very rough drafts! I wouldn't promise that you'll find anything interesting here
drafts 2 (rougher, less related, and more personal drafts)
more important/interesting entries are witten in bold or in an even larger font
8/25 people become difficult to distinguish from machines first and foremost because, in an environment run by machines -whether or not they consciously know it- people want to be indistinguishable. To fit excatly the input the machine is looking for. When you look at influencers this is obvious. what machines do first in the process of becoming indistinguishable is not change themselves to become human-like, but in advance of adapting to people, influence people to become more like machines. Specifically starting by training itself with the people who first become subjects of it, who are most adaptable and willing to using machines. The machine cannot consciously tell the difference either, all it can see is the feedback on how similar it can be to human behavior according to it's own actions. It is only programmed to understand the results of changing itself, it does not imagine that when it changes it's function to become more indistinguishable from people, the increase in similarity between it and it's userbase may be more because it is changing the people and not the other way around, it only knows that whatever it is doing seems to be working. When a society-changing machine is itself changed to adapt to people, to be more human, there is no control group of people not *themselves* already changed by the machine.
july
7/4 thinking about all the pre-internet and early internet emotions which have gone extinct. emotions you can never feel again. like waking up from a dream with the most complex and unique world of experiences and emotions you've never felt in your entire life before and will never feel again, and suddenly realizing you cant remember if you ever even had a dream in the first place, it feels more like you're just going crazy imagining it. it was all there just a few seconds ago. the last thing you remember was simply laying down to sleep the night before. that whole world just vanished, a world of a million unique emotions gone forever. you cant even be sure it was ever there.
june
6/25 The obsession with it betrays any attempt to escape
6/23 part of the way to cure yourself is to start talking, writing, and thinking, as if youve never used the internet before. to think more freely just imagine what you'd say if you already were thinking freely. imagine if you were already talking purely from your own mind, your own way of construting words. try to avoid every itch for using learned phrases and buzzwords, and just work out your words from scratch, straight from what your thoughts are, from what you /really/ want to say, not what the internet-brain makes you say
6/17
after the rancid cultural collapse which inagurated the modern internet, we are deluded into believing that this universal stagnation in it's wake is in fact a recovery from how we were in our past. It is not.
it is beginning to happen, I sense. In the collective conscious. Anyone who writes about anything current and important is beginning to notice this. "good" journalists, people who study philosophy, the experts in the tech and the market and those in human behavior and in social sciences, and anyone who does meaningful cultural analysis. Very many people with big internet followings themselves. It's not clear or agreed what "it" is, but it is being noticed my more and more people.
6/2 the internet has me socially "consuming" people as if their persona is a commodity, instead of connecting with them
and the same thing happens to me and my persona, when I create something to try and make a connection. I am not connected, in a truly social sense, but "consumed"
>(6/21 addition) i dont think i was clear enough that this isnt just about parasocial relationships, infuencers celebrities or even stand alone viral content, but even with near-direct socialization people cant really see eye to eye as humans. even in using the internet in a direct convseration, you are not communicating but consuming/being consumed
may
5/31 somthing im starting to realize is you shouldnt bother explaining anything important here* (*referring to social media i was posting this on) . By process of elimination these are people who cannot be reasoned with or elevated in any way. 99.99% of the time you are appealing to emotions they simply do not experience, appealing to culture they are not a part of, or to ideas they dont care about.
5/27 when you're physically stuck, you're mentally stuck, you're not as free inside your mind as you think. The tangable world around you very arbitrarly guides your thoughts. I think i meant to describe something similar in my draft entry on 3/24
I mentioned this online back when i made my other draft entry (specifically using an example of furnature as an environment), and a mutual commented that this sounded like feng shui, i've heard the expression but never actually knew what it was, after researching it, it does really seem interesting and relevant. (It's actually suprising to me that what i was trying to describe was already so close to such a well known concept). However i think that what i'm trying to describe isnt just physical in the sense of tangable objects making up an environtment, but "physical" in the sense of motion. Think for example; taking a walk to "clear your mind" (i want to take this chance to mention the relevant term "volta" as a known concept). Maybe "clearing" isnt how I'd describe it, its really like roaming your mind. With absolutely no effort or intention, new ideas just appear already formed in your mind like magic. The moving through physical environment moves you mentally, as every part of your mental world is arbitrarly tied to your physical surroundings, especially to the extent that you form habits and routine in the presence of specific environments. It seems like the brain can't process abstract concepts without tying them in some subliminal way to our long-evolved ability to understand the physical world or tangable experiences.
Think of how you go on autopilot or become forgetful when you exist in relation to some specific thing or place. You feel or think something once while you experience something, it could be a place or even something like a song, and then whenever you go to that place or listen to that part of a song again you are primed to stick to the same cycle of thoughts and emotions over and over again. Instead of simply experiencing, you add layers on top. You dont even need anything to reinforce or condition this, your brain always tries to anchor every abstract thought and emotion to physical places, things, or actions. I think I noticed the most strongly during quarentine when I spent nearly every hour and every day in the exact same spot on my couch, and when I stared off into space I saw the exact same wall, the same edges and corners, the frame around closet, the shelf. As that same view became burned in my mind, every single thought and emotion became burned in too, it was hard not to just think in circles. That effect is constant in life even when it's not so obvious, even when it's not for a year but just for a few days, even if our view is a walk, we feel the same if its the same walk, if it's the same drive to school, or drive to work.
5/26 i don't know if theres anything i can do about the fact that people across the internet dont expect a person, they expect a website, an account or a blog.
