The Online: Increasingly Real or Unreal?

[version]

This Zizek/Lacanian take talks about the internet as a space for capturing and neutralizing desire, "a fragmentation of perceptions and an impoverishment of the original physical organ," which I think resonates somewhat with my feeling.

They stole my idea!

I had a thought last night that if what Burroughs says about us developing towards astral projection into space and shedding the body is true and that the controllers will die if that happens so they're desperate to prevent it then you could posit the internet as some sort of snare or decoy.

We gradually shed the body, but, rather than traveling into space, we're funneled into cyberspace. A prison for the astral body that's still governed by the controllers.

I'm picturing the collection of venom from a snake or semen from a horse by tricking them into thinking they're interacting with another organism. A hijacking of the biological functions steering them into a cul-de-sac.

 

[entertainment]

"The discourse" once seemed very important to me, what position to take, what kind of people to align yourself with and so on. I never really engaged actively on twitter, I just began to reflexively view myself through the lens of whoever seemed like the right people online. The lines being drawn on there seemed crucial. If my opinion or identity was at odds with the in-group convictions it would bother me, it would be this rift in my self-identity.

Now I don't care at all and it seems a totally ridiculous thing to get worked up over. But obviously it has this sway over a lot of people.

 

[version]

The online/offline opposition's interesting as we're making a judgement simply by accepting it. We're defining The World by its not being The Online rather than its being The World, The Online replaces The World as the positive.

I can see the argument, but, despite spending a lot of time online, it's not the way it feels to me at present. The internet probably is everywhere in a sense, but it doesn't feel all around in the way that the world does. It's still something to be stepped into and out of, even if it's leaking through here and there. It remains a world within the world.

 

[entertainment]

The online/offline opposition's interesting as we're making a judgement simply by accepting it. We're defining The World by its not being The Online rather than its being The World, The Online replaces The World as the positive in this configuration.

I can see the argument, but, despite spending a lot of time online, it's not the way it feels to me at present. The internet probably is everywhere in a sense, but it doesn't feel all around in the way that the world does. It's still something to be stepped into and out of, even if it's leaking through here and there.

I don't know how to assess it in categorigal terms. Obviously real life seems to goes on in a normal way more or less independent of the internet. But nothing we call culture can really be exctricated anymore. It bears the mark on a cellular level.

I also think the way we engage with art, music, movies has been altered. Everything is reflexively viewed in terms of the social strategy of its production. A hermeneutics of vanity, which has colonised our perception from social media and now seems impossible to escape. I know people say it's always been there but I'm convinced there has been a qualitative shift.

 

[version]

I don't know how to assess it in categorigal terms. Obviously real life seems to goes on in a normal way more or less independent of the internet. But nothing we call culture can really be exctricated anymore. It bears the mark on a cellular level.

I also think the way we engage with art, music, movies has been altered. Everything is reflexively viewed in terms of the social strategy of its production. A hermeneutics of vanity, which has colonised our perception from social media and now seems impossible to escape.

The world/worlds thing's something I'm very caught up in at the moment. It seems obvious The World's the overarching structure and all these things, the internet included, are just parts of it, but there's something compelling about thinking of these parts as worlds in their own right.

That line of Kodwo Eshun's about "an object from the world it releases," is something I often return to, likewise the thought Pynchon gives Oedipa in Lot 49 - "Shall I project a world?" - and one of DeLillo's from Libra - "There is a world inside the world." The Eshun one's particularly tantalising when applied to the internet.

 

[version]

I don't know how to assess it in categorigal terms. Obviously real life seems to goes on in a normal way more or less independent of the internet. But nothing we call culture can really be exctricated anymore. It bears the mark on a cellular level.

I also think the way we engage with art, music, movies has been altered. Everything is reflexively viewed in terms of the social strategy of its production. A hermeneutics of vanity, which has colonised our perception from social media and now seems impossible to escape. I know people say it's always been there but I'm convinced there has been a qualitative shift.

Assuming we can consider the internet an object, what do you think of this?

With De La seduction of 1979 a further key term takes its place among the battery of concepts that structure Baudrillard's symbolic order: 'With the decline of psychoanalysis and sexuality as strong structures,' he writes, 'one may catch a glimpse of another, parallel universe ... , a universe that can no longer be interpreted in terms of psychic or psychological relations, nor those of repression and the unconscious, but must be interpreted in the terms of play, challenges, duels, the strategy of appearances - that is, in the terms of seduction.' And with this comes a recognition of what Baudrillard calls 'the supremacy of the obiect', a recognition that it is not the subject and its desire, but the object and its seduction that orders the world.
Chris Turner, The Intelligence of Evil: An Introduction

 

[version]

If you were born post-internet it could seem akin to “why are all these old cunts with their blown minds from too many drugs trying to understand the obvious?”

