Lately I've been thinking a lot about how the best days of Internet use are probably behind me. I had some fun and learned a bunch of terminally online gags that I can't share IRL. I think I've steered clear from getting brainwormed for the past 10+ years (I had a brush with libertarian brainwormed) but on a long enough timeline it's probably inevitable that some AI-spawned hyper-memetic-weapon will fuck me up. Besides, I just spent my flight reading Heidegger and flirting with the black MILF flight attendant and I've never felt this good from refreshing a feed or imageboard.
I can sympathise. Welcome to the forum without notifications, without inboxes, without (You)s, in fact without any feedback regarding the contributions that you have made. Every page is statically rendered and shown identically to everyone. You might just as well get addicted to a newspaper.
>18 Fuck me
Flight MILFs are an underrated phenomenon. Talk a lot though
do that boss
But here we are
sneed
Being and slime
>>39 I both loved and despised the book. Was lucky enough to read it during a college class devoted entirely to it, I think it that really helped as I probably would have given up otherwise. Definitely dense, almost poetic. It's one of those books that I catch myself thinking about almost every day
im gay
>>131 Yeah, the thing that really makes me want to quit is "how we spend our days is how we spend our lives." I had a friend who died unexpectedly of an embolism and candidly I am horrified how much of his life he wasted on SomethingAwful and stupid YouTube shit rather than spending time with the people who will mourn him.
I dunno. I think it's a matter of time before big platforms become unusable. I do like getting pilled on various topics, disillusioning though it is.
It's pretty over. Way too much is just for attention, and so little creation. Any take on twitter or reddit has devolved into non-information non-humor non-personality nothingness. I dunno if I'd even call it language, it's weird. I think it's a good thing though and I like discord / chats coming back. Talking about bus shitters is healthier than anything upvoted, liked, ranked, algorithm'd to you now
fellow minnesota retard i salute you
>>304 The big platforms of the internet are like the roman empire after the marcus aurelius. they will never be good again, but they will take a long time to die. In the meantime the best chance of preserving what is interesting and valuable is to try and stake out independent places on the frontier beyond the aegis of billionaires and glowies.
I want to delete everything, but this is basically social suicide. I think maybe I should keep only instagram. I just wish there was a way to only see content from people I follow.
switched to a flip phone a couple months ago. It's been nice. I can feel my attention span increasing and it's starting to be a lot easier to be bored
The social media giants are clunky, capricious behemoths. They shadow ban you for using a vpn, for trying to direct traffic anywhere off site. Meanwhile bots and scams run rampant. Somebody shows up in your inbox pretending to be a pretty girl to try to rope you into some crypto pump and dump schemes. Everybody who continues to use these things uncritically seemed to be getting dumber.
Honestly feels like we've already released Pandora's Box and there is no way to revert to pre-internet or even pre Web 3.0 times. I'm glad there's a new image board that hopefully won't be shitted up but it's unlikely we'll ever have a 'safespace' where we can go back to the old days just because the cat is out of the bag. I'm just gonna go with the flow and try and resist using brain rotting content as much as possible. Difficult when so much of my main form of internet communication (instagram) is just TikTok-lite. Anyways, $4 a pound.
Idk, I think that there’s still a lot of value in non-fully online forums. Group chats and discords for small communities can be amazing. My mum’s on a WhatsApp group with her book club and it’s very cute. The internet might be bad, but there are still some nuggets around.
I choose to believe that humanity will evolve to be able to handle the internet just as we evolved to handle booze.