(addition) Its a weird feeling knowing and am no more and am turned into
what???? i think i fell asleep or got distracted while typing^,
I'm scared to delete this now because I'm still trying to figure out what i was gonna say....
you are always made up of what you create, but on the internet you're put on the shelf next to all the processed slop churned out. Here on neocities there's tons of effectively empty sites without a trace of humanity.. did people give up on making them? did they realize they had zero ideas for what they wanted to actually put on their website? so many people are just using their page to link to everywhere else but here, piggybacking, letting someone else hold the burden of acutally making all the content, because the site creators are ultimately nothing but consumers themselves. their website is nothing but a tiny homepage to direct you to leave, to go to one of their comlpletely uncurated and unrelated social media accounts, so you too get the privilege of watching them consume other people's content in real time! oh boy that's exactly what i came to neocities for, to find links that lead to your account on a different website which requires less brainpower!
5/25 real life contains more fictional stories than fictional stories do.
#the real world creates fiction and turns itself into fiction but fiction tries to insist it is real within itself#we create fiction from real life #but as life becomes made of fiction and fiction replaces life where does our fiction come from?#what reality are we emulating within fiction if our reality is replaced with the consumption of fiction?#you dont stay inside all day to read books and watch movies and consume art about people who do nothing but stay inside to consume fiction.#at our stage of society fiction no longer repesents anything. it is purely nothing#how much of our reality is now dedicated to creating fiction?
this issue is financially encouraged as the industry of selling reality has overtaken reality
5/24 in the internet age the acceptance of the world as a purely passive consumer experience is bad on its own,
the shift from "ludic" to "epistemic" psychology (hyperreality, consumption, etc.) as described by Baudrillard (ex; ipad babies) as well as the ideas presented in society of the spectacle by Guy Debord
but for the people who actually engage with the internet, who try to fight the passive namelessness, there is an existential fear that they will cease existing if they ever try to leave. In the digital realm there is now no existence but the constant feeding of the cycle. You don't exist in your digital space unless you constantly feed it content to remind the people around you that you exist. The reality of trying to fight against the nameless, passive, consumer world of social media is a very cruel irony.
Proactive involvement may be healthier than passive consumption on the surface, but it ultimately makes it harder to leave the internet. Subconsciously, giving up internet presence becomes an existential fear of ceasing to exist.
you become more aware of sinking to the level of namelessness once you try to leave.
5/23 when people refuse to grow up and at the same time refuse to have childlike innocence and wonder it’s just… you’ve chosen not to be good in any way.
it takes a lot of effort to have both but you could at least choose to have one or the other.
it's like an epidemic of people permanently stuck with middle-schooler levels of socialization.
when i'm writing i have something like maslow's heirarchy of needs where i wish i could be explaining ideas at the top but the base of the pyramid is just trying save absolutely anyone i can from the new age of internet which is so bad its almost apocalyptically damaging to the collective psyche.
5/18 its only a matter of time before people view the internet the same way we view society after things like the invention of plastics or nuclear technology or PFAS or oil wells/combustion engines or the fertilizer/pesticide industry or something. Of course we were a little suspicious of it, but not enough to stop us from trying to use it in everything and creating a world where all it's little particles can never be completely removed from humanity for up to thousands of years. We will be absolutely horrified with ourselves wondering how we used it everywhere because didn't know any better.
#but just like the other things- we always do sort of know all along. #we just never wanted to really admit it to ourselves because the reality would be too terrible to comprehend #also the internet is not just the new version of these things. because almost all the other things we did are still happening#the many different apocalypses of our world dont cancel out- they layer upon eachother
5/16 it’s clear that only a very small handful of things about the present moment are really that memorable, but for obvious reasons people seem to think everything from the past was memorable. -That the past was made of its most memorable divergences. It shouldn’t need to be said that you’re just remembering the memorable things. What is most memorable is often the exception to the rule, to the actual world of the time. We remember the past not for how it was but for what changed it, we remember the past for the things that stopped it from being the past.
5/11 i assumed i had written or implied this before but i wanted to say that normal words or phrases (or iconography) becoming ruined or at least distracted by the fact they're forever associated with something is also an aspect of cultural entropy. Like ive implied before; that is especially when it's associated with something that stops you from being able to take it seriously.
(like if a word or phrase is used in the title of a movie, the phrase may be too synonymous with it to ever only invoke itself again / to invoke it's original meaning. as time progresses, everything gains connotations faster than connotations are lost. To be fair all meaning is made of connotations, but the point is that this process is entropic)
(6/23 addition) "it will be a rocky road to recovery from cancer" "woah- just like the ice cream!?"
5/10 I just remembered that in 2013 people could get made fun of for texting too much. actually crazy to think abt. Now it's not even that weird to meet someone who uses their phone all day every day even while eating or watching a movie or talking irl. the last ten years were insane. i mean i knew they were but i never really grasped it.
as the average thing on the internet get worse in quality, you subconsciously pay less attention to everything on the internet and appreciate everything less. You dont get excited about getting to watch a youtube video anymore, for example, because unlike it used to be, you know that now the site is completely flooded with lower quality content (as more people create simply because they can and without really feeling inspired to make anything good) so you dont have the energy to excitedly pay full attention and appreciate every single video you watch anymore. Because the media gets worse, audiences are appreciating everything less, and paying less attention, and as a result there's even less incentive to make things good, the standards are lowered for everyone, and as a result even worse content is made, the cycle repeats.
It's a lot like when a cafeteria has signs warning you not to waste food by throwing it away without finishing. But then you think "Maybe if the food was higher quality, people wouldnt be throwing it away in the first place!" You know the food is bad, so you don't appreciate it, and instead throw it away before finishing. While at the same time the cafeteria managers know that everyone wastes food, so *they* doesn't bother to put in any more effort, time, or money to make it higher quality.
