That’s my rap.
Finished reading Nicholas Carr Superbloom
Superbloom extended this to how networked digital tools (social media, automation, always-on connection) reshape identity, labor, and social relations—often tearing people apart through rivalry, performance, and overload, despite promises of connection.
He finds McLuhan a bit grandiose and overly utopian but The Medium is the Message is absolutely on point!
Every new iteration of technology, radio, tv, internet and now AI increases societal divide, decreases our cognitive functioning, attention span, critical thinking skills and controls our attention to what the system decides that we all should be focused on at the same time.
And ever iteration can send out propaganda to meet the states agenda in SCALE… Mass Brain washing has never been so easy.
We were never meant to read the minds of mass unconscious at the same time. Social media, you are essentially walking into a crowded city hearing everyones thoughts. Back in the day, I wanted to learn about the market, I read Richard Russell or read Charles Dow. Now the digital city is filled with thousands of people yelling, market up or down. And they aren’t seasoned forecasters. Same with some of the most followed political influencers who are using AI to write their missives. Before some kind of mass fame was available to the average person, they ran dog walking services (I looked) or they sold legal cannabis out of their apartment (I looked). But social media gave them a chance to be somebody.
And the more technology advances, the less developed becomes our critical thinking skills, our intuitive (gut feelings) and the less we actually communicate with each other and have meaningful conversations and the more we yell at each other. Other than that, it’s ALL GOOD!!!
We have become completely disconnected from the natural order. The dumbing down of America, and the rest of the world is complete.
The bookstores closed and was replaced by sneaker stores. The music stores closed and was replaced with parking lots. The Beatles and Elvis died and now it is replaced with Suomo? An AI artist.
One expert writes on his social media feed, Iran leader’s military objective is X, Y,Z. Within ten minutes, like Paavalov dogs, 15 people have responded with their own analysis, with their blue checkmarks and the smartest sounding one hopes that you’ll click on his feed and follow him so he can reduce his time walking dogs and monetize his thoughts.
It’s a game. And in Game theory, you can either play the game (hopefully well) or pass and exit the Game.
the entire population is getting their news from a platform that only allows you 27 words except if you pay for more virtual space, then you can subscribe to ten substacks for a one time offer of $15 per month and get more. Maybe more information isn’t the currency people need but THINK they need?
People don’t realize that many of the MAGA influencers are foreigners, or BOTS generating division. And the left are people that haven’t flown out of the Cukoo’s Nest Yet.
I’m fed up. I don’t want to exist in crowded virtual cities where my soul is on sale to the most charismatic influencer.
I ain’t playing this game anymore. Everyone wants a piece of my virtual attention and the system wants it that way. It’s an advanced form of Bread and Circus. In the old days, I’d sit in the coffee shop with two fella’s from the neighborhood, and we’d solve the worlds problems over a cup of tea, and come back the next day and do it all over again. Now I have 8 million voices yelling at me, I am the expert!!!
I think transcentalists are going to come back. Emerson and Thoreau “Walden”
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion”
Stoic philosophy has already come back in a big way. There is no one way. Christian, Jews, Hindu’s, Non political Muslim’s, who really follow the deeper meaning of their religion, can do it their way. Or you can go out in the woods.
All of this is creating mental health dysfunctions we never saw before. Children going to school who haven’t been potty trained, or can tie their shoelaces and now, many of them stutter which suddenly appeared.
People in the coffee shop now ALL on their phones at the same time and if you look at them and say, hello neighbor, they think you’re selling something.
If you can’t sit down and read a book for ten minutes, sit on a bench without reading your phone, I don’t know, knit a sweater, make something with your hands, grow a tomato, you’ve been incorporated into the BORG. They got you!! And I think it’s more of the population than is willing to admit it.
The other day Trump posted video of our bombings of Iran making jokes. I didn’t watch the entire thing because I got it. I get it. Good war propaganda against the enemy. Scare them into submission or have their population rise up against their leadership to stop it. And stoke, patriotism.
I ain’t gonna judge it. maybe it serves it’s function, and maybe it doesn’t. I don’t have to be part of the crowd screaming , YEAH. Go Baby. Or the crowd yelling, how vile.
YOU GUYS WORK IT OUT!!
I’m busy protesting the machine in my own way.
observed by Marshall McLuhan as far back as the 1960’s.
Thanks Robert!