Just wanna pirate white pony and visit dollmaker sites again :(
>421 humanity's going extinct in a matter of decades
Am really grateful for this board too :) absent of the degeneracy of 4chan, existential malice of the lolcow farms while maintaining just the right amount of snark and authenticity that sets it apart from the homogeneity of the neurotic “decent fucking person” echo chambers we see in abundance. I relate to the other posts on here feeling like their minds have been rotted by unfunny memes, culture wars and ragebait. I really want this place to last. The closest thing to old internet I’ve experienced was “Spacehey” a MySpace clone - the layout is nostalgic enough but most people on there turned out to be low attention span self diagnosed zoomers who listened to 100gecs and ayesha erotica while insisting on being scene so it just wasn’t the same. Also no top 8 :(
>>395 I cannot access reddit anymore: no vpn allowed, no logged off browsing allowed. This is some sort of blessing (less scrolling), except reddit has become a source of information I'm having a hard time replacing. Oh well, I'll find a way. >>397 >and there is no way to revert to pre-internet or even pre Web 3.0 times. I'm not sure. So many people I know live 90% off grid. They connect for administrative stuff and piracy, but most of their lives are outside screens (and their kids too). Someone might say: have you seen this youtube vid? And we'll watch it, and that's all. But that would be in semi-rural Europe and these people cultivate contempt for smartphones. It probably is different in the US (?).
If you like this board please mention it on those rsp threads where people complain about the state of the sub and other internet places with good vibes / cultural discussion, it's really the only way to grow the readership as an independent forum.
Mention it on /r/RSBookclub, that's where the quality people are.
>>458 This place is really nice and I hope it stays that way for a long time. I tiny bit more activity would be cool. The rs subs have been shit for years at this point. Reddit (and other social media) as a whole is useless apart from some very niche hobby subreddits. Even more niche imageboards are infested with 4chan /pol/ brainrot losers or get spammed by CP bots. Its all hopeless. I recently had the idea of trying to set up some kind of messageboard or forum that is not indexed by any search engines and not advertised anywhere on the web. The only way of learning about it would be by finding stickers/posters/etc that I (and my cabal of international nerd friends) have put up in places that might attract interesting people (i.e. university departments, specific clubs, cafes, theatres, conferences, etc.) Its a very elitist approach and there is a very high chance that no one finds the site at all and it dies in obscurity. But I feel like it could be an interesting experiment and the only way of hosting an online community that does not get subsumed by internet mainstream brainrot is hiding in the periphery as much as one can.
>>596 admin here. Thank you for your nice words about the imageboard. I have some ideas for trying to bring more of the right sort of users to the board but I don't think it's something I can do alone. What I'm saying is that if you write petrarchan.com in the stalls of a really good dive bar or similar you will have my eternal thanks :)
>>596 >>597 AFAIK, robots crawl everywhere, no matter the amount of robots.txt. Current era forces us all into walled internet if we want anything else than slop and memes and advertisement (either paywall or any kind of loginwall). The old free access, wild west, edge of the world Internet is a thing of the past. Pt is exempt because it is small, but if it succeeds into harboring more users, it will face the same issue: a robot variation on eternal September. I don't have a solution.
>35 Question Concerning Technology
>>741 My advice is to say something sincere but nasty on your fav time-waster site. What works for me is saying something heartfelt but disagreeable in public. That way I avoid the site where I said it so that I never have to deal with the response that other people will have to my disagreeable opinion. I get to preserve my ego AND enjoy the edgy pleasure of being a provocateur, but I just have to give up a website to achieve it. Guess my attachment style.
