2023-09-17 - Kvetching - Tech - The Machine Stops

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The Machine

Once a month or three I do Fediverse. Tried to-day. Within 7 minutes, I was physically ill, my gut contorted, my shoulders tense. And this, not from reading bad news or uncouth disagreement. No, sick just from the biotic effect of the technology, even with pleasant pictures of pixelated kittens and amiable company. Within 20, I was writing irate re-replies to autie reply guys. 25 minutes later, I shut it all down with a sigh of relief.

It’s too cloying, the quasi-human brouhaha. The scurrying ants busy to feed the drug of “just because”. The loud screams of an ecocancer bowing off the evolutionary stage in its suffocating fin de siècle. The poison of the panopticon agora is palpable, visceral. It may take having been weened off it a while to make conscious. Humans applaud ourselves for our brains. But human hegemony flows from the hand to the mouth. Always has done. Brainwise, we’re not really worth congratulations. Even less so now, in an era of the triumph of utilitarian anomie and the abdication of wisdom. The era of the parasocial identarian insect.

Why do we bother? That’s my first question. Is the queen of the hive truly worth her pulsating bloat? Is our petty endorphin kick of empty social calories worth it? The desolation and anxiety of facetious comradeship when bosom friendship is a lost art? In our private free moments can we still not ask: why do we do this?

Has electronic social media done net good? I am asking seriously. Has it *ever* done substantial, lasting, quotidian good? Survey the whole thing, highs and lows, in the broadest sense: from Usenet to IRC to Faceborg to Birdsite to even Smolnet. Add in talk radio and television chat, the bane of Rwanda and Texas both. Some vague good and a festering mountain of filthy bad.

And it’s palpable: the good is mainly discovered *despite* the media. A solitary few relationships occur from chance kismet and good faith. They even occur despite our interests and identities, almost never because of them. And that’s not social media. No, not really. That is *correspondence*, the moribund world of letters. Letters obtain to a deeper history. Fireside intimacy, forgiving confession, and care is what makes humans at all worthwhile. Made.

In the difference lays the all. McLuhan wasn’t right about everything, but he was a spot on prophet about that. True society cannot endure a labyrinthine hellscape where humanoid zombies chant “long live the new flesh!” at the top of our lungs.

The world of letters requires polish, and polish begets *time* for deliberation, consideration, and those fickle shadows of higher virtues we once believed possible of ourselves. Editorial judiciousness can encourage poignancy in such a world. Or it can exorcise dissent to fanatical common sense in the hands of bad faith. Just so. But the common denominator is the due contemplation it demands of us. Human ecologies of health become possible. It’s the difference between home cooking and fast food, the heirloom and the genetically bloated tomato. Without deliberation, we are simply lost as a human race. The interested blow smoke up our arses and tell us there’s no fire. But there is. And we damned well all feel it.

Stops

It seems to me, the overwhelming fact is modern social media is inately poison. True relationships have become a hunted counterculture under the panopticon agora. We must conduct them furtively, away from the mob’s hard gaze. The cacophony of the agora is inherently callous. Cacophony, literally meaning “crap sound”. Modern social media is the gaming of toxic mob mentality to the profit of the psychopathic elite. This is proven by now, right?

So should I just finally dump it completely? I don’t even get the endorphin high extroverted allistics do from the crowd, the mob mentality. I’ve told myself I keep it for talking with techies. Decent folk with the discipline to use infotech intelligently. Which is true, and this cohort can be helpful. A self selected bunch worth knowing if one has the interest, which I do. Utilitarian cordiality. Fair enough. But the ticket price is just too bloody high. And I don’t have the budget anymore.

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