Is that how people born post-TV felt about someone like McLuhan?

 

[version]

One point of interest will be how this varies depending on where people live and what they do. I can see Stan feeling it's increasingly real due to the kind of projects and people he's involved with and I think Shaka's talked about it being very noticeable how much some of the people he hangs out with get their opinions from certain podcasts and Twitter accounts.

Just to wrench things back from abstraction, this is crucial. William Gibson's adage about the future already being here, but being unevenly distributed.

My experience of the online as something to be stepped into and out of is clearly influenced by my interfacing with it on a desktop, not having a smartphone, and rarely being around very 'online' people when I socialise. I'm assuming those here who strongly feel it's becoming increasingly real are 1) in cities and 2) using smartphones.

 

[wg-]

My experience of the online as something to be stepped into and out of is clearly influenced by my interfacing with it on a desktop, not having a smartphone, and rarely being around very 'online' people when I socialise. I'm assuming those here who strongly feel it's becoming increasingly real are 1) in cities and 2) using smartphones.

The way you talk about this means it's more like the internet is a location to be visited, which more akin to how it felt growing up, but it does still make it a place or location. I think the language around even your sort of interaction has changed

I think it used to be about going "on" the internet, now you're talking about going "into," which a big change even if the language is slight.

 

[thirdform]

I feel completely uninsulted.

correct, because it wasn't an insult, but a statement of fact.

 

[thirdform]

Gender critical is a laughable term of criticism too. Is the opposite 'gender gullible'(?) and are the people critical of 'gender critical' people 'gender critical critical' and thus twice as bad.

It's almost as if some of the fundamental tenets of Butlerian gender theory cannot be explained by any of its proponents!

By the way, I can explain the body claim, with the outcome being that I'm about 20 years ahead of any progressives and they are all massively 'transphobic' because not only do they actually believe statements of that kind are untrue and therefore deluded (although they won't say so for social censure) but also because the implications of its being true are very wide-ranging and they do not recognise any of them (yet again, because they deny the literal truth of the claim).

What they also don't realise is that if they worked themselves into a mindset in which the claim can be literally true then pretty much all of the 'gender critical' critiques of authentic trans states are defused. They won't get to that mindset and, as a result, their project will be gradually dismantled on false premises (both sides are working off the wrong premise).

So you are a feminist who isn't confident with their own masculinity? is that what you are saying? glad we have that cleared up. otherwise why all this jennuflection to the inconsequential opinions of this amorphous grouping known as 'progressives'? You definitely don't have the analytical mindset here.

 

[version]

The way you talk about this means it's more like the internet is a location to be visited, which more akin to how it felt growing up, but it does still make it a place or location. I think the language around even your sort of interaction has changed

I think it used to be about going "on" the internet, now you're talking about going "into," which a big change even if the language is slight.

It's odd, but the old internet being dead makes it feel like more of a world than the living, breathing one we're currently inhabiting. Geocities sites feel more distinct and, for want of a better word, "internet-y" than Twitter and Insta and all that recent stuff. Self-contained worlds with clearer boundaries and greater visual variance.

 

[shakahislop]

One point of interest will be how this varies depending on where people live and what they do. I can see Stan feeling it's increasingly real due to the kind of projects and people he's involved with and I think Shaka's talked about it being very noticeable how much some of the people he hangs out with get their opinions from certain podcasts and Twitter accounts.

I can't overstate how twisted up with the internet people's souls are here. Very much in the belly of the beast, the US tends to lead the way culturally and it's such an unconservative culture, there are so few barriers to change of cultural practices, and manhattan is still the epicenter of all of that. who knows if it's a forerunner or an aberration. thoughts, opinions, modes of behaviour, structure of feeling, vocabulary, concepts, worldviews, practices, people are getting all of that from the internet. half the restaurants make food influenced by the online. who has sex with who is organized online. a lot of people's faces bodies and clothes are aimed at cameras. there is no obvious separation between the online and the offline, it's seeped into everything here until everything that happens in real life has an online component.

 

[dilbert1]

I solemnly accept. I know you interact with these types @shakahislop and I think I know how @sus might answer, but how do you find this process affects their Real character? Are you close enough with any of them at the level of friendship to gauge that sort of thing? Because of course its easy to see them as monsters from a distance, especially behind the screen, but also in more cursory IRL experiences. I’m online enough to know I’m not missing anything, but I do feel like from those types’ point of view if you don’t simply affirm/submit you’re entirely provincial and basically embarrassing to be around, which obviously warps my perception with resentment (“But I’m modern, too!”). Of course they’re also often performatively of two minds about it all, treating simpler living offline like pornography.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

So you are a feminist who isn't confident with their own masculinity? is that what you are saying? glad we have that cleared up. otherwise why all this jennuflection to the inconsequential opinions of this amorphous grouping known as 'progressives'? You definitely don't have the analytical mindset here.