>>741 I've found my internet use naturally dropping since I started taking long walks. 10,000 steps a day seems to give me a lot of energy so it's easier to actually do something instead of just vegging in front of the computer. Honestly though my old internet haunts have also gotten boring so it's easier to pull myself away Also it's easier to stop doing something if you have something else to replace it, so try to cultivate some new hobbies
I came to the edgy podcast when I was feeling pretty low and lonely. The experience of listening to two cool girls sneer at things had gratified something about my loneliness. I really enjoyed the community that they had engendered because it seemed like it was organized around people who could at least recognize people were falsifying their preferences (read: people in the community could see the obvious trash being passed off as art, insight, or fairness). I found this addictive because I'm a strong people-pleaser. I grew up in a slightly abusive context and it's been a struggle for me to stand up for my own judgments. But the edgy podcast has been lost at sea for years and one of the girls, A, is obviously addicted to /pol/ fandom. I stopped listening after they had a famous racist on the pod. But I've stuck with the community for better or worse. Now that community is being overrun by more /pol/-tier racism and I think this is closing time. But before I go I want to share a read that I have on A that comes out of the low loneliness that felt relieved by this podcast: There's something about A that I recognize in myself. For her, the thrill is in being so self-effacing that she's permitted to say awful things about everyone else. She thinks that it's paradoxical that she's really nice even though she has a horrifying reputation online. This is not paradoxical at all: she loads up on the self-directed negativity because once she's under this load of shame she doesn't feel the additional shame that comes with behaving badly. I know this because it's also true in my life: I have a handful of shame-games that I play that give me this awful headachey guilt but once I have it then I'm insulated from the additional guilt that comes with being selfish. I don't really know what to do with this knowledge, but it really seems like closing time for the podcast and the community. This is basically the best last thing I could get from this: recognizing the venom that others are drinking at least so that I will put down the glass myself.
>>911 >she loads up on the self-directed negativity because once she's under this load of shame she doesn't feel the additional shame that comes with behaving badly. You express the idea well (I recognize it). It's a bit like taking a shitbath so you can't complain about the smell of your farts (and neither can anyone else). It's debasing your self, because starting from a lower point is easier - so it's a low self-esteem issue, also some lack of courage. I understand the urge, but it condemns one to mediocrity.
>>913 I really like this post because I really relate to the whizzing bullets analogy. I see it everywhere now, I see people recoiling in horror at other people who are slightly more cringe, slightly more unaware, slightly more of a loser than themselves. In fact, I've realised that a large proportion of the time, if you see someone being unreasonably angry or mean to someone else, the reason is because they feel threatened by the insinuation that the two of them are more or less the same. There is nothing scarier than someone who is 15% more pathetic than yourself.
>>917 But Christ on the cross is all about being (and suffering) as a human, all about understanding those who have killed him and thus opening the route to forgiveness. It's not a raising up to a hallowed state, but rather a humble lowering down. Whatever sort of thing Anna'd be going for here isn't meant to gain an understanding of 'the haters', but rather to be un-understandable and raised above them.
maybe we shouldn't give up on internet culture as a whole but just astro-turfed, botted garbage full of AI content
The internet used to be a better, less cynical place. I remember you could find a forum for lets say, music production fans and there'd be 500 people posting there with in jokes, lingo and culture unique to that board. And you had to lurk to understand it because if you didn't people would make fun of you. People can blame discord but the issue really is reddit and overall, the shrinking of the internet by huge corporations who want to control everything. You used to be able to find people in all different sites and places. Now, people use a handful of sites. Reddit, one or two social media sites, youtube & a news site. It's a far cry from people just scrolling the web looking for cool things. Oh well, nothing really lasts forever. The future is lame.
I just want to add one thing to anyone, anywhere who's reading this: One of the most poisonous things you can read about online is any sort of "how am I doing? is this a normal way for things to go?" board / forum / discord. That includes job hunting stuff, dating advice, grad school rumors, any of it. The only people who have a healthy relationship to those places take one look, grab a small number of hypotheses to test, and log off for good. The people who stay on those message boards are basically mired in self-hatred and self-blame. Stay long enough and you'll start thinking about totally normal, workable problems in terms of fundamental deficiencies, unsolvable problems, and ropefuel. But the truth is that for any deficiency you might think you have (bad CV, physical attribute, GPA), there are countless people who have had similar deficiencies in similar situations and most of them simply found a way to *work it.* The kinds of creativity and novelty that it takes to find a way to *work it* are completely contrary to the culture of advice boards.