The exact same thing is happening to everything on the internet. There is a perpetual cycle of wasted human experience leading to the creation of even lower quality experiences. And of course, attention span is ruined exponentially too. (This internet machine churns out these people into the real world, and the real world is ruined by extention)
5/8 it's likely that nobody ever again is going to experience getting a family computer and inviting a friend over to browse the internet together for the first time
5/7 I truly believe that second-hand social media usage is real the same way second-hand smoking is. It doesnt matter if you personally make healthier choices, youre still being harmed within the atmosphere of the collective conscious. Although I would argue it's a danger to humanity thousands of times greater.
the danger is not simply a disease within the body. the danger is within your entire experience of the world. within your fundemental human identity. the danger is within your politics, your media, your art, your literature, all of culture and the future. the danger is within philosophy and the suffocation of every greatest emotion imaginable. Its a cognitohazard to not only the fabric of the individual, not even society, but of reality itself as a human species. We are on the precipice of a post-human age
If you had a more permanent internet presence it would be centered on a webpage, you would customize everything, and the features of the page would be anchored in place as where you added them. Your webpage was a library, a museum of the self. Everything you put out into the web was your own act of expression, of creation, even to borrow or take inspiration from someone else at least meant showing real admiration of what they created. But the switch to web 2.0 brought many changes, almost none of which were good. Rather than a creative act, web 2.0 was an act of consumption. Personal webpages became replaced with accounts on a larger site. Searching was replaced with being fed a nonstop stream of content. Personal creation replaced collecting what was made by others, reblogging, retweeting, cross posting, sharing, hoarding these fragments of personality to make yourself appear as a whole person. The joy of reading individual messages replaced by lifeless numbers of views and likes.
5/6 What’s the most awe-inspiring and shocking opening line someone could ever have for my thesis/manifesto or book? I’m currently thinking its “humanity no longer exists”
>"for all of history, humans have used tools, but never before have tools used humans."
>"The use of tools, which we use to shape our environment, and our ability for complex socialization in the beauty of culture are the two things which most people would argue define us above all else, they are the very things which make us human."
>"even as individuals, what *creates* each of us, what fundementally makes us up as people, within our own mind and our experience of the entire world around us is our environment and our socialization. -But what happens when our entire environment is industrial? what happens if our socialization, if every aspect of culture and connection, is algorithmic?"
>"what if there was a tool, that is to say a machine, so powerful that it used humanity instead? What if that machine was engineered from the gears of complex socialization itself? in the presence of such a force, what then would be left of humanity?"
>"what would happen humanity was mediated by something which we created, a tool, an environment, and it’s purpose was to mechanize our complex systems of socialization?"
"beyond even what is obviously a machine, there exist metaphysical machines within the collective conscuious, a demiurge made of tulpas, a mechanism of social constructs, cultural machines, political machines, and economic machines."
5/5 I think the current internet, representing a world, is essentuially a late stage in a kind of post-industrial demiurge. Though I want to avoid the mysticism that ancient texts use, it's essentially still a good explaination; my ultimate goal is the destruction of the demiurge, an intangable realm created to interface with the human soul as reality, but by it's nature of existence, keeps people trapped in perpetual suffering. I think it's a pretty interesting way to see it. Definetly a very continental means of philosphy.
>maybe the real demiurge trapping us in an illusory world of eternal torment… was the parasocial friendships we made along the way!
5/4 I’m increasingly taking the importance of ancient texts more seriously. It’s really surprising how so much was realized from the beginning and then lost to the complexity of history and the entropy of cultures. What Schopenhauer and Nietzsche wrote in their philosophies was already contained across ancient text and systems of belief, only written with a much more poetic, metaphorical, or spiritual tone, which is easy to misinterpret over time. Much of Ancient Greek philosophy, Gnosticism, hermeticism, the Veda scriptures (other than just their record of symbolic rituals), Jainism/ the original Buddhism (before it accumulated it’s more superstitious and pseudoscientific aspects), the same aspects of meaning are to be found to some extent in the original birth of Abrahamic religion, and many other ancient texts I probably don’t even know about. Intuitively it seems that the progression of culture and of society means that these recent philosophers represent growing millennia of advancement and discovery and factual confirmation, but what is to be found is essentially the uncovering of the universal truths which, on account of their nature, are discovered far before they can be truly understood, and as such (being the earliest in an overwhelming lineage of writings) their knowledge disappears into history.
A sort of small scale funny example I noticed was how the “rules of the internet” which was first written in 2006, was originally meant as a joking commentary on the internet, which was extremely new to people at the time. The observations seemed kind of obvious but were not understood or seen as important. Rule number one was don’t talk about /b/, rule number two was DON'T talk about /b/. And then, ten years later, the 2016 election happened, people talked about /b/ on a national scale, and look what the consequences were in the landscape of social media. The real and digital world collided, and then both were ruined. On the one side real life was no longer real, and on the other there was nothing left to post about, there was no origin for content, there was no dream. Political unrest reached never before seen levels of nastiness, there was cultural stagnation, cultural decay, more people became trapped online as part of their daily life, for many of these new users, getting trapped online began with following the news coverage of/on the internet, in massive part as a result of 4chan's influence specifically. Many of the other serious rules turned out to be not only accurate, but much more important and omnipresent and often subliminal than people could have fully understood at the time.
>5/13addition.
I think many ancient religions and philosophies fall victim to myth, poetic license and metaphor, where as a result they become taken and is misunderstood and mutated. people, unable to understand what is being said, will attribute genius observations of the forces that exist in the world, and assign a magical understanding to them, because they assume that there is more to what is described than what they perceive in the literal world, how can the confusing texts descibe what happens in the literal world if they fail to see any of it? They rationalize how nonsensical philosophy can be by replacing it with the simpler but more mystical. They cannot understand that these concepts do not describe the literal way of the world in itself, rather than an imaginary hidden spiritual or magical force which is behind and controlling of the world. These magical and spiritual elements are not fictional in origin, they are real but misrepresented and misunderstood until the point where an entire fictional cannon arises. In the most ancient of knowledge there is a literal observation of the world. The magical and spiritual are not beyond or outside of anything, they are the thing itself, it's nature. It is not to be discredited but understood in what it was originally meant to explain.