I wouldn't call sterilising children because of fundamental errors of fact and logical argument inconsequential.

 

[shakahislop]

I solemnly accept. I know you interact with these types @shakahislop and I think I know how @sus might answer, but how do you find this process affects their Real character? Are you close enough with any of them at the level of friendship to gauge that sort of thing? Because of course its easy to see them as monsters from a distance, especially behind the screen, but also in more cursory IRL experiences. I’m online enough to know I’m not missing anything, but I do feel like from those types’ point of view if you don’t simply affirm/submit you’re entirely provincial and basically embarrassing to be around, which obviously warps my perception with resentment (“But I’m modern, too!”). Of course they’re also often performatively of two minds about it all, treating simpler living offline like pornography.

I think it's everyone to be honest, with younger people in the online more and older people in the online less. In terms of people's opinions and what they say, it is basically all filtered through the online prism, that thing of the consensus in one corner of the internet or other coming out of people's mouths. i know quite a few people who have had their perceptions transformed by what they've read online. i'd include myself in that. none of them are monsters really.

i know one camera-and-looks person pretty well, although i'd say trails spiraling out of the pick up artist world had more of an effect on him than cameras. his body, his clothes and his face are all a consequence of that. that's pretty Real. i have a teenage relative (in UK) who is doing her makeup in a way that can only be a result of tiktok. something like self-diagnosis with mental health things is widespread among the americans i know in nyc. arguably all of the complex stuff around gender identity has been given fuel by the online and i know a few people who have changed their lives based on that (i'm not saying nothing like 'oh all that is fake', i'm just saying that probably some of the people i know wouldn't have had the idea that there was such a thing as being non-binary without those concepts being circulated on the internet). i'd say it's distributed among more or less everyone to some degree.

beyond the effect on the individual there's also inescapable things like the way that nyc housing if you're renting is first and foremost structured by the online, in that Streeteasy is your portal to this basic need, the algorithms that set prices, the data / price transparency that is almost always against you as a renter here.

 

[dilbert1]

i know quite a few people who have had their perceptions transformed by what they've read online. i'd include myself in that. none of them are monsters really.

I do too, of course. But a lot of the things I read online are PDFs, not just online discourse or podcasts. There’s so many ways to use the internet, and sheer asceticism isn’t any more noble than cultivating a moderately omnivorous curiosity, although with the most popular apps its clearly designed to wear you down into a lowest common denominator automatic scrolling, glomming on to the most obvious and popular figures and outlets, even at the niche level. The people I meant were maybe the chronically Twitter-obsessed, trend observing participants of the internet in that way. Maybe they aren’t making waves themselves but RTing and regurgitating takes at all hours, explicitly mirror-like in their talk, a clear sense that to them only what’s happening there is where its at, what’s important, and any reference to history or elsewhere has only come to them through this narrow tracking and filtering.

But by character I meant something less surface-level than lifestyle choices, opinions, etc. I think a certain online mode can be corrosive to one’s moral fiber and sense of humane reasoning. What and who they have time for outside of their own immediate self-interest. Obviously proximity to social capital has always made people dishonest, disloyal, and cold to their fellow man in need, but these online scenes weave in the popularity contest pretty seamlessly. I’m not saying using the internet all day makes you less human, it can probably have the opposite effect, but centering your life around being seen as a cool, smart, good person via social media seems to inevitably result in becoming a lamer, dumber, bad person. Perhaps it also depends on your chosen, partially imagined audience.

 

[version]

Maybe they aren’t making waves themselves but RTing and regurgitating takes at all hours, explicitly mirror-like in their talk, a clear sense that to them only what’s happening there is where its at, what’s important, and any reference to history or elsewhere has only come to them through this narrow tracking and filtering.

A lot of people were disappointed when they found out William Gibson of all people was going through a phase of being one of those guys tweeting about Trump all day with a timeline of CNN and MSNBC clips.

 

[dilbert1]

A lot of people were disappointed when they found out William Gibson of all people was going through a phase of being one of those guys tweeting about Trump all day with a timeline of CNN and MSNBC clips.

Were you?

 

[sufi]

But by character I meant something less surface-level than lifestyle choices, opinions, etc. I think a certain online mode can be corrosive to one’s moral fiber and sense of humane reasoning. What and who they have time for outside of their own immediate self-interest. Obviously proximity to social capital has always made people dishonest, disloyal, and cold to their fellow man in need, but these online scenes weave in the popularity contest pretty seamlessly. I’m not saying using the internet all day makes you less human, it can probably have the opposite effect, but centering your life around being seen as a cool, smart, good person via social media seems to inevitably result in becoming a lamer, dumber, bad person. Perhaps it also depends on your chosen, partially imagined audience.

the internet has made people believe that the sky is not Real