>>1243 one of the things i find most unnerving about smartphone era culture is the seepage of online vocab into real life. not a priori because words have spread and meanings have broaded since forever, but somehow (the nature of algorithmic content?) everyone who is tapped in gets a firmware update at the same time and start saying some online phrase (many such cases). there's a clear separation between like a 4chan user or AA member who couldn't turn the jargon off and would say "normie" in polite company and someone who got it implanted into their brain when it suddenly became a fan favorite in like 2018. whenever the latter repeats some phrase to me that i've been marinating in for a decade i pretend like i don't know what they're talking about because it triggers the same reaction as a greasy child talking to me about rare pepes in 2016 unaware that no one thinks he's funny. it's obviously a different phenomenon though
Yeah we have no freedoms anymore. I'll give you another example, you can't even go to car meets without the police gaining access to FB groups and whatsapp chats in order to catch people
I don't know why I keep hopping between different RS forums. From r/redscarepod, to rsx, to the rdrama clone, and now here. The immediate answer, as always, is that it becomes too popular. Too redditified. However, I'm not sure if that's actually true. It's difficult to assess if the content being posted is objectively of lower quality than before. Even more difficult when there are other people who'll share the same sentiments as you ("it's over", "shut it down", "go back", "front page", etc.) I think I might just like the feeling of being in a "niche" community. Be it because I feel more aloof or it's just genuinely more cozy and personal. Why do these types of splinter forums prop up in the first place? Is there gonna be a splinter forum for Petrarchan in a few months?
I made this thread a year ago. I was the one at the MPLS shake shack. I was the one who thought about quitting internet culture. And then, for a year, I just... didn't. I feel like the events of >>1664 are another obvious indicator that it's time to leave the internet. I don't have anything kind I want to say about that site or chan culture other than this: Every one of the five remaining sites is going to resemble Heaven Banning or some similar offshoot of Dead Internet Theory. No antisocial weirdness, no spontaneity, nothing beyond what the AI editors trained on Conde Nast or Barstool Sports would approve of. This year I went to the same annual thing that took me to the MPLS shake shack last year. I went to MPLS again and I reflected on how I did nothing. I spent another year doing a thing I didn't really like and I didn't really get a lot out of it. I didn't find a lot of new culture. I probably could have found more by just opening up an issue of the New Yorker (or whatever print pub, you get the idea) and looking up things that sound interesting. I certainly wasted a year that I could have spent going out and building rapport with people. A year of friendship potential consigned to oblivion. In the last year, a good friend who I morally admire happened to have quit screen / scrolling stuff without any input on my part. I'm not clear but I suspect that part of his motivation was also quitting porn -- he initially talked about how he really had to quit watching "videos" (unspecified) and it genuinely might have been either porn or YouTube running amock on his ADD. Whatever the motivation, he seems to have done it. When I landed I texted my friend that I was going to go low-screen for the next 72 hours. That was Sunday. I'm here, obviously, so it's not a resounding success. But at work yesterday I successfully stopped myself from wasting time. In early April I bought myself a linen-cover journal that I like and it's just a way better use of my life to use that to escape from stuff (as opposed to the web). I'm much more active so far. Fuck it people I'm doing it.
> In the last year, a good friend who I morally admire happened to have quit screen / scrolling stuff without any input on my part. I'm not clear but I suspect that part of his motivation was also quitting porn -- he initially talked about how he really had to quit watching "videos" (unspecified) and it genuinely might have been either porn or YouTube running amock on his ADD. Whatever the motivation, he seems to have done it. maybe i need to do this im 22 no failed high school spent the last 15 years posting on half chan cripple chan and so on maybe i just need to disconnect from it all pluss i have 337 days played in hours on steam and iv only had my account for 10 years
I remember quitting the internet and video games for a few months. It was the most productive and happy I've been, yet I fell back into it. There's this gnawing in my heart, so bitter and depressive, that tells me I don't deserve an ounce of happiness in my life. No matter if I turned a new leaf and lived like a saint, or solved every problem plaguing the world. That in the end it just wouldn't amount to even a grain of a goodness. The thing is however, is that I agree with this gnawing. It was a truth left unspoken between myself and others. That's why I wouldn't mind going back to 4chan.