>6/2 addition.
"Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things."
— G.K. Chesterton
5/3
I'm worried that as i write, anything i say will only really be understood for it's more obvious examples. Especially when talking about the problem with social media, it isnt just that it's bad because it's social media, but that it's the worst insance of many things which are universal and timeless factors at work within complex society and within the nature of social interactions (as well as the culture involved in economic issues, like being "out of touch", or gentrification). I'm not sure what to do other than just list current and historical things to individually complain about. like when i wrote about how there should be a world for "terminally online" but for americans, there really are similar unnamed concepts which exist just everywhere in every culture and subculture and within the discussion of even economic issues, all stemming from certain intangable, far more universal issues that are impossible to fully talk about.
I think the biggest key to actually understanding philosophy is to just start thinking about it when you’re doing some other than studying philosophy. It suddenly goes from words to being real. Just thinking about philosophy randomly in everyday life, thinking about it when you’re enjoying something or when you’re learning about current events or thinking about it when you meet people or talk to people you already know. Thinking about it when you learn about history or when you’re appreciating art. Philosophy makes sense when you remind yourself to think of it as real
5/1 cultural entropy pushing every single part of existence (as we experience it) further from platonic ideals?
No culture or artifact of culture or subculture ever actually gets better over time. Absolutely everything in the world is in a constant process of getting worse, what appears to be a culture getting better is actually the introduction of truly new artifacts of culture, new genes are introduced into the populace of the collective consciousness.
A small degree of (good) development upon an origin, if any, is actually part of the creation of the original good (i.e the origin is still in the process of being created),
and the reality is that further development simply represents an extention of the host artifact, which is not complete yet. Once the host artifact of culture is complete, it only ages.
>The development of a cultural origin may be better described as *discovering* it's inate good qualities which were not initially known, as opposed to creating them.*
*for those looking to be optimistic, I think it's possible that the good qualities of a thing are not as finite as they seem, as new cultural contexts are created by *other* new cultural origins, and within these new contexts there may be further development to discover in the old cultural origins
It's just like how people always get older, nobody ever gets younger, instead they are just replaced with new people. (After a certain age, development of the origin is complete, and from that point the desired quality comes not from continued growth but from stability.**) In the same sense culture follows entropy. The quality of goodness only comes from cultural youth. A culture only appears to become better though continuous origination.
**although... Just like culture, the value of life and meaning of existence even as we grow beyond some imagined ideal, beyond our simple orignation and progenation, our basic childhood development, is the continuous discovery of the self, something ultimately indistinguishable from the *creation* of the self.
something can be good from staying the same, or from a constant rebirth, but not by being recklessly added to and distorted after it's origination is complete.
It's not that something needs to stay the same or that needs NOT to, it's just that it cannot bear entropy within it's definition.
>parasitic culture and artifacts?
>psycho-social progenation in the collective consciousness
april
4/29 Not only are people driven to cause cultural entropy by producing garbage for attention, (by filling in the easier niches of attention-getting which are within reach, which require the least effort or skill) they invest in their personality by doing so, and are unable to go back to anything better, they must continue to produce garbage to remain relevant, the garbage must become increasingly subversive upon itself, and the more garbage they produce the less chance they have of changing their public image and undoing their personality or changing what they want to culturally contribute. The time spent blindly filling these niches also means they’ve failed to invest in growing in different directions. You wouldn’t trust someone to make something good after they built their whole personality off of garbage, even if it was good you wouldn’t be able to appreciate it.
Think of the the cultural trend following all of celebrity culture, following all art movements, all communities of online creators, just to name a few examples.
Social media is genuinely just evil. Every social media. The equivalent of hitting your head with a hammer daily or drinking lead water.
Its so insane how magically efficient it is at being bad. Its literally just somehow in the nature of social media to constantly manifest worse things into the collective conscious
the amount of things Nietzsche said is really mindblowing. I’ll think I know most of his worldview and what he had to say but then I find out that he had yet another genius observation in some other writing which is so great that even on its own it could have been a life changing revelation for most people
#People always say read the original source and that’s true but I’m glad I get to see other people talk about what his work said#Because there’s just so much of it and it’s so dense and the translation is confusing#Of course there are things to disagree with but he is still a person and not like a literal prophet of gospel.#Makes sense he’s complicated And sometimes disagreeable#But he’s undeniably such a genius
4/28 I want to know so badly how this moment will be known by historians
"#Around the year 2015 everyone began to go insane from using internet. Though culture was largely introspective about itself#in the year 2020 this insanity was accelerated exponentially and was not reversible#Everyone who grew up on the internet turned out even worse#But then a ton of people died and now we’re okay again"
without some higher inspiration, cultural entropy is really just a drive to kill brain cells. The drive to simply consume more and more reinforces the complementry drive to blindly churn out something new, anything new, something new must always replace old ideas, new different more more more, when things are consumed so quickly it is because they are not appreciated, and this appetite must be fed. In a market of culture the supply will rise to any outrageous demand to consume, and likewise, a demand for attention always met with supply of attention. And culture will be pushed beyond anything sustainable, anything enjoyable, anything meaningful, it will become repulsive and cancerous and mind numbing, because culture is reduced to economics and algorithms.
#More internet more content new funny in need more more algorithm new meme funny trend aesthetics dangle keys in my face more irony layers#more satire more parody more copies more subversions more subgenres of a thing I like to stretch a good thing out as much as possible#This thing is so unique and niche they should make a billion different versions of it and change it in every possible way and add to it until its unrecognizable
Culture is mechanical, and because human consciousness and identity are created within a cultural consciousness, that means people are mechanical, algorithmic, and economic too. Of course these three concepts are functions studied to interpret or aid what humans already do. They are introduced into the collective consciousness on the assumption that they will change to fit humanity, not the other way around.
