The Cocoon

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Picture a not too distant future in which someone spends their time alone in a bedroom. Between a universal basic income and telecommuting they have no financial need to go outside. Likewise, with amazon, tesco online shopping and deliveroo at their disposal they have no need to go out shopping. Their entertainment consists of streaming music and films and playing video games. An vr headset allows them to occupy novel environments and the abundance of online pornography similarly means their sexual desires are met. Their social interactions all take place on social media. They have no need to establish a repartee of in-jokes with their friends as popular memes serve that purpose.

it's a future that's very close indeed. it's one that's been built by (and thus for) social outcasts and introverts. its in some ways an autistic future.

where do we encounter this future now and what does it all mean?
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
you even have 'sun lamps' which are supposed to mimic natural light and ostensibly stimulate vitamin d production.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
the womb future.

there's an emotional component to all this. the idea that the exterior world is a pain to be mitigated. the popularity of opioid crisis-music speaks to this.

the new world used to mean travelling thousands of miles across oceans to unconquered territory. the new frontier used to be space. now people speak of advancements in smart phones and home computing in those ways.
 

Leo

Well-known member
old-timers like me scoff at it -- not interested, why would you want to spend your life like that, that's not really living! -- but the rate of adoption skyrockets as generations who never knew another way come of age. they'll say "why would you want to actually go to the grocery store to buy food?" in the same way we now say "why would you even go to a bank branch to get cash or post office to buy stamps?" it is objectively sad, though, when it comes to "why would you actually want to deal with the awkwardness of social interaction IRL?"
 
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sadmanbarty

Well-known member
social networking (in the non-social media sense of the phrase) has always been viewed as morally degrading.

eden is a very isolated understanding of utopia. ideas of the noble savage. rousseau's idealised visions of savage man. cosmopolitanism is twinned with decadence whether that's in the mind of the taliban or the tabloids castigating metropolitan liberal elites.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yesterday I was in that tesco express between my house and yours and the lad on the checkout was free but looking at his phone and the self service tills were also free and I had to weigh up the situation. Do I intrude on his private space? What's the more considerate course of action? What do I want? What am I voting for here?
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
social networking (in the non-social media sense of the phrase) has always been viewed as morally degrading.

mohammad, moses, buddha and nietzche (and his zarathustra) all had to go and isolate themselves from society to attain wisdom. they often go to caves which invites comparisons to the 'man caves' this thread is about.

also there's a victimhood and martyrdom complex with all this. jesus, socrates, mohammad, dc miller, et al. were all rejected and punished by society at large due to their virtue.

all of which speaks to that school shooter mentality. the virginia tech bloke compared himself to jesus for example.
 

mvuent

Void Dweller
was going to post this in the autecher thread
uses marvin gaye in a context that's opposite to what it "traditionally" suggested. if the original song was about physical intimacy this about dematerialized solitude and escapism. and this of course is one of the most influential producers of the decade.
 

luka

Well-known member
though the cocoon is not communion with self god nature howling void it's time obliterated by distraction and constant drip feed of entertainment. Which in a degraded sense is participation in the polis, which is, in a sense, the town square. the shared experience which binds us.
Your refusal of facebook et al is today's sojourn in the wilderness.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
there's a political tradition of equating individualism with autonomy.

the trump/brexit rejection of pooled sovereignty. notions of property rights and land ownership in the american psyche (militias taking this to the nth degree).

the other perspective of course is that this leads to a self-inflicted imprisonment
 

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
"The duty to produce alienates the passion for creation. Productive labour is part and parcel of the technology of law and order. The working day grows shorter as the empire of conditioning extends. In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. What spark of humanity, of a possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of weekends, where the crowd communes in weariness and boredom? From adolescence to retirement each 24-hour cycle repeats the same shattering bombardment, like bullets hitting a window: mechanical repetition, time-which-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion. From the butchering of youth’s energy to the gaping wound of old age, life cracks in every direction under the blows of forced labour. Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live. The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. Already the front against forced labour is being formed; its gestures of refusal are moulding the consciousness of the future. Every call for productivity in the conditions chosen by capitalist and Soviet economy is a call to slavery."

this was written in 1967, 50 years later we have to conclude that this rage to live, to argue, sing, drink, dance, make love, hold the streets, pick up the weapons and invent a new poetry has disappeared.

makes me cry this topic.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
political polarisation emerges from the abstracted glimpse of the world you get from the cocoon.

notions of failed multiculturalism and 'no go zones' completely evaporate once you walk around deptford or bethnal green for five minutes and see everyone's fine and just getting on with life.
 

luka

Well-known member
I noticed on Facebook today Nina was bemoaning the lack of face to face interaction and linking it to some of the excesses of today's political culture and I'm sure there's some truth in that but it also makes you remember how good the Internet can be for certain kinds of discussion.

When I meet Barty we don't try and impress each other by being clever we just have a laugh. Any time I meet Reynolds all he wants to do is have a few beers and talk about girls. I've known Craner since 2003 and we've never said an intelligent word to one another but online it works very differently.

Not that it's impossible to have intelligent conversation. It happens. But usually the demands of conviviality take precedence.
 

luka

Well-known member
was going to post this in the autecher thread
uses marvin gaye in a context that's opposite to what it "traditionally" suggested. if the original song was about physical intimacy this about dematerialized solitude and escapism. and this of course is one of the most influential producers of the decade.

Funnily enough Marvin locked himself in a caravan in Belgium and wanked himself into psychosis.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Any time I meet Reynolds all he wants to do is have a few beers and talk about girls.

as good a time as any to ask si once again to write his big sex essay.

as much as he denies it, ALL of his intellectual and emotional energy for past year or so has been entirely dedicated to sex and wanking. if he could just admit that fact he could literally spunk out his masterpiece.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
the cocoon also produces emotional disconnect and reduced empathy levels.

drone warfare is carried out in bunkers by men on computer. people watching vulnerable young women exploited and abused in porn. 'fail' videos. beheading videos. luke said there's some video with a disabled boy drowning. etc.

the abstraction of suffering.
 

luka

Well-known member
once you have the choice to avoid the complexities and risks and relative open endedness of social interaction it's hard go back. Even online dating (I've not done it as it goes) presumably takes some of the anxiety out of it cos you know alright, they're in the dating pool, they're single, looking, they've vetted and approved of my picture and potted bio. You're not just going, fetch your coat love, you've pulled.
 
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