This whole Dead Internet thing makes me real sad desu. The propest of 4chin closing for good got me feeling blue the whole day, and I'm not even an oldfag I joined like 3 years ago. The prospect of leaving the internet doesn't even feel that appealing to me, possibly because I grew up with it. It feels like to me like Internet Realism, if I were to adapt the idea from capitalism realism, even real life doesn't feel like a good enough replacement. But I've never been a part of a lasting group of friends, every seems fade away, such is life i guess but why even bother then
>>1677 it is incredibly hard to maintain a community above a certain size. it might actually be impossible. hence why people have been creating /r/trueolives instead of /r/olives or /r/windowcleaning2 instead of /r/windowcleaning for decades on reddit. I once thought about making a forum with exactly 10,000 members allowed. The first of every month, any users who haven't been active in $X months get their accounts revoked, and the slots get issued based on a queue or an application system or something.
>>1698 Interesting idea but who even has the attention span to get it if they don't get in immediately anymore? There was a time when Facebook was just for colleges or Gmail wa invite only, but that Cartman amusement park scheme only works now if you have cash to flood people in to begin with
>>597 The monkey's paw curls, you all got mentioned on Kiwifarms which is why I am here. The good news is you got mentioned because the & compilation got posted here, and someone over there wanted to share it. So the kind of people who follow the link here are probably going to be folk with a literary inclination, so it's not all bad.
The Internet and its culture have been both such a creative and destructive force in my life that I sometimes wish I could lick my wounds, and break with it altogether. Live a life farming, in the sun, and care not an iota for the non bodied series of tube's. I used to think they were ridiculous, but I've seriously thought about getting a dumbphone in the recent months. I'm an addict; most things that give me pleasure, I'll abuse. But the Internet is something hard to shake off. I love it too much, and it's been with me too long. I try to also read more, keep away from electronics, work with my hands. But I'll find myself somewhere like here eventually.
>>1811 With the way the world is going, I don't think anyone can break with their internet addiction. I can't say that's all bad, though. Dropped almost 70 pounds and managed to eek out an existence online while being a terminal shut-in who goes for the occasional neighborhood walk.
>>1823 No, similarly, there is a glimmer of desire within me to accelerate my Internet addiction. Burroughs wrote, in paraphrase, that heroin gave purpose to the purposeless. Not only did you gain the "feel good" chemicals that one ordinarily needs to work for, but the junky gained a culture, a drive, some friends, and the daily need to score. (I think) The Internet is absolute consciousness, and when you use it, you lose all sense of the body. In a trite example, when you see people scroll, they are completely absorbed by the device and lose sense of the exterior world. All they focus on is the scroll, which is to say, their own thoughts and the dopaminergic stimulus. When I found out about the Gnostics, I felt that I discovered a long-lost people whose dispositions matched my own. Lose the body, and find the truth. And sometimes, I think if I were to just become a NEET, a husk, I would remove that weak flesh and become something better. I like sunlight a little too much, though.
I am addicted to YouTube. I am currently managing my addiction, but it has become clear to me that there is no ambiguity about the matter. It is a chronic psychological addiction that is actively damaging my quality of life. Thank you for reading my blog post.
>>1887 In my case, the opposite happens: nothing on YouTube manages to interest me, neither the bad (reaction content slop, inflammatory or misleading material) nor the good (well-made documentaries, lectures from academic institutions, book reviews, etc.). It’s as if I’m experiencing a kind of anhedonia when it comes to content consumption. The same thing has happened with Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and so on. I only checked /lit/ occasionally, and now I’ve discovered this board. On one hand, I feel like this is a positive change (I’ve even started "touching grass," for instance), but at the same time, I can’t help but feel a little sad, perhaps because I’m no longer able to participate in popular culture. My friends are constantly referencing tweets, sharing shorts or reels, videos from X youtuber, and so on. I feel like this has started to build a sort of barrier between us, because what I do now isn't what they do, and what they do is no longer part of my life. Sad!