“why would someone make this garbage? Why is all this garbage content and garbage culture produced?” Because it gets attention, because there’s a market to consume it.
“but why would people give this attention? Why would anyone consume this? Why would this be any part of culture?” Because it is produced, because it is shown to you. People will never stop trying to make something so new that it can’t be ignored, no matter how bad, and every time that happens, you will pay attention, and the cultural entropy will continue. your mind will be a little more destroyed by entropy and you’ll be a little weaker to stop it
Really stop and look at anything you see on the internet, think hard, is it really anything more than cultural sludge? Is it anything more than someone giving in to cultural entropy?
(Someone creating anything just to fill a market for unstable attention spans and absent standards? just exerting their voice for no reason other than to claw further into the collective consciousness? Is it ever because it’s something actually good or unique or groundbreaking worth sharing?)
and remember to ask, are YOU giving in to cultural entropy by consuming it?
4/27 blade runner is one of those things that people want to think/act like they “get” just because it’s popular and they know it’s well made and profound.
so many people online think that just liking something means they understand it. In reality people really just scrape away all its meaning until eventually it just becomes a vague aesthetic to represent “deepness”. Same thing with Evangelion and Lain
#Same thing with sewerslvt too I guess#Though I think she put much more emotion and much less thought into her work#It’s not supposed to be about what it *means*the same way movies and shows are. it's an emotional experience
4/26 out of everyone I’ve ever met on tumblr across three years of being here there’s only enough personality to make up like 7.3 different people, and I’ve befriended about 5 people who account for an entire personality
if there’s anything I really am it’s indecisive, that’s the foundation of everything I am. theres just too much in the world. the best i can hope for is a feeling for the awe of it all
people who know me may have grown comfortable associating me with certain things. believing that i have interests and beliefs which i can confidently call part of my personality. but ive always been afraid of letting myself really *have* a personality. if i chose the wrong thing, and then comitted to it- could i grow out of it again? Ive never been descicive about it, what im left with is a personality of least resistence, i have some passing interest in the things that (in the minds of those around me) make up who i am. but i dont know if i would have chosen any of these traits if i was given a choice again
with my beliefs as well- my philosphy and ideology- i have the same problem with being completely defined by indeciciveness. maybe i give a different impression when it comes to my emotions, how i sound during in-person conversation. but anything i believe, no matter how fundemental, i will completely doubt constantly. and anything that completely challenges my beliefs, or even outright attacks me as a person, i cant help but consider, im so curious, even empathetic to literally any philosophy or ideology, no matter how blatantly it should seem wrong. no matter how harsh or violent or destablizing of my self-image. its a way of thinking both easily suceptable to propaganda and completely immune to it. i'm just never decisive. in the end there's almost never any way to settle my ideas. theres only the ideas which find the path of least resistance in my everyday life (not that ive always had the emotional maturity to adhere to them)
4/25 what can I say that hasn’t already been said better by someone who I would disagree with on almost everything else?
4/20 trying to say things that make sense to stupid people slowly makes you stupider over time. I’ve noticed the effect tumblr has on me and other people #Same thing with appealing to other people’s bad attention spans #Or appealing to people who have irrational emotions #It effects the way you think, this definitely is the case with every social media. maybe this is also related to cultural entropy?
(addition 4/28) the scariest part is that you start doing this subconsciously whenever you're exposed to people
4/16 it was a mistake to let some people use the internet. By which i mean letting everyone use the internet was a mistake. we need to bring back the seperation between internet and reality. #almost everything that has happened in the past 10 years has been bad
4/16 im getting really sick of everything being subversive. society is overdue for an age of originality and earnestness
4/14 (talking in reference to schopenhauer) The problem isn’t being able to make friends, it’s being able to keep them. Because I want to be close to people I end up doing it too quickly. And the closer you get to someone the more boundaries you encounter, and when you’re too quick neither of you adapt. Getting close to someone just makes you discover things that would stop you from being close, and the closer you want to be the more inherent conflicts become revealed. The closeness is vulnerablity (conflict of the ego barriers/ some other jungian psychoanalysis stuff i dont fully understand seems important here)
4/13 can we normalize men being masculine. Who are femboys gonna date if real men disappear
4/12 anyone else remember when you were on the internet for the fist time and you hadn't made an account for anything yet and you would just go to google images to see different stuff
#i remember literally just googling 'memes'#and then scrolling#i probably enjoyed it in that moment more than ive ever enjoyed anything on the internet since then#i was probably only like 7 years old or something just crying laughing from literally googling the word 'memes'
4/10 I’m not religious but I do really believe in the importance of understanding religion. Because I have noticed things in the world hidden in plain sight. There are things you can only explain with a sort of religious fervor. All of that history and continental philosophy and experience, though explained in inaccurate and mythical and very personified ways, illuminates so blindingly things hidden in plain sight, entire hidden ranges of emotion of human nature and the human experience and the world around us. To have a religious sense (or at least a sense for whatever it is that creates religions) is essentially the same as what great art does, only it is a fully immersive, lived experience.
4/6 i was gonna write something sort of related to broken window theory but i forgot. ill leave a draft for it in case i remember
4/7 I think I understand now, why the greatest artists and philosophers are almost always either famous only after they die, or live while being very resistant and opposing or argumentative or even reclusive to everyone around them. ideas are destroyed by other people. (a thought is infinitely fragile from the moment it is created) If you’re taking the path to success then you’re not *making* a path anywhere, and not doing anything, you leave no sign your ideas existed. If you’re not creating an idea or emotion or never experienced before, letting people in your mind destroys those things.
