sufi
lala
My computer is getting quite old now, so we bought an external harddrive to back up all the data.
(As soon as i put it next to the laptop, the laptop started to develop an odd new fault of switching off without warning. What's that about?)
Although there seem to be GBs and GBs of stuff to back up, I realise that since the last time i did this, i have almost never gone back to the archives, there is nothing there i actually "need", or if there is it's a couple of important emails or documents - less that 0.01% of the total. (And the 37,000+ photos - why?)
As we spend so much time on these machines, we forget our strategies for non-digital living. I received the "Phone Book" through my letterbox last week. Digital experience supplants real life skills, there is a lazy circuit in your brain that makes it prefer to outsource functions and at the same time deletes the internal facility to do that. ie finding a plumber. it's a nightmare online. Can you still remember phone numbers from before you had a mobile phone?
The internet, unlike media previously, is an increasingly solitary activity (more than cinemas or telly), unlike books there's no physical trace of what you've been up to.
Those photos - masses and masses of them, why do we feel so compelled to snap everything? A tiny proportion might make it onto the internet or whatsapp. Why should we feel that it's necessary for us to log our experiences like this, why do we feel this perspective is so important it must be reported - the ease of creating images makes us so arrogant (and doesn't this interposing a lens between us and everything involve losing contact with life through our actual senses, or is that what we want?)
Why do we feel that we need this constant current affairs, hot updates all the time without any direct relevance to our circumstances, without any providing lever that allows us to exercise our insights or understanding, why do we accept to feel so arrogant that we need all this, why do we accept this flattery?
We don't dare ask why we seek out this drip drip of poison in our eyes, snuff and porno, hyper-mediated by people who we don't like and who don't like us. I mean previously Euro Trade Treaties were the most boringest topic known to humanity, yet now we are up in arms about it, whilst still we have the same next to zero actual understanding or knowledge about them.
We forgot how to entertain ourselves without that visceral tweak of nasty
Building up our internal personalised stores of disconnected understandings.
And as you present, display and curate your best face to the world via the internets, you receive constant positive affirmation from your selected peers (or you get ignored, so you escalate your shtick). Your online persona is presumably still you, still part of you, but increasingly it can be barely connected to your irl meatlife.
Most scarily though is how the digital realm has got in amongst the irl relationships, when we allow them to be mediated by instawhatsyerface, how they are distorted by the shadows we through up on the walls of our electronic Plato caves,
and of course this system is developing at a pace - the businesses behind it working night and day to improve the panopticon
Our main guidance on our situation now seems to come from 3 x well known "New Yorker" style 1 panel funnies
"On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog"
"I can't come to bed now, Somebody on the internet is Wrong!"
& lastly
"What if Climate Change doesn't exist and we make a better world for nothing?"
This last plaintive plea indicates our way out of here.
These tools are so powerful - we need to get them back (free open source, self-hosted, non-corporate media still exists but only just) and make them our force multiplier to kick the babylonians out of our lives on and offline, use ourpowerr to challenge the irl negativities and anti-life regimes, systems, behaviours.
The attack surface is gigantic, everybody lives and dies by their public image now, inversely related to the scale of influence.
Dig ourselves out of this pit of narcissism. The potential now exists. We are the first humans to have the tools and opportunity to achieve that.
(As soon as i put it next to the laptop, the laptop started to develop an odd new fault of switching off without warning. What's that about?)
Although there seem to be GBs and GBs of stuff to back up, I realise that since the last time i did this, i have almost never gone back to the archives, there is nothing there i actually "need", or if there is it's a couple of important emails or documents - less that 0.01% of the total. (And the 37,000+ photos - why?)
As we spend so much time on these machines, we forget our strategies for non-digital living. I received the "Phone Book" through my letterbox last week. Digital experience supplants real life skills, there is a lazy circuit in your brain that makes it prefer to outsource functions and at the same time deletes the internal facility to do that. ie finding a plumber. it's a nightmare online. Can you still remember phone numbers from before you had a mobile phone?
The internet, unlike media previously, is an increasingly solitary activity (more than cinemas or telly), unlike books there's no physical trace of what you've been up to.
Those photos - masses and masses of them, why do we feel so compelled to snap everything? A tiny proportion might make it onto the internet or whatsapp. Why should we feel that it's necessary for us to log our experiences like this, why do we feel this perspective is so important it must be reported - the ease of creating images makes us so arrogant (and doesn't this interposing a lens between us and everything involve losing contact with life through our actual senses, or is that what we want?)
Why do we feel that we need this constant current affairs, hot updates all the time without any direct relevance to our circumstances, without any providing lever that allows us to exercise our insights or understanding, why do we accept to feel so arrogant that we need all this, why do we accept this flattery?
We don't dare ask why we seek out this drip drip of poison in our eyes, snuff and porno, hyper-mediated by people who we don't like and who don't like us. I mean previously Euro Trade Treaties were the most boringest topic known to humanity, yet now we are up in arms about it, whilst still we have the same next to zero actual understanding or knowledge about them.
We forgot how to entertain ourselves without that visceral tweak of nasty
Building up our internal personalised stores of disconnected understandings.
And as you present, display and curate your best face to the world via the internets, you receive constant positive affirmation from your selected peers (or you get ignored, so you escalate your shtick). Your online persona is presumably still you, still part of you, but increasingly it can be barely connected to your irl meatlife.
Most scarily though is how the digital realm has got in amongst the irl relationships, when we allow them to be mediated by instawhatsyerface, how they are distorted by the shadows we through up on the walls of our electronic Plato caves,
and of course this system is developing at a pace - the businesses behind it working night and day to improve the panopticon
Our main guidance on our situation now seems to come from 3 x well known "New Yorker" style 1 panel funnies
"On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog"
"I can't come to bed now, Somebody on the internet is Wrong!"
& lastly
"What if Climate Change doesn't exist and we make a better world for nothing?"
This last plaintive plea indicates our way out of here.
These tools are so powerful - we need to get them back (free open source, self-hosted, non-corporate media still exists but only just) and make them our force multiplier to kick the babylonians out of our lives on and offline, use ourpowerr to challenge the irl negativities and anti-life regimes, systems, behaviours.
The attack surface is gigantic, everybody lives and dies by their public image now, inversely related to the scale of influence.
Dig ourselves out of this pit of narcissism. The potential now exists. We are the first humans to have the tools and opportunity to achieve that.