>>1896 I've stopped pretty much everything else -- Instagram I quit because it had a bad effect on me (too addictive/makes you retarded/wastes time), TikTok I never started because of the format (too addictive/makes you retarded/wastes time), Twitter I just never got into, Reddit is fucking gay etc. YouTube is the last holdout. On the bright side, it sounds like you're suffering from a pretty 'good' problem-- some social friction/alienation with your (many?) friends. But I relate to that feeling of dissonance with popular culture. Sad indeed.
>>1902 Yup. No point in comforming to a sick society, as I read somewhere. At the end of the day, we shouldn't feel bad for avoiding braindead/retarddcontent just because the majority of the population in our generation doesn't, after all. I'm not saying we are "awakened ones", but it's getting harder to connect with people or have a basic conversation without being immersed in that world. In the case of my friends (we are 3, lol) sometimes I don't understand what the hell they are talking about, because they reference to the internet so much. As you said, it's overall not a horrible problem at an individual level. I feel more attentive and present in the moment, actually sleep well and feel content in general, albeit at the detriment of the little social interactions I had.
>>1896 This happened to me when I went to college. I dropped vidya and 4chan like a sack of potatoes; went from scrolling and gaming till 2 or 3am to attempting, but ultimately failing, to even tolerate either. I don't know why. I did get a gf right after I entered college, so that replaced a void. But when she dumped me later, I didn't go back. It was a good change for my mind and body. Just can't shake some of the last vestiges within me!
>>1823 >managed to eek out an existence online while being a terminal shut-in who goes for the occasional neighborhood walk. How? I do the incelwalks too but I've never managed to find any meaningful connection online while getting to know people, except maybe twice when gaming like 12 years ago. I feel like I'm too spergy even for internet life
The internet is 0% different from the Enlightenment, or French Revolution, or Flower Power, or any other movement / group that starts with the best of intentions and is rapidly corrupted by the masses who misunderstand its core principal, which is at bottom the same every time -- "To create a better world". You would be delusional to assume that average people can take part in these movements and really "sit at the table". Because the average man (and woman's) conception of life is fundamentally static. It takes a rare kind of person to look at reality and imagine how it could be different, so when your average person joins a movement, they're not trying to "reconstruct" anything; they're looking at the world RIGHT NOW in front of them as a zero sum game where their +1 is your -1. Really, to speak of "the internet" is an utter misnomer, because "the internet" was snuffed out in the womb. What you're really trafficking through is the new portal to the very old very much ruined rest of the world.
>>1943 It's even worse because the internet and technology in general help to destroy traditions and communities which(among other things) create a feeling of purpose and togetherness among those regular people towards the outliers that stabilize society. Now this stabilizing force is replaced by ever more pervasive surveillance technology which means there is no counterbalance to the ever growing rot everywhere, but particularly at the top. basically Ted Kaczynski.txt, but unfortunately the only way out is through.
why is there so much AI slop now. The new ChatGPT can beat GeoGuessr now…
There has to be a large number of people who feel similar malaise towards the internet/phone culture as you do. SO, the question is Why hasnt there been any significant internet counterculture? There is a now a young generation who have been forcefed the most sterile corporate net, who use their phones for everything, from work to love to entertainment to friends. Yet, there is not even an angsty "fuck the system" rebellion, which should've happened 10 years ago at the latest. instead of neo-luddite gatherings and disruptions there are "social media detoxs." any opposition is transformed into the safe, health-mindset, individual productivity framwork. The internet seems to be the ultimate absorbent and postpostpostironic detachment is the attitude for everyone on this carnival ride which means nothing actually happens
>>2478 Internet culture has made me extremely jaded and cynical to any kind of political movement. Any form of rebellion would appear as inauthentic to me since rebelling is nothing more than an ego trip for the many and a grift for the few. It would be nice if everyone just collectively logged off or stopped consuming online herd mentality. However, being anti technology will not stop the ideology machine from churning because the problem is deeply psychological. We're naturally political (social) animals and will naturally want to submit to any heard we find covenant. The internet just amplifies the phenomena. Even if we were to make an antithesis of such heard, that too will become a heard. At least 4chan getting nuked is a step in the right direction since I can kick off my scrolling addiction and read more.
