The internet replaces its users' thought patterns with whatever phrases the algorithm vomited up in their direction. If you spend enough time online, you start to notice that normal communication gets replaced with slogans invented by someone else, making different people behave like an army of clones. From tryhard quirkiness ("I thought quicksand and the Bermuda triangle would be a bigger problem in my life!" "Did you notice hamsters always die in the weirdest ways?") to politics ("MAGA", "trans women are women"). Even performative nationalism lost its charm because it's just people repeating slogans they got off the internet at each other ("Europoors have no AC!" "Amerifats are hooked on fentanyl and pills!" "I hate the Fr*nch" "The Bri'ish steal our stuff for the Bri'ish Museum"). Some people completely ruin their lives because online slogans have parasitized their brains ("I'm not an autistic shut-in programmer male, I am actually an anime girl named Lilith" "I hate the foids and I'm gonna smash my face in with a hammer until Stacy starts liking me" "I'm gonna shoot up my school because my Discord server said school shooters are based") and they no longer have the ability to discern that they have been mentally colonized. Their online bubbles all serve as hosts for the same verbal brain eating amoeba and they all think these thought processes are their own. Even this place is starting to develop its own thought-replacing vernacular. How do YOU resist mental colonization?
Anonymous :
4 days ago :
No.8713
>>8727
>>8713 (OP)
>How do YOU resist mental colonization?
It is simple as long as you consider that everything coming out of a screen is unimportant; everything in reality is. The healthy contempt society used to have for television is the same I have for the Internet. And depending on your age, you might remember it used to be the same with television and radio: people would regurgitate a good bit from the morning show and it would make the rounds during the week. Or a good joke heard at the family table would then be repeated at work, school, etc. The news has always been the highbrow version of this. All these elements of human conversation have been commodified for a while, and they're social currency in real life, although with so much in circulation, their value has gone down.
The Internet is just a bigger, stupid box. Once you look at everything on the Internet as an ad for something in between you doing important stuff like talking to real people (and social media is not it), producing something (a post on FB is not it) or learning something (r/TodayILearned is not it), it becomes easier.
Petrarchan is on the fringe, it's like talking to real people up to a point, so I try and spend a little but not too much time here.
>>8716
Not living in an English speaking country somewhat shields from that. You can always spot some direct translations though.
Anonymous :
4 days ago :
No.8716
>>8727
>>8713 (OP)
>How do YOU resist mental colonization?
It is simple as long as you consider that everything coming out of a screen is unimportant; everything in reality is. The healthy contempt society used to have for television is the same I have for the Internet. And depending on your age, you might remember it used to be the same with television and radio: people would regurgitate a good bit from the morning show and it would make the rounds during the week. Or a good joke heard at the family table would then be repeated at work, school, etc. The news has always been the highbrow version of this. All these elements of human conversation have been commodified for a while, and they're social currency in real life, although with so much in circulation, their value has gone down.
The Internet is just a bigger, stupid box. Once you look at everything on the Internet as an ad for something in between you doing important stuff like talking to real people (and social media is not it), producing something (a post on FB is not it) or learning something (r/TodayILearned is not it), it becomes easier.
Petrarchan is on the fringe, it's like talking to real people up to a point, so I try and spend a little but not too much time here.
>>8716
Not living in an English speaking country somewhat shields from that. You can always spot some direct translations though.
Idk it's weird because nobody actually says this stuff irl. Do you ever see a new phrase and actually find it funny and then a few posts later you see the same phrase and just get instantly annoyed?
I go on walks and drink beer and talk to the old hippies at work about their youth. I've thought about whether it's possible to ever clean my brainwashing out, having been plugged in since a youngin, and I don't think it is, so I just try to be in the real world and air as much as possible. But here I am.
I think you need to calm down and take a walk, OP. Do some stretches or some shit. This post and your comment in the other thread say more about your own online habits than anything else and don't add anything new. Yeah dumb people repeat stock phrases they read online, big whoop.
When you age out of trying to be aggressively correct online you can come back.
> If you spend enough time online, you start to notice that normal communication gets replaced with slogans invented by someone else, making different people behave like an army of clones.
I think you're right that this does characterise internet discussion. Something something baudrillard something linguistic sign.
For me, it's a consequence of the reward system of internet discussion being different from real-life conversation. In real life, in general, people will consider you a good conversationalist if you're genuinely interested in them, if you're able to talk honestly and engagingly about interesting things - and yes, if you're able to make them laugh. Vitally, though, it's an interaction between a small group of people - usually between two and five - and your success as a conversationalist is basically equal to the human connection you are able to make with your interlocutors.
Consider instead the archetypal internet conversation, the reddit thread. Although it nominally consists of a discussion between a few people, it is nothing like people talking in real life. Instead, it's a sort of bizarre impromptu stage-play in which everyone involved is acutely conscious of the presence of an unseen audience. The users 'talk' to each other, but really they're trying to embarrass each other in front of the unseen audience, or get the loudest silent laugh from the unseen audience, or get the most people in the unseen audience to agree with their opinion. (of course, you do find out in the end if you succeeded in this strange reward system, but only several hours later when you check your upvotes).
It should go without saying that this is a profoundly inhuman way to socialise. And it leads to the prevalence of memes of all kinds, including these sorts of rote phrases and boilerplate jokes that you reference. Someone in real life who makes a lame rehashed joke every three minutes in a conversation is annoying, attention seeking, and probably autistic. Someone who does it on the internet is an extremely successful poster.
Do you ever notice these things bleeding into real life? If you talk to people who spend too much time on the internet and aren't good at recognising the difference between social codes and contexts, you might see someone literally doing reddit bits in person. Bri'ish museum. The Fr*ench. (Brief panic fleets across their face as they realise they can't render the apostrophe in actual speech).
Even normies are a bit afflicted by it now due to TikTok. And the proportion of zoomers and gen alphas who are internet poisoned to the point of induced social dysfunction is really very large indeed.
>>8713 (OP)
>How do YOU resist mental colonization?
It is simple as long as you consider that everything coming out of a screen is unimportant; everything in reality is. The healthy contempt society used to have for television is the same I have for the Internet. And depending on your age, you might remember it used to be the same with television and radio: people would regurgitate a good bit from the morning show and it would make the rounds during the week. Or a good joke heard at the family table would then be repeated at work, school, etc. The news has always been the highbrow version of this. All these elements of human conversation have been commodified for a while, and they're social currency in real life, although with so much in circulation, their value has gone down.
The Internet is just a bigger, stupid box. Once you look at everything on the Internet as an ad for something in between you doing important stuff like talking to real people (and social media is not it), producing something (a post on FB is not it) or learning something (r/TodayILearned is not it), it becomes easier.
Petrarchan is on the fringe, it's like talking to real people up to a point, so I try and spend a little but not too much time here.
>>8716
Idk it's weird because nobody actually says this stuff irl. Do you ever see a new phrase and actually find it funny and then a few posts later you see the same phrase and just get instantly annoyed?
Not living in an English speaking country somewhat shields from that. You can always spot some direct translations though.