(addition 4/29) it's not revolutionary thinking or art if its very obviously what anyone would have already been thinking, it could still be good, it just doesnt change anything or stand out. of course if someones pretentious theyll want to start conflict on purpouse to convince themselves and other people they have something special
(addition 7/4) people will always try to understand new ideas in old ways, foreign ideas in familiar ways. and that destroys the uniqueness of the thought which is being had
4/5 having a Lain avatar is an indicator of a status of internet anon that many people use but very few have actually earned
#So many people use lain avatars by now that probably less than 1% are authentic#You are not a netizen#you have never surfed the web#you are not a hacker#you are sensitive to light gore#You would not last a day actually using 4chan#I wouldn’t even be able to use it
(unrelated entry) People don’t use the internet because they want to have fun anymore. They use it because they’re trapped here and cannot leave. Every single day you’re on here like it’s your job. like an addict. See now it’s not even fun. If everyone is on the internet every day then where is the content coming from? People used to post about real life, came to the internet as an escape or to find things that were hidden or obscure or too dark for everyday life. But there is no everyday life on the internet now, There is only internet. all thats left is the self devouring of culture
march
3/24 After pondering a lot of neuroscience/psychology papers I’m convinced that an environmental change as simple as rearranging furniture could make you change in ideology, or at least it leaves you open to lots of fundamental changes in your worldview. Simply because you grow patterns of thought which are tied to environmental awareness. Your brain becomes shaped around physical objects, there doesn’t need to be a specific reason for a certain environmental factor to evoke a way of thinking, it’s just that your brain gets used to thinking in patterns, and disrupting an environment which you feel mentally integrated into causes your brain to refresh and try to make some new connections, as it needs to adjust to the outside world
(i dont know what the fuck i meant by this but sure i guess i'll believe it)
3/22 It’s hard to have a deep or complex personality if you’re in a social circle of people who expect everyone to just constantly be talking even when they’re boring and have nothing interesting to say. If you aren’t gonna constantly say annoying gibberish people will assume you don’t have anything to say, and you fall out of the conversation. So being around annoying and shallow people makes it hard not to act like them when you socialize.
(addition 4/29) On the internet though, this pressure is universal
3/19 try to imagine what would be left of your human identity if there were no more algorithms or industrial facades mediating your interaction with the world around you, there would be almost nothing left, for that reason people essentially choose to loose freedom. you stay inside a mental prison you create for yourself because you are incapable of wanting or even imagining that there exists an "outside" to this prison.
(addition 5/3) you become afraid to loose the part of yourself that *IS* the prison
3/19? I honestly believe internet humor at its current state can cause permanent brain damage.
Try to say something without trying to make it sound more like like a joke or ironic or sarcastic or like it’s lighthearted or copying how you expect to see something written online, dont let yourself sound like any of those things even a little bit just try to speak naturally and say something. can you do it? Does it take more effort than it should?
How are people gonna function long term while only able to communicate with internet-brain?
(addition 4/29) this basic concept applies to tons of other stuff too, it was just my main concern at the time. the mind numbing effects of corporate speak, (job interview personality, HR speak, email etiquette), or even the faux-therapy way of talking may be good examples outside of the internet. Theres def more i cant think of RN
(3/19) The brain naturally restructures to fit our environment and socialization.
-But is it possible our entire environment is mediated by global industry?
That our entire socialization is mediated by algorithms? And by the industrialization of culture?
Is a Petri dish of human neurons which grew around a computer “human”?
Are we in the same situation?
-Consider the concept of a post-human age.
Your brain is naturally shaped by your environment and how you socialize.
It’s easy to forget that your environment is industrial, and your socialization is algorithmic.
(and both are mechanized further within economic systems-
-both are mechanisms to serve economic interests, rather than cultural interests)
Your existence is physiologically connected to things which are fake, those things are your only connection to what the world should be. Your mind is naturally rewiring itself to fit your environment and socialization. But your environment is mediated by industrialization and your socialization too.
3/16 Society needs to go back to seeing internet use age as antisocial behavior by default. For both the sake of irl social lives and for the sake of enjoying the internet unbothered.
Btw- Notice how the internet getting exponentially worse coincides perfectly with how historical events cause more people to use the internet for more things and for longer, and to have less alternative? Like in 2015 leading up to the U.S. election, and in 2020 when Covid hit, it’s just millions of people crowding into the internet at once and people who were already online being more disconnected from reality. I need to stress that beyond just the immediate effects of violent and stupid political conflict, internet culture as a whole, even the most seemly unrelated things ended up getting worse. Suddenly everything just gets exponentially worse.
You know how sometimes cafeterias would have posters about stopping food waste and you think “maybe there would be less food waste if the food was better made?”
It’s hard to explain but I think you could say the same thing about the internet.
the fact that the internet is getting worse is essential to how it works. If it was really enjoyable people would pause longer on what they liked and have longer attention span and think more critically.
But like selling food, it’s harder to make it good, and if people can’t finish their food they get hungry again sooner. So there’s nothing to stop the dumping of garbage.
Literally the oldest saying on the entire internet is “garbage in, garbage out”
3/6 I’m not sure how to explain but I feel like I am cancer. Like the original me was completely destroyed and replaced by a tumor and that’s all that’s left. And it’s still “me” but it’s not the version that can exist in this world without suffocating itself.
It’s like the entire world is radioactive. The world itself is replacing people with cancer and there’s no way to escape and we are no longer human we are just rotting in some machine
febuary
2/27what was up with that 2000's cultural phenomnanon that includes stuff like the truman show/the matrix/inception. we need another one of those staples of "american schizophrenic" culture from the Bush-presidency survailence state / new internet age of modern life.
these are likr long term consequences of the protestant reformation or something
web2.0 has literally ruined the ability to understand anything before or outside of itslef. like the world itself has changed so much and become so superficial and homogenized to the point that its like mental pollution is causing niche emotional worldviews to go extinct.
