’s this way for a reason
Think of what’s happening to your brain and to the world and to ideas when you’re operating with twitter as a tool that you will reach for..
A thought has just happened in your head, you don’t know if you should be marrying yourself to that thought or not you don’t know if you identify with every thought you don’t know if every thought’s a good thought or not or if it’s stupid.
But if you have this tool of twitter.
You quantify this thought into this tweet so now it’s written language attached to your name.
And you launch it out there. Everyone is now responding to it. If someone attacks this thought it feels like they’re attacking you.
Now these random thoughts that you have are now getting blasted out into the world and the whole world is having this kinda teeth gritted psychedelic fast meth-like experience with thoughts and identity.
What just happened to you?!?
What is happening?
This isn’t just like a calm representation of thinking or thoughts or human beings.
This isn’t just ideas
This is something happening
Also why is it happening?
There’s no way around the profit incentive structure of social media
.
It’s like our nuclear bomb as it’s completely revamped all of our minds and societies.
It's a trauma, this new medium of communication is to change humanity and we are just starting to graple with it.
It's like a layer that presents itself as somehow reflecting reality
People are treating the internet media and like their phones as this like disenchanted world -they’re trying to interact within the same way you try to interact with the modern world.
This constant appeal to objective literal truth is when paired with the infinite chaos and confusion and incentive structures of social media and online life it creates this perverse like extremely anxiety inducing bad confusion and bad action and bad conversation.
Even though we’re in the most post modern like doubting every institution believing nobody pathologising everyone’s secret intentions constantly and we’re all appealing to the truth for some reason?
It’s the wrong frame work to understand the modern world the digital landscape we live in
Correspondence theory of truth
A much better understanding of the space we’re living in now once understanding the move from pre modernity into modernity. Most people are working in this weird framework of understanding the world through this lens of objective truth but our world is not mostly understood or like actually interacting with our world through that framework like maybe it worked for what for a short period of time when Cartesian scientific Industrial Revolution era was really coming into play but it is totally broken now
Pragmatist principles
You know it works really really good for incredibly fast generation of like wealth and the machine
But it doesn’t work for meaning
Not necessarily for community building either you can argue it contributed significantly to like uh democracy and stuff like that and you know these ‘tools of reason’
All men are created equal is that a rational statement?
Not exactly
What do we mean by that
It’s a weird spiritual statement
The things that are in western rationality that we think are powerful tools of objective factual scientific truth or whatever
There’s a lot of faith propositions in there
But we perceive these things to be like objective factual things..
But they’re actually way more tied to our kinda premodern knowledge about like story and religion
.
If you spend all day on twitter it's a personal thing, your soul is in it, you're going to be walking around all day with twitter overlaying reality.
Like you play Tetris all day and you go to bed and close your eyes it's still happening
If humanity's conscious expierence is all on Twitter like there's nothing not real about that like it is very real it's just like should it be is this the most effective place to be pouring our conscious experience
We're all very complicit in like the it's what's happening and validating it and pouring our souls into it
Twitter and TikTok are the most dangerous like fucking crack
If there's a billboard on the moterway like atleast we're all looking at the same billboard.
That's something weirder and more perverse that everyone's getting fed a different kind of reality and it contributes to how little of a unifying story we have and how we even lack the same lanuage and expectations and understandings of eachother because it's all refracted through a differnt lens
It's not conducive to community and the social cohesion
It's that mixing the advertiser model in with your soul, with your relationships with your friends
It's really capitalising on the most innately human things ever.
It's control over you and your emotions probably isn't useful for human goals.
Nietzsche's armor for fatigue acceptance of one's current situation and what has happened in the past
Autotelic personality - Internally driven. One's reaction to external circumstances.
There's something about changing those things in your immediate enviroment just for your own aesthetic pleasure
That is such a counterbalence to the illusion of importance of a bunch of people seeing your social media, the numvers and rationality. Social media is so utilitarian.
Putting a little flower on your desk for only you to see and finding meaning in just that act. It's exerting effort in your life that only you can see. It's a little bit of faith in the significcance of that act itself.
Beauty is meaningful. Self love. making things around you more beautiful. It's like an act of worship.
The goodness someone can still carry out in one's deprived state.
Maintain focus on the good in the world if we wsh to rebel against all that threatens it's beauty
Video games you become the type of person that cares about this thing and refuse to take for the joy to of trying to struggle towards that goal within these limitations so like agency itself
If you keep doing that with different games then you start to identify with the ability of reshaping yourself
You become much more fluid and dynamic and able to do a lot of things
That’s the process of going in and going out and having ways to do both and realising this is maybe what being a human is about and this is what people should be doing all the time and not just figuring out the right thing to believe