>>2478 Fuck the system used to happen because the youth didn't get what they wanted. The current youth gets all types of free porn and other types of snuff movies, legal amphetamines and weed, an insane amount of games, cartoons, tv, movies, whatever. It's way too comfortable for rebellion. Besides, it is always said "they grew up with the Internet/screens", but more importantly, they grew up with mics and cameras pointed at them at all time. A rebellion is too much of a risk of ridicule and failure, and I am not sure the youngest adults know how to exist without being watched and commented.
>>2563 Some sizable number of people have just 'logged off' but for that exact reason you don't really feel their presence online. >>2564 This is probably a significant factor. My sense is that the youth countercultures of the past have been largely made up of the relatively poor/cheap have-nots, but in the modern era of freely available media/culture there is no such thing as 'too poor to consume' >>2478 The chokehold that large tech companies have on online platforms mean that there is no real independent infrastructure for counterculture to propagate through. The only counterculture that exists is mediated through the 'normie-fying' effects of YouTube Twitter Reddit etc.
>>2478 >>2563 >>2564 I agree; But these all feel symptomatic. The superficial signs of a disease. When one sneezes, it is the body attempting to expel. I think part of the crux is, to rearticulate the original question, how can connection and matrix and strata have been supplanted so totally? Thousands of years contained human conditioning, unconscious and conscious, now to be hijacked by something altogether different. "The medium contains the message" and "one cannot imagine a world without Internet" are now combined. I cannot imagine a world where my words are not heard and interpreted by someone somewhere else. But why? Who chose this? Myself, or my parents, or my president, or my king, or my God? How can things have changed so quickly?
>>2564 This reminded me of the first time I came to the realization that everything you see on a screen has been recorded. I know it sounds trivial, but as a kid thinking for the first time that everything I was seeing on the screen had been previously recorded by someone talking to an inanimate camera and not me, and then this recording being published and me seeing it because my inanimate device was replaying it was akin to gaining a new layer of self-awareness in a way. And I still feel like I need to remind myself of this every once in a while. The human mind can't find an inherent difference between looking at someone standing in front of you and looking at someone you see on a screen unless you consciously make it do so. The modern era is defined by unprecedented levels of abstraction that are present in many more areas of life than ever before. We are not made to be able to naturally deal with this much labor of discernment (and it's in your best interest to make the effort if you want to keep the mental separation between what's real and what's a result of a particularly ordered string of 0s and 1s). It's Marx's alienation of labor applied to every facet of your lived experience. I don't think that it necessarily had to get this bad, though, which makes it more depressing since it was to an extent preventable. I know I'm younger than most people here, but even I remember when the Internet felt like a place, not an omnipresent entity. There was an old fashioned wooden desk with a computer at the corner of the living room, and if you sat there you could access it, and when you were done with it, you just got up and went about your day, and the Internet was nowhere to be found. What happened? This is why I've never loved movies in general. Filmed media has such a pervasive influence on the human brain you can't prevent while it's happening that I can't help but feel like I'm being force-fed a different version of reality, in a way that inevitably sticks. If I don't like a book or it's contents are disturbing or too much to take in all at once, I can put it down forever or until I want to pick it up again. You can't exercise nearly as much agency when watching a movie, but it's also far more comfortable since you can just stop thinking and let what you see do the thinking for you. I think this is why so many people are hooked on Netflix. I'm aware that this is also mixed with my personal opinion and people can enjoy visual media without it becoming dystopian (I do too, it's just not my go-to for the same reason I never liked books with pictures since I learned to read). But overall it feels like something very present in our lives and we rarely give it a second thought.