Pre-web2.0 art is going extinct even though it’s still physically preserved because it’s no longer possible to experience correctly
unable to realize or unwilling to admit that all our lives have been rebuilt to rely on something which has withered so grotesquely, we sit back as it is kept in this suspended state of rot, rather than destroyed and regrown like everything else in the course of nature and history. Like some cancerous growth on society, we are subconsciously afraid to destroy it because it is now so inseparably part of ourselves.
2/22 you could turn literally any web2.0 media name into a verb meaning “becoming vapid”
the tiktokification of culture, the redditification of culture, the twitterificatuon of culture, the tumblrification of culture, the instagramifcation of culture, pinterestification …. etc.
I don’t like how even though almost everyone could admit that it’s unhealthy and annoying and destructive of culture and generally bad to have a TikTok personality, or twitter personality, or Reddit personality, swap in any basically any website or cultural touchstone, they just don’t really want to care or apply it to themselves. Stop it. Stop your entire personality.
You’re using the internet wrong. You’re just letting it fuck up your brain. You’re annoying and unhealthy and everything. Youre literally not that different from a TikTok user. You are not that different from an ipad baby. If you even want to be different then try starting by seeking a more authentic experience with everything. Like come onnn
2/17 (talking on tumblr) I hope one day in the future someone considers the archives of my blogs as a well preserved sample of internet subculture from before its inevitable fall to becoming lost or ruined in cultural pollution
not organized
If you make something your whole personality that’s because it faced resistance or persecution.
And what you’re actually doing is creating a mental prison by trapping yourself further within the space you’ve been condemned to and isolating yourself within your smaller range of personality and lived human experience.
#I haven’t read Foucault yet but isn’t this something he says? #It’s kind of sounds like a Nietzschean idea #but I don’t think Nietzsche ever said this specifically
your entire personality is being on the internet? Were you bullied out of real life for being autistic or something? Your entire personality is being gay? Your entire personality is being trans? You definitely wouldn’t have made that your whole personality if you felt safe and not persecuted or bullied and if it felt normal. Now look at you; you’re willingly trapped on the internet because you thought you were staying safe when in reality you’ve accepted a mental prison. Meanwhile the people who bully you are free to live normal lives. you sure you didn’t just create a mental prison for yourself? Your whole personality is being a woman? Why? Because you faced resistance while trying to work a mostly male job? Your whole personality is being black? Would that be the case if racism didn’t exist? You built two whole religions around being persecuted by massive empires in ancient history? Judaism and Christianity? You made Islam your whole personality after it came under attack by modern imperialism? Are you sure any of this is helpful?
you would enjoy being free from this prison if you realized that it existed.
>I think this relates a lot to the concept of the gedankenwelt, and maybe it even relates to what I said about "investing" in your personality/identity
(i wrote a different post for the same idea) stop coping with being bullied or exploited or outcast or oppressed by convincing yourself that its actually your personality that you chose! You’re making it worse! Put down the fake culture! The surface level aesthetics! The commodities! Whatever garbage is marketed at you!
#The girlboss shit will not work out for you!#You do not love the hood or anything that’s marketed to you about it!#You are not happy as the billionth autistic person who thinks withering away on the internet is a personality!#Don’t convince yourself you like anything that’s even in the same general cultural sphere#Gay people are not actually happier with the way hookup culture is! You’ve just accepted it because of the precedent-#-of not being able to have a normal relationship. Or to be able to live openly or anything else#(Not that it’s wrong to date and look for people. But be real about the fact you’ll get hurt if you think hookups are a default)#Everywhere you look there are people who’ve accepted the way they’ve been hurt as part of who they want to be
after two decades of drought, after my entire childhood, it was like I had seen the color green for the first time in my life.
I keep thinking of how I can describe it. If there is any way to describe it. The most intense emotion I’ve ever felt. The most alive I’ve ever felt. It felt like I was awake for the very first time. I don’t know if any work of art could ever capture a fraction of it. I think every single thing I’ve tried to express since then has been a striving to what i felt. It can never be expressed. Every bit of philosophy I study, every piece of art I experience. The rest of my life. It will stand in the shadow of that single moment. After twenty years of drought. After two years of quarantine. After two million acres of fire and two weeks of thick orange sky. I stepped outside, and I saw green for the very first time.
and at the same time…. Maybe most of all it was the least intense moment of my entire life. It was so simple and light. So quiet. I just breathed in perfect air, I just basked in soft warm light… it was an emotion which required absolutely no effort to feel. I had no idea I was trying so hard to feel anything until the moment where I didn’t even need to try. It was just so unimaginably pure and soft. Awake for the first time in my life, and it felt like dreaming.
it was just a feeling of the pure realness of existence
Against the force of everything in the world encroaching to cloud my thoughts, it's impossible to overstate how blinding of an emotion realness of existence was, its impossible to comprehend within the world that exists trapped within the clouds of the psyche.
5/3 I think I've been unusually willing to pick up and drop literally any idea or emotion (unintentionally). It keeps me from creating a personality or identity but allows me to much better explore a mental landscape, and by extension, artistic, cultural, philosophical and other landscapes as well. I know it's natural for most people to grow but it definitely seems that most people would have found ideas they could stick to better by now. It seems like at least one of the things that define me should have stayed the same, either something surface level which doesn't matter enough to change, or some deep held belief which is too important to let go of. But nothing has really stuck yet, and it makes me even more skeptical of every new thing I find myself believing or experiencing. I can't help but stop and feel that no matter who I am, what world I mentally live in, it's only a matter of time before I change my mind. There's simply too many mental worlds to commit to, choosing any one means committing so wholly that I don’t allow myself not to be bothered by what may lie beyond my chosen self, my chosen image of the world. There's too many people to be, but too late I discover that not choosing is also a choice. At least it keeps me from falling into any one world. It would not surprise me if many of my ideas about the "gedankenwelt" come from me having a personality disorder, either way my writing about it stands on its own.
>maybe it’s that my obsessive self-consciousness as i watch the breakdown of my “self” lets me see just a little outside the boundaries. I don’t think a personality disorder would count as biased in that sense.
5/2 I think the classic philosophical dilemma of "how do I know your red is the same as my red, what if you see red the way I see blue?" applies to our
psychology and fundamental experience of the world more than we are capable of expressing, especially when we realize we are not even
connected to our *own* experiences as soon as the smallest aspect of yourself changes. As time passes and we experience different worlds and cultures
We go through times of experiences we will never be able to experience or understand again. We almost always imagine these intuitively as chronological,
as eras of our life, and when we look back to them from a distance we call it nostalgia but the reality is that they are more of a place, our
mental world, and we are wandering without even knowing there is such thing as steering, and even when we try to change anything, we will only find
ourselves as an individual living through history and within our environment, being swept by cultural currents almost impossible to fight against or even see. And when we *don’t* see
these internal worlds as a chronology but as a place of the human ego within consciousness, it's likely from contrasting life against only a single experience,
when we come home from a trip somewhere, when we escape from the metropolis into nature, when we emerge from a great story, when we awake from a dream or escape
Plato's cave. But there is no "outside", there is definitely a direction to strive for, there is better culture and personalities, but ultimately the worlds are infinite, they are literally as infinite as anything that the mind could imagine.
>damn i totally forgot i wrote two super similar things in two days, i must have been really sleep deprived these felt like a week apart at least
>i wonder if in part my realizations about mental worlds and personhood come from hating myself as both a person and as a way of seeing the world, from hating the sort of personality i pick up and seeing myself as a cultural artifact or world to escape from. -actually thats almost definetly part of why
5/4 I’m thinking about the concept of being “different friends to different people” where you have a different personality depending on what friend or friend group you’re in, your personality adapts depending on what their personality is like. But it makes me wonder, if everyone does the same thing, there’s definitely lots of cases where two people could have had many different personalities towards eachother, depending on more random variables around how they met, neither of them knew it but the personality they think they need to be friends could have been a whole bunch of other personalities instead. “I’m this way because I thought you were this way, well I’m this way because I thought you were” makes me nervous to realize that when I talk to new people, I’m not just meeting them, but actually creating the person I will talk to. It feels like a little too much free will, choosing who I want to be is already so hard, how do I choose the personality of a new person/group of people? Also I feel obligated to say I imagine this ties into the gedankenwelt.
5/4 In life, you come across increasingly great realizations or discoveries, these change our worldview, both in terms of what emotions and experiences we are capable of having, our worldview from a social circle, our worldview from a greater cultural circle and in terms of our more conscious ideas, our ideological worldview. This change of our worldview, that is our internal psychological world and lived experience, means the destruction or transformation of our current worldview (gedankenwelt). Our world becomes our personality. And the growth of the world means the destructive act of deciding how to dispose of old ideas to account for our discovery, this becomes harder as the world becomes more complex, and especially as it determines our personality, especially because we invest socially and physically in who we are, and do not want to lose these investments.
In this sequence of increasingly great discoveries and revelations that make up life, these things which destroy and overwrite our old selves and old mentalities, there almost inevitably comes something which is absolute, some discovery or revelation which is superlative within our(as an individual) world. Some experience which is "world-changing", which "shatters our reality" something that changes who we are as a person. It's not a change of our world, but a changing *between* worlds.
Most people limit themselves to only one, or maybe two entirely world-changing moments in life. They live incomplete lives looking for (or at least stumbling upon) more discovery, and then they find some specific great truth which is superlative.
This greatest truth, is in fact only the greatest yet, and in addition it is only the greatest within a worldview. It's hard to believe that after the entire world is shattered, there is still more to discover. How can there possibly be something left after something encompasses everything, after something demands a reevaluation of all values? But before *this* worldview was the greatest truth, there was something else instead, and before that there was something else within our incomplete worldview that was the greatest truth. For something to encompass everything means the end of growth, we reach the limit of discovering a certain worldview.
We have incomplete worldviews as we develop and seek discovery, but for most people it only makes sense that superlitive truth is the end of growth, it's too difficult to completely destroy and reinvent our world after we complete it (or are in the proccess of completion under a guiding truth), and without an outside force, some broader cultural current, some force of historical proportions, most people will never grow again.
>For example, every major religion in the world is self-superlative, within its many interpretations all provide their own absolute and complete worldviews. Religions can answer everything, and from that perspective, there can never be any real question or escape or change in worldview without destruction of what is already the highest truth, without complete undoing of the world and self.
But all these religions of the world, all meant to be either completely infallible, or all-encompassing, or at least provide a set of highest truths (which an individual can always guide themselves with), are in competition with each other, they have separate truths. You could endlessly convert to new systems of belief and say that from your new understanding of the world, this is the highest truth, you could infinitely self-destroy and perceive growth. And even if you were to stray from religion, from thought experiments which are non-falsifiable, the same process could apply to secular philosophy.
And to take this ever further, what applies to most people is that even if without (or independent of) religion or philosophy, your experience of everyday life and your personality can be continually readapted to new personalities, new aesthetics of life, new things you consume, new "eras'' of life, you can switch subcultures and change as you follow trends, you can endlessly consume the concept of having a personality, and from within any of them say that *this* is the superlative version.
5/12 the type of emotions you are capable of feeling determines above all other factors what your ideological/philisophical worldview can be. most people aren't aware that they have a spectrum of emotions, they only imagine that there exists *a* spectrum of emotions